FIRST YEAR (2024-2025)
Intensive Week I
Team Effectiveness – MGT 6151 – Jennifer Cummings
This course is an experiential introduction to working in teams, with a particular emphasis on socialization, early stage team formation, and team building. The course provides students with opportunities to develop their skills as team members in their student study groups using the overall program of study as the embedding context. Using team building exercises, the class leads students through the initial steps in team formation and through common challenges teams and their members face. In addition, the course discusses tools to address these challenges and identify them as opportunities for proactive and thoughtful action. The course is designed to enhance students’ participation in teams through the development of a theoretical understanding of team effectiveness, a review of current research on best practices, and case study analysis.
Ethics
&
Foundations
of
Business Thought
– MGT 6152 – Harris Sondak
Personal and organizational statements of values and codes of ethics are discussed in an environment of competing and complementary objectives and constraints. Readings of a classic nature are presented to underscore the timeless and multi-cultural nature of business and the relevancy of great works to today’s business environment.
Financial Accounting – ACCTG 6100 – Ed Owens
This course introduces the basic concepts, standards, and practices of financial reporting to serve the needs of decision-makers. The curriculum focuses on basic financial statements, analysis and recording of transactions, and underlying concepts and procedures. Key concepts for this course include accounting for cash, receivables, inventories, long-term productive assets, bonds and other liabilities, stockholders’ equity, and the statement of cash flows. This course provides students with an understanding of how financial statements are prepared, the ability to interpret the information provided in financial statements, and the ability to conduct a preliminary financial statement analysis of a firm.
Leadership & Management in High Performance Organizations – MGT 6150 – Abe Bakhsheshy
This course addresses the diagnosis and management of human behavior in organizations. One key to success as a manager or leader is the ability to generate energy and commitment among people within an organization and channel that energy and commitment toward critical organizational goals in an ethical and responsible way. Doing so requires a thorough understanding of the root causes of human attitudes and behavior, as well as knowledge of how your actions and the surrounding organizational context influence those attitudes and behaviors. The course is designed to help education seekers develop this understanding in order to enhance their leadership effectiveness. The specific learning goals of the course are: 1) to increase student conceptual and analytical knowledge about human behavior in complex organizations at the individual, interpersonal, group, and intergroup level and to examine how organizational, societal, and cultural contexts affect these behaviors, 2) to increase student awareness of their own and others’ assumptions, commitment, and values in managerial and organizational interactions, 3) to sharpen student skills in problem definition, enrich students’ set of diagnostic models, and refine the process students use to generate and select alternative actions.
Communication & Interpersonal Effectiveness – MGT 6155 – Jennifer Cummings
This class involves learning new skills, and in some cases, unlearning some assumptions and behavioral patterns students may have acquired over the years that could be holding each student back. This course will focus on developing an awareness of individual communication styles, the ability to effectively interact with others in a variety of contexts (convincing, collaborating, coaching, etc.), and a number of authentic communication skills that can translate into both professional and personal gains. In this course, students will learn the following skills: awareness and understanding, non-verbal communication, feedback, managing conflict, writing, and presentation skills. Students will use a variety of approaches and methods to achieve learning goals.
2024 Fall Semester
2025 Spring Semester
Statistics – OSC 6940 - Don Wardell
Statistics provides a systematic approach to make intelligent, fact-based decisions and improve processes. The emphasis is on understanding concepts and their application to real world business situations. The conceptual material focuses on the importance of statistical thinking in making sound business decisions. The statistical methods are implemented using a computer to analyze business and economic data sets, with an emphasis of interpreting the output. Topics covered include: statistical and process thinking, summary statistics, data visualization, probability, distributions, sampling, statistical inference (confidence intervals and hypothesis testing), and the study of relationships (regression and correlation).
Corporate Finance – FINAN 6121 – Matt Ringgenberg
The course addresses the theory and practice of corporate financial management – namely, managing the operating, investing, and financing functions to maximize the value of the firm. The three major objectives of the course are: 1) to provide you with a solid understanding of the basic concepts of finance, especially corporate finance, including the time value of money, the role of financial markets, security valuation, portfolio theory, and the risk-return trade off, 2) to develop your skills in financial analysis, planning, and decision making, 3) to expand your awareness of institutions and practices in business and finance.
Marketing Management – MKTG 6190 - Jeff Brazell
This course provides an overview and integration of major marketing management concepts and principles. The course covers the fundamentals of marketing strategy and the decisions related to marketing that must be made in every profit and non-profit organization. An emphasis is placed on the application of concepts to marketing decisions, with the goal of developing and enhancing students’ skills of critically thinking about marketing management issues. Topics for discussion will include: external analysis of the customer and competition, internal analysis of the decision-making company, and formulation of marketing mix decisions.
Negotiations & Conflict Management – MGT 6153 – Tina Diekmann
The purpose of this course is to understand the theory and processes of negotiation in a variety of managerial contexts. The course is designed to be relevant to the various kinds of negotiation problems faced by managers. The course complements the technical and diagnostic skills learned in other courses. A basic premise of the course is that while a manager needs analytical skills to discover optimal solutions to problems, a broad array of negotiation skills is needed for these solutions to be accepted by others and implemented in collaboration with them. The course will allow participants the opportunity to develop these skills experientially and to understand negotiation in useful analytical frameworks.
2025 Summer Semester
Operations Management – OSC 6160 – Manu Goyal
Matching supply with demand is an enormous challenge for firms: excess supply is too costly and inadequate supply irritates customers. In this course, we will explore how firms can better organize their operations so that they can deliver the right products for the right customers at the right time. The first part of the course touches upon the more classical ideas on business processes, the impact of variability on business processes, inventory, and quality. The second part of the course focuses on the more recent, cutting-edge ideas on innovation, supply chain management, risk pooling, and internet retailing.
Economics – QAMO 6120 – Scott Schaefer
Teaches the basic principles of microeconomics and derives applications for business decision-making. Topics include: value creation and value capture, cost curves and sale economies, demand curves and elasticity, pricing and price discrimination, imperfect competition, game theory, equilibrium industry structure, supply curves and perfect competition, taxes, externalities, and price floors and caps.
Intensive Week II
SECOND YEAR (2025-2026)
Managing in the Global Economy – STRAT 6171 – Brad Vierig
This course is a mid-program field study for the Executive MBA program with an international focus. Expanding the learning environment outside of the classroom allows a broader curriculum for areas that cannot fit into the traditional on-campus schedule. Classes will emphasize the culture and business climate outside of the United States of America.
2025 Fall Semester
Business Strategy – STRAT 6170 – Jen Brown
This course introduces the basic concepts and tools for formulating business strategy. Focuses on how firms can develop sustainable competitive advantages. Central topics include assessing industry economics and dynamics to identify strategic threats and opportunities and evaluating the profit potential of strategic resources and capabilities. Other topics include assessing actual and potential cost and differentiation advantages, the value of flexibility, the impact of tacit collusion of firm profits, and vertical scope of the firm.
Advanced Marketing Strategies – MKTG 6191 - Sam Chun
This course builds concepts, frameworks and skills for students targeting commercial-facing, revenue-related career paths across a broad range of industries. We will explore methods and techniques in the areas of product management, customer management, channel management and sales management. The overarching domain of this course will be business-to-business markets, since most every company (even the CPG variety) use business partnerships throughout their path-to-market.
Corporate Strategy – STRAT 6172 – Todd Zenger
Some of the most visible changes in strategy occur at the corporate level: acquisitions, mergers, spin-offs, vertical integration, hostile takeovers, and diversification. This course focuses on the strategic decisions that confront the senior-most managers in complex, typically multi-business corporations. Finding ways to add rather than destroy value at the corporate level can be a difficult task. In this course, we will examine the objectives, issues, and tools that confront corporate managers. The course will focus on topics of leveraging resources and competencies, drawing horizontal and vertical boundaries, diversification, corporate organization, and corporate governance.
Organizational Economics – QAMO 6124 – Scott Schaefer
This course applies principles of microeconomics to business questions around human resource management and organizational design. Topics include hiring, retention, promotions, employee training, pay-for-performance incentives, and divisionalization.
2026 Spring Semester
Cost Accounting: A Manager’s Perspective – ACCTG 6101 – Brian Cadman
This course focuses on firms’ internal accounting systems. The first half of the course is an introduction of the basic concepts for individuals who will make business decisions and evaluate the performance of business units using data obtained from the accounting system. We first examine firms’ managerial accounting systems and their use in decision-making. We begin with a discussion of the basic vocabulary and mechanics of managerial accounting systems. We then focus on how to identify and extract relevant information from managerial accounting systems as an input to decision-making. Throughout, we will consider the role of management accounting in decisions concerning resource allocation and performance evaluation as well as the limitations of, and assumptions underlying, these data. We will then expand to cost analysis and performance evaluation. Included in this are discussions of inter-departmental allocations, joint costs, capacity costs, and extensions of activity-based analyses to service industries. We also consider the process of evaluating firm performance and business units. Included in this are issues related to transfer prices, productivity measures, the estimation of cost functions using accounting data, the study of benchmarking procedures, the choice of performance metrics for compensation purposes, and the rationale behind the balanced scorecard. Finally, we consider multi-national firms and special considerations involved in the global economy. The course objectives are reinforced through the lecture notes and course packet readings, discussion cases, assigned case write-ups, class and group discussions, and numerical problems.
Advanced Leadership: Strategic Leadership in Organizations – MGT 6156 – Glen Kreiner
This course focuses on the tasks of strategic leadership. Students examine the role of the leader in determining organizational purpose and strategy. The course also addresses the leader’s role in leading change and adaptation. Students also address how leaders affect various aspects of organizational architecture such as structure, culture, networks, systems, and incentives. Students will also be introduced to conceptual tools for assessing their personal strengths and for examining a variety of organizational dynamics.
International Finance – FINAN 6123 – Karl Lins
This course addresses how international factors affect the operating, investing, and financing functions of a firm. Students will learn about global finance issues and valuation tools managers can use to maximize the value of their firms. In almost any market, companies are affected by global factors; even a firm with no current international operations will be subject to potentially severe currency exchange rate risk because its non-domestic competitors’ positions will change. Additionally, non-domestic markets often represent the most important growth area for many organizations. Understanding and managing the risks that come with cross-border operations is crucial in shaping a firm’s growth strategy. The key objectives of the course are to: 1) understand the role of foreign currency exchange and how it affects both multi-national and domestic-only firms, 2) understand the effects of political risk on the multi-national organization, 3) understand the use of currency forward, futures, and options contracts and their role in hedging risk inherent in a firm’s cash flows - even in domestic - only firms, 4) understand how to pose and analyze the capital budgeting decision of the multi-national company, 5) understand the importance of global corporate governance practices for strategic partnering and investing decisions.
Competitive Advantage through People – MGT 6154 – Abe Bakhsheshy
Many corporations are struggling to adapt their organizations to the era of intense competition. The problem oftentimes lies in their inability to leverage the human capital within their organizations. The successful corporations of the twenty-first century are those that will reinvent themselves and rebuild their organizations anew. The course will focus on how best to recreate organizations and position them for excellence. The course shall discuss specific strategies to align the organization with the realities of today’s competitive marketplace. The course will cover reflections on successful human capital strategies and on the best practices employed by leading organizations. This intensive course will examine human resource management functions in a corporate setting and focus on the development of knowledge and skills that all managers and leaders need. The course will focus on such subjects as: the selection process and behavioral interviewing, motivating, performance management, coaching, leveraging of Emotional Intelligence, and maintaining effective environments. The class is not designed to familiarize participants with current human resource practices that apply to their careers regardless of their field.
International Field Study – ACCTG 6131 – Brad Vierig
Developing a broad global perspective is essential to understanding the international business environment. Executive MBA students travel in their final session of the program. Students experience first-hand the strategic and organizational systems in the modern global industry. Observing business practices and customs, and gaining an understanding of cultural, financial, and political ramifications will prepare you for business decision-making on a global level. Students will tour renowned firms and have direct contact with high-level executives and government officials. Previous Executive MBA classes have visited the following countries: Argentina, China, Czech Republic, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Turkey, and United Arab Emirates.
