Curriculum

This course is designed to evaluate and sharpen your business writing and speaking skills and to show you how language can be used as a tool to identify issues solve problems and communicate policy. You will be introduced to argumentation as an advanced form of communication that is crucial for effective managerial performance. You will also gain expertise in the various forms of professional writing, oral presentation, audience analysis, and copy editing.

This course introduces the requisite micro and macroeconomic tools needed to analyze business problems. The emphasis is on establishing a practical link between basic economic concepts and a wide range of contemporary business problems, including economic data analysis for business decision-making, forecasting, demand analysis, pricing and cost analysis. Topics include market structure, cost and production, international trade and finance, national income determination, and monetary and fiscal policy.

The course provides you with theory-based knowledge of managerial and organizational processes from a behavioral point of view, along with the necessary tools to enable you to design those processes prudently and optimize their uses. You will develop leadership skills that promote, in yourself and others, ethically and socially responsible behavior as you engage others in areas such as motivation, job satisfaction, commitment, positive team dynamics, effective negotiation, and cross-cultural understanding. You will emerge from the course with a solid understanding of organization structure and the key principles of organizational design, as well as gain not just theoretical approaches to organizational change, but practical methods useful for building momentum around the need for change and widespread acceptance of change objectives.

This course arms you with knowledge of probability theory and inferential statistics and demonstrates their uses in business decision-making. You will become skilled in the many uses of data as critical components in organizational decision processes. In particular, you will learn quantitative tools such as data visualization, probability models, interval estimation, hypothesis testing and regression analysis which you will use as the analytical foundation for other courses in the program.

The course provides you with a broad overview of operational issues in manufacturing and service organizations, and equips you with an assortment of quantitative and qualitative techniques for analyzing and optimizing business processes. Your managerial tool kit will be considerably enhanced by learning how to make use of time series analysis, process analysis, queuing theory, models of inventory management, total quality management and the six sigma approach, and global supply chain management.

We begin our comprehensive approach to accounting by sharpening your understanding of the accounting concepts, principles, and conventions underlying financial statements, and what motivates a manager to select a particular accounting treatment, and how this choice affects financial statements as well as how it affects the analysis of those statements. We then move on to demonstrating how you can use accounting information for best-practice organizational planning, control, and decision-making. You will develop skills in such areas as cross driver analysis, budgeting, variance analysis, cost-volume-profit analysis, capital budgeting, differential cost analysis, and optimal performance evaluation schemes which incent ethical managerial behavior rather than the reverse. Much of what you learn is also applicable globally.

In this course, you will learn how to apply the key principles of finance in managing contemporary organizations. Centered on the measurement and creation of value, this course will make you adept at analyzing financial statements and financial markets responsibly, in both domestic and global contexts, and will give you considerable expertise in present value analysis, the theory of risk and return, portfolio theory, asset pricing models, and cost of capital, capital budgeting, and capital structure.

Here is where you will acquire the analytical tools and frameworks that will enable you to make effective and responsible marketing decisions in support of your organization’s overall strategy and in service to the organization’s economic and social objectives. You will learn how to investigate consumer behavior, analyze industries, segment and target markets, create customer value through product policy, position brands, design channels of distribution, as well as how to develop communication channels and pricing policies. Through practical case studies you develop a keen appreciation for how global markets function.

This course prepares leaders to address moral issues and challenges that arise in organizations and industry at large.  Students will develop a clear understanding of the responsibilities of business in social and government contexts. They will also learn how to anticipate the unexpected moral issues and challenges that arise in their organization and industry at large and respond with integrity by modeling ethical decision making and balancing the needs and interests of stakeholders in a principled manner. They will be equipped to guide the creation of organizational structures and cultures that cultivate ethical deliberation and action.

This course introduces the student to think critically about business ethics, corporate social responsibility, and corporate governance concepts. The course addresses how the regulatory environment affects business operations and management. The subjects covered include employment law and relevant federal regulations, including civil rights, and equal employment opportunity legislation affecting employer/employee relationships; intellectual property and unfair business practices; and how contract law affects various business transactions and relationships, focusing on compliance and responsible business strategies that are preventative rather than reactive.

This course builds upon and integrates the core functional areas of business as it delves deeply into the rich variety of strategies which enable firms to achieve sustainable competitive advantage in domestic and global markets, while upholding and promoting organizational values characteristic of a responsible corporate citizen. We equip you with concepts and models in areas essential to the formulation, analysis, and implementation of business unit and corporate strategies.

This course will introduce you to the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation with a main focus on helping you develop your creative thinking, sharpen your idea generation process, and learn to stimulate your creativity in more meaningful and manageable ways. You will gain a better understanding of the appropriate context to cultivate and implement creativity in the workplace, differentiate between an idea and an opportunity, and develop your skills in problem solving with inadequate information and in decision making under uncertainty. The purpose of the course is to help you acquire skills to form novel, useful, and fresh solutions to new and unfamiliar problems and engage in customer validation for your innovation.

This course will introduce you to think strategically about creating, growing, and financing new ventures through the initial fast-paced stages. We will discuss designing and evaluating business models, effective market positioning, managing rapid growth with limited resources, and assessing capital needs based on sophisticated cash-flow modeling. The course also covers strategies for acquiring early-stage external financing by successfully pitching to potential investors such as family, friends, bankers, angel investors, venture capital investors, and alternative financing sources; and it covers exit/harvest strategies for successful new ventures. We will provide you with sophisticated views on viable legal forms of business for startups and the role of intellectual property rights in bringing innovations to market.

This course is designed to introduce various data analytics skills. Students will learn the main Business Analytics concepts through case studies and projects. After the course, the students will be able make informed business decisions through rigorous data analysis. Either R or Python will be introduced. 

This course equips students with the analytical skills to translate managerial decision scenarios into structured mathematical models and find optimal solutions using Excel. This course also prepares students to create compelling narratives to effectively present the results of their data driven analysis. Students learn data visualization software packages (e.g. Tableau) to present data effectively and dynamically. Topics include linear programming, integer programming, simulation, and data visualization.