EMBA - Executive Master of Business Administration

This course is designed to sharpen communication and interpersonal skills through class activities, writing, presentations and simulations. It focuses on perfecting speaking, writing, visual and interpersonal communication skills necessary for students' careers as business leaders.

This course examines the challenges associated with managing business enterprises whose operations stretch across national boundaries. Through extensive readings and case analyses, students obtain a fundamental understanding of the strategic, operational and behavioral aspects of managing across cultures. Students will further develop their leadership skills and interpersonal skills and will work with community leaders to advance their personal brand and marketability. Through a variety of career development experiences students will learn critical components involved in strategic career management and progression including self-assessment, creating and managing one’s professional brand, personal marketability, business communication, networking and leveraging available job-search and internship resources. (prerequisites: all courses in the EMBA program, except EMBA 850 and EMBA 855)

This is a basic financial accounting course for managers who do not have an accounting background.  The course is aimed at teaching the fundamentals of creating, reading, and interpreting financial accounting statements as prepared under US GAAP.

This course is a review of basic data analytics concepts essential for decision modeling and analysis in business environments.  It is designed to prepare students for taking EMBA 825, Modeling and Analysis for Executive Decision Making.  Topics include descriptive statistics, probability, discrete and continuous random variables, sampling distributions, confidence intervals, and hypothesis testing.  The course is divided into four modules, each of which is succeeded by an on-line post-test.  Students will be able to keep taking these tests for one week after the conclusion of the course.  We use lectures, videos, exercises and appropriate software to illustrate all concepts.

This course focuses on the role of innovation in the 21st-century organization. It addresses the need for a systematic approach to building innovation capabilities and the challenges of integrating the many facets of innovation management. Leading innovators and building innovative organizations are covered from a theoretical and applied approach. Topics addressed include fundamental theories of innovation, developing innovation strategy, innovation as a business process, the role of the innovation context including leadership and organization, culture and values, people and skills, and processes and tools, and assessing and improving innovation performance. Both classroom and alternative instructional methods may be employed.

This course is designed to introduce graduate students to the organization and practices of corporate finance, and a basic understanding of the quantitative tools used by financial managers with relevant applications.

This course is a foundational economics course for managers who either do not have a formal economics background, or have not studied economics for several years. The course is designed to rapidly acquaint, or re-acquaint, the student with foundational economic concepts and tools, and provide an introduction to the “economic way of thinking”.

This course focuses on advanced leadership skill development with the goal of accelerating the impact of leader’s behaviors on the human dynamics in organizations. Through a variety of practice modalities, students will enhance their knowledge of their personal leadership strengths and challenges. Students will also learn about organizational behavior topics such as motivation, ethical and effective influence strategies for a diverse workforce, and leadership of teams. Finally, students will learn how important OB topics are applied in organizations through effective human resources management. 

This course provides a pragmatic study of selected financial and management accounting concepts, methods and practices relating to financial analysis, cost assignment, cost management, performance management and decision analysis. The central focus of this course is how accounting information helps managers identify strategies and make decisions to produce a sustainable competitive advantage.

This course provides an overview of statistical and mathematical models for effective decision making. Tools used daily by managers, business analysts and consultants are utilized to solve problems in operations, finance, accounting, marketing, human resources, policy making, economics, etc. Topics include regression analysis, statistical process control, linear optimization, time-series forecasting and decision making under uncertainty and risk. The course is taught using lectures, cases and appropriate software packages.

Modern organizations face rapidly changing environments and require information systems that can quickly adapt to support business operations. Given rapidly evolving information technologies, many organizations struggle with obtaining strategic benefits from information systems. This course explores contemporary issues related to the strategic use of information systems and technology to manage and enhance organizational operations. Topics such as the value of IT investments, IT-business alignment, enterprise systems/ERP, operational analytics, and cybersecurity are covered in a discussion-oriented and case-based approach to prepare business leaders to extract strategic value from investments in information systems.

Introduces students to strategic decision-making tools for planning, promoting, pricing and distributing products and services to targeted markets, with a goal of delivering high levels of customer value. Strategic marketing management techniques that lead toward the formation of exceptional firms are applied with the use of analytical practices. The course will use current events readings, cases, simulations, discussions and formal strategic plans.

The goal of the course is to provide business leaders with an economic framework for making decisions. The course begins by exploring the efficiency of the market-based system and an examination of how repugnance, price controls and taxation affect that system. We examine why business institutions exist and how their boundaries are determined; explore how design architecture influences individual decision making; and study how incentives and monitoring alter employee behavior. Models for optimally pricing in commodity markets, entrepreneurial markets and markets with dominant rivals are developed. Lastly, tools for mitigating systemic risk within financial institutions are investigated.

This course focuses on the core concepts of financial decision making: maximizing wealth, cash flow, net present value and the existence of risk and return tradeoffs in most corporate decisions. The course also explores the implications of various financial strategies within the dynamic global financial environment. Accounting concepts learned in EMBA 820 are applied using models that are realistic and robust. Students compute prices and returns on corporate securities and the weighted average cost of capital for a firm and evaluate long term capital investment projects using capital budgeting techniques. Students also learn about capital structure theory and financing strategies firms choose to optimize their mix of debt and equity.

This course asks the student to adopt a strategic perspective for the entire organization, with all its highly interdependent elements and dimensions, as it operates within a dynamic, global environment. The course lays the foundation for the international travel course and requires the application of conceptual models, tools and skills unique to the practice of strategic leadership and competitive global business strategies. Through readings and case studies, students will apply the concepts, tools and skills they have gained from previous coursework to real-world organizational problems, and begin preparations for the International Experience course project.

This course is integrated with EMBA 850. Students are required to apply research skills in gathering data from a broad range of sources in order to develop quality external and internal environmental analyses. The analyses are tailored to a client and targeted country. The course includes 9- or 10-day travel study component, in addition to scheduled class meetings.