McDonough School of Business

Executive MBA Dubai Academics

The Georgetown Executive MBA program is uniquely positioned to prepare students as leaders who understand the existing complexities of today’s business challenges. Our program is differentiated by an inspiring curriculum steeped in global management and the understanding of external factors such as government and international institutions and organizations that influence global markets. Our Jesuit traditions and value system underscore our distinctive approach to the teaching of ethical leadership, and our electives offer greater flexibility for students to customize their professional skillset in today’s global marketplace. 

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Class Schedule & Curriculum

Core Courses

Opening Residency – Leading Teams for Performance and Impact and Leadership Communication
These courses focus on developing your social intelligence by increasing your self-awareness and growth as a leader, understanding interpersonal differences, and influencing others. Drawing from behavioral science research and professional practice, you will gain a focused experience in leadership development. Additionally, you will improve your ability to influence outcomes, motivate others, and both build and maintain relationships.

Decision Analytics
This course provides a prefatory yet comprehensive perspective on analytics and quantitative methods used in business decision-making activities. Case studies and statistical software are used to illustrate and reinforce concepts and develop competence.

Accounting for Executives – 1 & 2
Learn how to understand and communicate firm performance to outside stakeholders for your role as a future business leader. Understand how to assess a firm’s financial performance and condition, and become proficient in using financial statements and footnote disclosures to understand and evaluate corporate activities.

You also will explore techniques used by leading companies to transform data from internal accounting systems into value-creating information that supports corporate strategy implementation. The focus is on effective business management, including how leaders allocate resources to maximize value, control production, support product design and pricing, and evaluate the performance of business units and personnel.

Microeconomics & Strategy
This is an integrative course that provides frameworks, tools, and concepts to help make sound business and corporate strategy decisions, based on theoretical and empirical research from the fields of microeconomics and competitive strategy.

Structure of Global Industries
This course introduces students to the principles and frameworks that govern the global economy and the global activities of firms. It draws extensively from macroeconomic principles, trade policies between countries and regions, and provides an excellent understanding of commerce and business operations across the globe.

Global Operations
Explore managing global production and supply chains, implementing operations improvement programs, and assessing the impact of new technologies in operations. The course includes a special section on understanding how global supply chains are impacted by major events, like the pandemic, and how companies should respond to such global shocks and disruptions.

Marketing
This course provides an enriching experience for students with all types of backgrounds – whether you have no or little exposure to marketing, or have spent most of your career in a marketing role. The objective is to help you grow marketing decision-making skills and comprehend contemporary marketing opportunities and issues. A significant focus of the course is on understanding consumers and customers, their needs and wants, and how firms can influence their decisions.

Public Private Partnership
Explore how public-private partnerships shape economies and growth, what roles and responsibilities are played by each partner, and how we can manage public sector projects with commercial approaches. This course will draw examples from across the world to showcase examples of what approaches work better than others.

Organizational Behavior & Leadership
Expand your knowledge of executive leadership, corporate policy making, and the application of behavioral science concepts to management problems. The content introduces all participants to the core concepts of HR, human capital management, corporate culture, and leadership.

Global Business Experience
The Global Business Experience empowers students to more fully understand how business is conducted around the world. Student consulting teams travel abroad to solve a pressing business problem facing corporate clients with operations outside of the UAE. This course has a strong focus on experiential learning and is typically a highlight of the program.

Corporate Finance
Gain an understanding of the important issues faced by corporate managers and the criteria managers use to make financial decisions. The course is a good mix of quantitative analytics and its qualitative strategy implications. The course makes careful use of case studies to bring the financial concepts to life through real work examples.

Negotiations
Understand the theory and processes of negotiation in a variety of settings. Objectives include evaluating notions of when to negotiate and what assumptions, beliefs, values, and habits influence negotiation behavior. This course will draw from different business cultures across the globe, and specifically draw from regional norms of engagement.

Sustainable Business Models
This course provides you with an opportunity to work on a real-world problem related to sustainable business faced by a business, a non-governmental organization, or an institution. You will take a strategic perspective to thinking about sustainability and examine how considerations impact and guide corporate strategy.

Ethics for Business
Develop a deeper understanding of the ethical implications of leadership, including the role of values/beliefs and social influences on your decision making, the use of power and influence (for good and for bad), and taking responsibility for the consequences created by your actions. The course invites you to engage in deep reflection and formulate your own “moral compass.”

New Business Ventures & Entrepreneurship
Transform a promising corporate innovation opportunity into an innovation venture concept proposal, and launch it as a new innovation concept. Learn the key steps in the venture creation process, including customer discovery, feasibility analysis, product development, marketing and internal stakeholder support, and fundraising. The course internationally focuses on both “entre”-preneurship as well as “intra”-preneurship and helps participants apply principles of entrepreneurial thinking to projects within more traditional organizations.

AI & Future of Work
This course examines each element of the Talent Value Chain and the role that AI, data, and analytics will play across the whole talent ecosystem. In addition to its forward-looking content, the course is distinguished by its delivery model – an intensive and interactive dialogue with a set of academic and corporate thought leaders, each of whom will bring their own experience and data into the learning arena.

Investments
This course is designed to introduce you to the modern world of professional asset management. Topics include the identification and analysis of investment opportunities, portfolio analysis and optimization, the execution of investment strategies, and the professional responsibilities of asset managers.

Strategic Advocacy for Business
The course starts with the observation that businesses do not operate in a vacuum, devoid of non-market influences. Quite the opposite, businesses need to proactively engage with and influence all non-market forces. You will learn and apply the core elements of developing and implementing major advocacy strategies in an era where businesses are increasingly required to participate actively in policy making, politics, and regulation.

Closing Residency – Business, Policy, and Global Affairs
Explore the foundations of business and public policy, with an eye toward the relative strengths and weaknesses of both in addressing society’s most challenging issues. This class takes a managerial perspective, while stressing the interplay between the central features of the global non-market environment of business: citizens, national governments and politics, and the international rules around global trade and investment. Develop frameworks to analyze and respond to the most important political, environmental, and technological challenges currently confronting business.

Electives

Second-year Executive MBA Dubai students customize their program by taking five electives. Note, electives may vary based on the composition of the cohort, faculty recommendations, and key business issues of the time. A sample of electives offered in past years of the Executive MBA D.C. program include:


Connect with Us


Or visit us at the following location:

Georgetown University
Dubai International Financial Centre
DIFC Academy, Gate Village 2, Level 3
PO Box 74777, Dubai, UAE

Lana Dajani

Lana Dajani

Director of Admissions & Operations, Executive MBA Dubai

As the director of admissions and operations for Georgetown’s Executive MBA Dubai program, Lana Dajani leads admissions, recruitment, marketing, and program operations. She has more than 12 years of experience in higher education and the private sector. Prior to joining Georgetown, she worked for Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in Dubai. Her experience includes business development, admissions, operations, strategic planning, and recruitment. Dajani also is the author of two children’s books. She is a graduate of Georgetown University, with a B.S. in foreign service and an M.A. in international law.