Executive MBA | Core Classes & Electives

Firms and Markets presents the major tools and concepts of economic analysis and their application to both business decision making and the formulation of policies. The course covers determinants of product demand, decision making within different industry structures, competition, network economics, cost-benefit analysis, and the influence of government policies on firms and markets. Students develop analytic tools and frameworks useful across a range of business areas, including finance, strategy and marketing.

This course is about financial markets and how financial assets are valued, managed, and traded. Students analyze different types of assets (e.g. equities, bonds, and derivatives) and study important valuation frameworks (e.g. portfolio theory, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), etc.) and their applications. The goal of the course is to give students a solid understanding of how financial markets work and how to make sound investment decisions.

This course provides students with a systematic understanding of critical aspects of the international business environment, especially the basic workings of the macroeconomy. Students explore how GDP, labor markets and inflation are measured and the role of money, banks and interest rates in the economy. Students also explore the sources of economic growth and the role of currencies and international trade in global business.

The Global Immersion Experience (GIE) is an experiential course that enables students to interact with companies, industries, financial institutions, and government leaders from around the world. Students travel internationally to a unique global market. In groups, they study the local market and produce a final business idea proposal based on learnings garnered during the GIE.

This course provides frameworks to examine leadership in organizational settings and the tools to act on what is learned to be a more effective leader.  It is based on the premise that leadership opportunities present themselves every day, and that to be a leader one must recognize and seize those opportunities. The course helps students appreciate that effective leadership requires an understanding of oneself, how organizations work, and how to work with and through other people.

This course introduces the concepts, tools and processes used by today's marketing companies when developing and implementing marketing strategies. It highlights the importance of a marketing orientation regardless of functional responsibility, and provides an analytical framework for developing, pricing, distributing and promoting products and services.

Corporate accounting reports are an essential means of communication with market participants. This course introduces students to the concepts of financial reporting, the language of business, and its underlying assumptions. Students discuss the uses and limitations of financial statements and use financial-statement information to unlock critical insights into the evaluation of business performance and risk.

Professional Responsibility encourages students to think critically about the broader context and consequences of the decisions they make as managers. The course highlights how ethical considerations are important in the decision-making process, while helping students to develop the analytical reasoning skills needed to weigh competing ethical concerns. It also highlights the importance of understanding the interdependence of markets, ethics and law in a democratic, free market society.

This course provides a survey of probability and statistics applicable to decision making in a business environment. It covers a range of foundational topics related to statistical analysis such as probability and probability distributions, sampling and statistical inference, and correlation and regression analysis. Focus is on application, and how statistical analysis can inform and aid in business decision making.

Translating business ideas into successful initiatives requires strong communication skills and the ability to connect with multiple diverse audiences. This course helps students become more effective communicators so that they can align their messaging with their business’s strategy and stakeholder expectations. Strategic communication helps students support and strengthen the potential success of business initiatives, and position themselves and their organization for effectiveness in an ever-changing world.

Business leaders need to have a strong foundation in strategy in order to create value for their firms. This course focuses on both competitive strategy (positioning within an industry) and corporate strategy (managing multi-business or multi-location firms).  It trains students to look outward to the environment and inward to the firm’s resources and capabilities as a basis for formulating strategy.

Negotiation is the process by which people work together to achieve mutually agreeable outcomes and/or resolve differences. This course provides students with frameworks and concepts for understanding the negotiation process and the opportunity to improve their negotiation and conflict resolution skills. The learning method is experiential. Students engage in a series of negotiation simulations designed to give them experience with a range of different types of negotiations. Emphasis is on principles, strategies and tactics for reaching effective outcomes.

This course focuses on the tactics and skills needed to not only manage critical conversations but also to identify them in advance with the objective of maneuvering the ultimate outcome to one’s advantage. This course reinforces core communication skills and teaches advanced communication techniques through intensive drills and immersive scenario-based role playing sessions.

Corporate Governance is a multi-faceted topic that has socioeconomic, ethical, legal, and regulatory dimensions. The goal of this course is to help students develop the skills to address critical governance issues and to recognize the workings of the governance ecosystem.  Students examine the roles and responsibilities of senior management, directors, shareholders and other stakeholders affected by a corporations’ environmental, social and governance policies, successes and failures.

This course focuses on the business decisions, management processes, and leadership skills necessary to anticipate, plan for, manage through, communicate about, and recover from crises. Students learn how companies and their stakeholders behave when things go wrong, how leaders can maintain the confidence and trust of internal and external stakeholders, and how to; navigate a crisis in a way that protects long-term business interests and delivers on critical business strategies.

This course is geared toward deepening students’ understanding of the challenges, techniques, and opportunities associated with initiating and implementing major changes in an organization. The objective is to prepare managers and leaders, or their consultants and advisers, to meet the challenges of organizational change successfully. Students learn how to diagnose change issues, understand the perspective of change recipients, and appreciate the role of leadership and the elements necessary for sustaining change.

This course is designed for individuals interested in learning more about the art and science of influence in organizations. Many people are ambivalent, if not disdainful, of those who seek to wield power and influence at work, but power and influence are key mechanisms by which things get done. For those considering careers in management, it is important to be able to diagnose situations as opportunities to exercise power and influence in order to form and implement new strategies.

This course covers advanced corporate strategy, and in particular the execution of corporation strategy (e.g., negotiating prices in acquisitions, integration, etc.). This course will build off of foundational concepts students learned in their Strategy core course and prepare students for the complex task of implementing corporate strategy moves such as mergers, acquisitions, spinoffs, etc.

Having a perspective about how various industries make money is critical whether one analyzes a company for investment, advises its managers, manages its operations, markets its products, or chooses its capital structure. The course will provide a framework to analyze financial and strategic performance and to identify key drivers of business success.

This course is an experiential learning opportunity where students work in a team to tackle a business issue or opportunity for a client, while applying in real time the key steps of the consulting process they are learning in the classroom. Students discuss their challenges, approaches and recommendations in class while benefiting from the guidance and expertise of the instructor and a seasoned strategy consulting professional. They learn how to break a complicated problem into pieces that can be individually and methodically addressed.

Game theory studies competitive and cooperative behavior in strategic environments, where the fortunes of several players are intertwined. It provides methods for identifying optimal strategies and predicting the outcome of strategic interactions. As well as learning the underlying theory, students learn how game theory can be applied to business.

As part of the EMBA Program, students may participate in an optional second-year Global Immersion Experience, in addition to the required first-year GIE. Like the required GIE, this course enables students to gain an understanding of doing business in a given global region through exposure to business leaders and local organizations and institutions. Students travel internationally to a unique global market. In groups, they study the local market and produce a final business idea proposal based on learnings garnered during the GIE.

This course provides an understanding of the cultural, political, competitive, technological, legal, and ethical environment in which multinational firms operate. It introduces a range of tools and techniques for assessing foreign and global conditions, opportunities, and threats. Students examine how firms build strategic capabilities, collaborate across boundaries, develop coordination and control, and manage activities and tasks, as well as challenges of worldwide functional, subsidiary, and top-level headquarters management.

This course focuses on the role of operations as a source of competitive advantage. Topics include capacity planning and efficient resource allocation, strategic process design, global supply chain management and sourcing, and revenue management. The course approaches operations from the perspective of the general manager rather than an operations specialist.

In contrast to the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), behavioral finance (BF) allows for the condition that investors and managers are not always rational and may make systematic errors of judgment that affect market prices. This course focuses on the insights and implications of BF theory, showing how it can explain otherwise puzzling features of asset prices and corporate finance. It identifies the assumptions of both EMH and BF, and the practical questions for real-world money managers in three instrument types: stocks, cryptocurrencies (fungible coins) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

This course helps students develop an analytical framework for understanding how organizations make investment and financing decisions. Students also learn the theory and practice of various valuation techniques. There is an emphasis on understanding the theory and its applications to the real world as well as appreciating the limitations of existing tools in practical settings. Specific topics include capital budgeting, investment decision rules, discounted cash flow valuation, real options, cost of capital structure, dividend policy and valuation methods such as WACC and APV.

This course provides a broad overview of the financial service industry and of the forces that are continuing to change it worldwide. By the end of the course, students have a new perspective on the global financial system, and are well versed in the functioning of the industry, able to understand the financial press and associated economic commentary, and aware of the types of skills necessary to thrive in this industry.

“Fintech” is the label for increasingly technological approaches to the main financial intermediation functions: payments, capital raising, remittances, managing uncertainty and risk, market price discovery, and mediating information asymmetry and incentives. Consumers today bank via mobile apps integrated into social media, institutions trade electronically, and robo-advisers make decisions about investment portfolios. This interdisciplinary course provides an introduction to the emerging fintech field.

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the problems of formulating and implementing successful acquisition strategies. It introduces a framework for thinking about acquisitions as a strategic investment where the bottom line is superior shareholder performance. The course approaches acquisitions as a multi-step strategic and organizational process drawing from the fields of strategy, negotiations, finance and organizational behavior. The objective is to enable students to act as a senior advisor regarding strategic M&A, and to assist them in becoming informed consumers of anything written on M&A success.

Private equity is the investment of capital in private companies to fund growth or in public companies to take them private. It is a significant source of capital for both new ventures and established firms. The objective of this course is to provide an overview of the private equity market from the differing perspectives of private equity investors (limited partners), private equity fund sponsors (general partners) and the managers of portfolio companies, by focusing on the nature of the market and the strategies employed.

This course focuses on institutional real estate investment, primarily within the U.S. market. It covers real estate property level valuation and risk analysis in the context of four group cases spanning industrial, office, retail and multi-family development. While primarily relevant to those in the real estate equity and debt investment arena, skills and concepts are relevant across investment sectors. Prior real estate investment experience is not required.

This course provides turnaround, restructuring, and distressed investing skills that exposes students to, and prepares them for, careers in the industry. The focus is primarily on corporate reorganizations ranging from small/mid-size businesses to large corporations. Topics include identifying distressed opportunities; distressed research analysis; and the sourcing of distressed opportunities. The class also discusses workout strategies; the fundamentals of bankruptcy and the bankruptcy-reorganization process; and career opportunities in the distressed investment business.

This course covers a broad range of issues in corporate financial management. Students analyze the core financial decisions made by firms and their impact on the value of the firm in the financial market. Topics include financial planning and forecasting, project analysis and evaluation, resource allocation, capital structure policy and cost of capital, payout policy, corporate restructurings and firm valuation. By the end of the course, students are able to analyze a variety of corporate decisions, and understand how analyzing strategic and financial decisions from the perspective of value creation can improve managerial decision-making.

This course provides a practitioner’s view for understanding how startups create, deliver, and capture value. Students will explore the design, evolution, and scalability of business models across different industries, with a particular focus on technology-enabled and AI-native ventures. The course bridges entrepreneurial strategy, financial thinking, product-market dynamics, and venture scaling to help founders, operators, and innovation leaders make informed decisions throughout the startup lifecycle.

In this course, students learn the principles of technological innovation driving major business transformations and leading to the creation of more intelligent and agile enterprises. Emphasis is on understanding both business problems and underlying technologies and how the two interact.

This course explores the many dimensions of new venture creation and growth and new business formation in independent and corporate settings. It integrates academic and practitioner views of the challenges facing entrepreneurs and investors involved in entrepreneurial, venture capital and private equity investment activities. The course draws on a variety of disciplines, including management and finance, to develop frameworks and techniques needed to plan, start, evaluate and successfully operate ventures.

We live in an era where “technology” companies are fundamentally changing our lives, and artificial intelligence will further propel this trend. Understanding this mass transformation is crucial, as it’s evident that each and every industry is being disrupted by technology. Students will study how “management” is conducted in high-tech companies and will study megatrends in the technology sector.

The world today is facing multiple intersecting crises—environmental devastation, unprecedented economic inequality, deteriorating health outcomes, racial injustice, amongst others. Social entrepreneurship is the process by which effective, innovative and sustainable business solutions are pioneered to meet these and other social and environmental challenges. It aims to design businesses and leverage the tools of business to create meaningful and measurable impact in the world.

This course is dedicated to exploring the depths of this rapidly evolving domain. It will explore definition, offer context into how it fits within broader economics and management frameworks, introduce high impact case examples and speakers, offer tools to identify social sector problems and create solutions, explore business designs, and examine methods to measure impact.

This course gives an introduction to, an overview of, and a comparison between the various statistical methods that are used to analyze datasets, both small and large. It is geared towards helping managers understand these methods so that they can converse with the analytics groups in their organizations.

This course introduces the basic principles and techniques of applied mathematical modeling for managerial decision making. Students learn about some of the more important analytic methods (e.g., spreadsheet modeling, optimization, Monte Carlo simulation) to recognize the assumptions and limitations of those methods and to employ them to make data-driven decisions. The course covers a wide range of application areas.

Digital technologies are playing increasingly important roles in today’s businesses, markets, economies, and societies worldwide. As digital technologies transform or disrupt organizations’ internal operations and external industry ecosystems, business professionals need to acquire an understanding of the dynamic relationship between technologies and strategies. This course is designed to provide a strategic perspective on digital transformation and disruption, and help students develop the knowledge for analyzing, managing, and leveraging digital technologies in diverse settings.

AI is rapidly transforming the business world, and understanding the language of AI and the fundamentals of how it works is increasingly becoming table stakes across many jobs. Agentic AI extends large language models (LLMs) beyond passive chatbots into active agents capable of taking actions in the real world to improve business processes and workflows. In this course, we explore the underlying principles of building effective AI agents. The course culminates in a demo day where students present the AI agents they built to solve business problems of their choice.

We're at a new age, an age where artificial intelligence is becoming the most influential General Purpose Technology, a technology that once arrived, is poised to morph all aspects of our lives, irreversibly. Artificial Intelligence (AI) rapidly moves into the mainstream, supported by emerging capabilities in cloud and quantum computing, big data, open source software, and ML algorithms to name a few key forces. AI is already demonstrating capabilities that generate greater efficiencies, precision, and personalization, and at times, greater creative output than humans. And with this growing capacity, there grow questions regarding the business value of AI, the societal implications of deploying this technology, and of course, new and intriguing ethical considerations. This course will introduce you to some of the major disruptive Artificial Intelligence developments, concepts, and considerations, and will address the future of work questions as we lead and evolve/sustain AI-enabled businesses.

This course provides an appreciation of the role of brands in consumer decision making and in creating value. It focuses on the core principles underlying a consumer-centric approach to brand strategy and on the research tools that illuminate the meaning and strength of a particular brand. Students learn to think creatively and critically about the strategies and tactics involved in building, leveraging, defending and sustaining inspired brands.

Each of us are active consumers in everyday life, purchasing everything from groceries to clothing to college educations. However, our individual personalities and characteristics dictate that no two consumers are alike; we make unique choices, making it challenging for marketers to create coherent marketing strategies regardless of similarities within target markets. In this class, we will examine how and why consumers behave the way they do, how environmental impacts shape how we behave, and the practical marketing implications of that behavior.

In this course, students learn about cutting-edge trends in social media, and develop a toolkit to evaluate disruptive mobile technology. They also learn how to apply these tools to write a Fortune-100 level social media marketing plan.

The course is designed to provide students with a framework for understanding the entertainment, media and technology industries, and their intersecting points. It covers recent activities in key sectors of the entertainment universe: movies, television, cable, OTT, social media, publishing, sports, music, gaming and live entertainment.

This course is designed to equip students with the frameworks, techniques, and latest thinking on assessing and formulating pricing strategies. Students learn the process of making pricing decisions that accounts for underlying consumer behavior, and explore innovative approaches for setting prices across diverse industries.

This course provides a framework for understanding the various technologies impacting media and marketing in the marketplace today, including emerging next-generation technologies. It also provides students with a structure for assessing the opportunities and challenges of innovations in a 3‐5 year time horizon.

This course is designed to give students an understanding of the applied economics of healthcare. It provides an advanced critical analysis of the delivery of healthcare services and evaluates the responses of major players (hospitals, physicians, payers, life sciences, and new entrants to the market). A key goal is for students to understand why economics in healthcare is constantly changing and the major drivers impacting the healthcare system.

Climate change presents one of the central challenges of our generation, with a wide range of effects on financial markets and the broader economy. At the same time, financial markets play an important role in financing the transition to a net-zero economy. In this class, we study the interaction between climate change and firms, financial markets, energy markets, regulators, and policy makers.

This course applies the tools of economic analysis to study how medical care is produced and financed, in both the private and public sectors. The emphasis is on the United States, with a brief treatment of health systems in other developed and less developed countries.

This course explores the choices global businesses face in addressing human rights challenges in their core business operations. The course will include a series of case studies from different industries where accelerating globalization and advancing technology have made these challenges more acute in recent years. The course will focus on the evolving public face of these issues driven in part by rapid developments in the global media and advances in information technology.

In this course, students develop an understanding of how leading companies are embedding sustainability in their core business strategy and using it to drive innovation; operational efficiency; employee, supplier and customer loyalty; competitive advantage and value to society. Students become familiar with the key environmental and social issues affecting business today, explore the innovations developed by corporate leaders in pursuit of sustainability, become familiar with the latest research on sustainability, and develop some of the skills required for leading in this new social and political environment.