Executive MBA: Washington, DC | Core Courses

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

This course delves into the history and emerging theories around inclusion, diversity, belonging, equity, access, otherness, and difference. It focused on how leaders can apply best practices, utilize cross-sector and interdisciplinary research, and build sustainable inclusive excellence programs within their organizations. Today’s business leaders must be well-equipped to understand and manage the challenges and opportunities posed by diversity and inclusion and their impact on 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.

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.

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.

This course focuses on how to effectively lead within an ever-changing world. It introduces some of the central theories and frameworks in leadership and helps students understand how to apply them to evaluate organizations and their leadership and to address critical organizational challenges. The course also helps students reflect on and develop the skills that are required for being an effective leader within an organizational setting.

This course is designed to assist students in developing the knowledge, skills, and perspective they need to understand and address environmental and social challenges in business, so that as leaders they reduce risk, create competitive advantage, and develop innovative services, products, and processes, all while building value for society and protecting the planet.

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.