The Management Division offers many of the School’s highest-rated elective courses. Management courses provide an interdisciplinary approach to complex business problems that will benefit all MBA students, regardless of their specific career goals.
Core Courses
Leading and managing in organizations
Strategic management of the enterprise
Managerial negotiations
Electives
Managerial negotiations
Top management process
Corporate growth and development
Turnaround management
Managerial decision making
Power and influence in organizations
International business strategy
Executive leadership
Corporate governance
Core Courses
B7011-100 - Leading and managing in organizations
This course is designed to get students to the next level in their careers. The assumption is that their careers have peaked at the point where their technical expertise and IQ can take them; their future success requires getting the ordinary people around them to do extraordinary things. Students will take away practical tools for improving their ability in influencing, negotiating, and leading changes in their organizations. Emphasis is on the practical. Many of the principles are demonstrated using classroom experiments. The final project requires students to apply course concepts to an ongoing challenge in their current work environment.
B7017 - Strategic management of the enterprise
This course considers the roles and responsibilities of the general manager, with special emphasis on the strategic management of the business unit. Provides a set of concepts and frameworks for formulating and implementing business strategy. For multibusiness firms, problems of corporate organization and strategy are discussed. Issues of corporate governance and social responsibility are also considered. Students grapple (using cases and projects) with diverse managerial situations: large and small organizations, manufacturing and service industries, growing and mature firms, and U.S. and international settings.
B7462 - Managerial negotiations
In managing human resources in an organization, many outcomes and decisions are determined by the process of negotiation. This course involves students in actual negotiating experiences to enhance their skills as negotiators. Concepts developed in the behavioral sciences, economics, and game theory are used as guides to improve negotiating. Each fall and spring, one section of the course places emphasis on game-theoretical foundations of the negotiating process.
Electives
B7462 - Managerial negotiations
In managing human resources in an organization, many outcomes and decisions are determined by the process of negotiation. This course involves students in actual negotiating experiences to enhance their skills as negotiators. Concepts developed in the behavioral sciences, economics, and game theory are used as guides to improve negotiating. Each fall and spring, one section of the course places emphasis on game-theoretical foundations of the negotiating process.
B7702 - Top management process
This course examines the ways general managers get things done. Typically, general managers work through processes-sequences of tasks and activities that unfold over time. The course explores six top management processes: strategic, resource allocation, decision making, learning, managerial, and change.
B7708 - Corporate growth and development
This course is for students who are interested in mergers and acquisitions, diversification, corporate strategy, and improving shareholder value. It combines analytical frameworks with case studies and guest speakers to identify how managers create value through multibusiness activity. As a final project, class participants give presentations that include analysis of their own original fieldwork. The course is highly recommended for consultants and private equity investors.
B7711-001 - Turnaround management
This course provides students with a perspective on identifying and remedying turnaround business situations, that is, established businesses experiencing operational, financial, and managerial difficulties. Students learn, from the standpoint of a general manager, how to distinguish between "troubled" and "crisis" companies and how to use both qualitative and quantitative tools to effect solutions. The course integrates the functional disciplines of the core curriculum; a basic understanding of accounting and corporate finance is necessary. Cash flow and going concern projections, debt restructuring and liquidation analysis, credit relationships, and managerial perspectives are central components of classwork. Assignments are group-oriented projects culminating in a final group analysis of a turnaround candidate.
B7712 - Managerial decision making
This course examines the individual and collective factors that affect the decisions that managers make in their everyday work lives. The approach is descriptive and prescriptive, that is, the focus is on how managers actually make decisions, as well as how they ought to make decisions to maximize organizational and personal outcomes.
The course is divided into two main sections. The first section deals with individual-level processes that influence managers’ decisions. The second section considers collective (that is, group or organizational) forces that affect managers’ decisions.
B7714-001 - Power and influence in organizations
Power and influence processes are pervasive and important in organizations, so leaders need to be able both to understand power and to act on that knowledge. Organizations are fundamentally political entities, and power and influence are key mechanisms by which things get done. Therefore, this course has three objectives: to increase your ability to diagnose and analyze power; to expose you to effective and appropriate methods of influence; and to explain how power and influence can be used to build cooperation and promote change in organizations. Although the information provided is relevant to anyone who works within an institutional setting, this course specifically examines power and influence through the lens of leadership: that is, from the perspectives of those who are accountable for achieving particular organizational goals.
B7718 - International business strategy
The purpose of this course is to give students a practical understanding of the why, when, and how companies become international and of the issues such a transformation raises. The emphasis will be on the identification and making of the strategic and organizational decisions that such a change implies. As such this course is conceived as a continuation of the reflections started in both the International Business Course and the Strategy of the Enterprise Course and is positioned at the intersection of these two areas of study. The proposed course is tentatively structured as a sequence of 11 "double sessions" of three hours each with a quarter of an hour break. Each double session will be used for a case discussion (2 hour) and a "mini-lecture" (45 minutes). Depending on the issue at hand the mini-lecture will either be given after the case as a way to generalize and conclude on the case discussion or before as a way to introduce and focus the case discussion.
B7720-001 - Executive leadership
The goal of this course is to help you develop your leadership potential. Beyond intelligence and technical savvy, what separates leaders from average managers is a set of individual skills, such as the ability to make sound decisions under ambiguous circumstances, and a set of social skills, such as the ability to build productive working relationships among team members. This course identifies these critical individual and social skills and illustrates how you may use them to gain an extra edge in your career.
The emphasis of this course is on organizing, directing, motivating, and influencing other people within, and outside of, your organization. Although some class time is conducted in a conventional lecture format, much of the class consists of an assortment of experiential exercises and class discussion.
B7799-015 - Corporate governance
This is a new course that covers all aspects of corporate governance. Topics include: why has corporate governance become a central issue in the United States as well as in most other countries, the role of corporate law in the functioning of the modern corporation and in financial markets, the limits of corporate law, the fiduciary duties of officers and directors, the role of the board of directors, and the audit committee, the implications of the Enron debacle, shareholder rights and the proxy system, executive compensation and incentive alignment, stock options and equity compensation, the role of large owners, the protection of minority shareholders, institutional ownership and the role of institutional investors in corporate governance, the role of gatekeepers, hostile takeovers and takeover defenses, derivative shareholder suits, and recent proposals to improve corporate governance, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and recent stock exchange listing requirements. While the central focus of the course is U.S. corporate governance, throughout the course the U.S. is compared to the corporate governance systems used in other countries on a topic specific bases, and the trend towards international convergence in corporate governance systems is examined.
