MiM Academics

Effective leadership requires you to be self-­aware and able to understand, motivate, and influence others. This is increasingly complex in organizations today as we work with diverse people across cultures, via technologies, and in an environment of increased change. This course focuses on developing your social intelligence by developing the self as leader, understanding culture and interpersonal differences, and leading change in the organizational context. Social intelligence skills are crucial for influencing, persuading, motivating, and leading people and change. They predict performance and career success, and have a potent effect on the performance and well-­being of others around you.

The goal of this course is to provide an introductory overview of the world of business. This course will examine various industry sectors and the spectrum of businesses ranging from ‘start ups’ to large, multinational enterprises. This course is designed to introduce students to several core concepts and constructs that are widely used in the business world. The course assumes the student has had limited or no exposure to business practice or study. It aims to lay the foundation for understanding the basic elements and ‘business language’ in the areas of business strategy, organizational functions, globalization, and corporate culture. The course will use a variety of learning approaches. Through a combination of class and online presentations that introduce theoretical foundations, class discussions, simulations that provide students an opportunity to apply concepts, case studies, and site visits, students will gain exposure to the world of business.

Ethical Leadership is designed to deepen your understanding of the ethical and social dimensions of business in general and corporate leadership in particular. At its conclusion, you should have the know how to evaluate and lead the ethical performance of organizations—from teams to enterprises and from the top to the trenches. You should have an acute awareness of the heightened social demands on firms and how leaders are anticipating and managing this expanding responsibility. Finally, you will have the opportunity to examine and reflect on your profile as an ethical leader and to formulate strategies for making the most of your upcoming leadership opportunities.

This course is designed to offer students a strategic perspective to developing, implementing, and reviewing marketing strategy. The approach to the class will be from the perspective of a strategic marketing consultant. That is, you will be asked to take on the role of “marketing strategist” as you review companies’ design, implementation, and modification of marketing strategies. We will begin by focusing on the strategic building blocks required to be an effective marketer. This entails analyzing the customer as the most critical input in marketing strategy development. It is by benchmarking the customer that true marketing success is found. Of course, while a potential strategy is developed for the customer, we must also test its feasibility by analyzing the company and competitive environment. Thus, the final analysis of the market includes a thorough understanding of our constituencies, competition, and our own firm.

In the rest of the course, we will turn our attention to developing our marketing “tool box” in order to successfully implement our marketing strategies. This will include individual and integrated focus on product, distribution, pricing, promotion, and packaging decisions. This discussion and focus includes issues involved in managing the business, including profit analysis, marketing research, operations, etc. If you cannot do “the numbers,” then you will have a hard time becoming successful in the marketing field. Upon completion of this course, you should have the knowledge and analytical abilities necessary to successfully develop, implement, and evaluate an integrated marketing strategy. Additionally, your business communications skills should be enhanced, as your colleagues and I will challenge you to present and defend your analyses succinctly and clearly.

This course focuses on improving your ability to influence outcomes, motivate others, and build/maintain relationships. In short, we focus on all aspects of Leadership Communication in an experiential course designed to not just enrich your conceptual knowledge, but to improve your abilities to: – Verbally present effectively in a variety of business settings—including determining audience needs and situational demands, integrating visuals effectively in speech, and organizing /structuring/articulating a position. – Apply knowledge and skills of communication, influence, assertiveness, conflict management, decision making, and managing your boss to real life situations. – Better understand your own ability to productively communicate and influence the contexts around you. Moreover, understand also how you are influenced by those same contexts—and the role of evidence in designing/articulating an argument. – Gain more intentionality in the cognitive communication and behavioral choices you make within organizational settings and be in a better position to evaluate potential outcomes—particularly understanding how style, organization, and structure affect decision-making and problem-solving. – Understand the elements important in creating an innovative, feedback-rich culture, and be able to foster such an environment wherever you go. – Apply behavioral analysis and feedback to aid others in their quest for better self-awareness and self-management when communicating—and in the process improve your own emotional intelligence skills. Beyond these formal objectives, we hope this course gives you a better sense of the difference between intentionality and perception of behavior, how much your behavior signals who you are to the outside world, and ultimately, how much positive, productive impact you can have on the folks and organizations around you.

This course is designed to introduce students to the fast-changing and increasingly important field of Managerial Statistics. In the business world of today, managerial statistics is becoming increasingly important. Understanding data analytics and how to use them effectively is crucial to business success. This course teaches both the concepts and skills of managerial statistics, as well as the statistical language R, in order to give students the preparation they need in today’s information-oriented world.

The objective of this course is to provide you with an overview of the financial accounting and reporting process. After completing the course, you should be able to understand the difference between cash-based and accrual-based accounting systems, appreciate the interrelation between the balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows, prepare basic financial statements, and complete simple financial statement analysis.

This course is designed to offer students a strategic perspective to developing, implementing, and reviewing marketing strategy. The approach to the class will be from the perspective of a strategic marketing consultant. That is, you will be asked to take on the role of “marketing strategist” as you review companies’ design, implementation, and modification of marketing strategies. We will begin by focusing on the strategic building blocks required to be an effective marketer. This entails analyzing the customer as the most critical input in marketing strategy development. It is by benchmarking the customer that true marketing success is found. Of course, while a potential strategy is developed for the customer, we must also test its feasibility by analyzing the company and competitive environment. Thus, the final analysis of the market includes a thorough understanding of our constituencies, competition, and our own firm.

In the rest of the course, we will turn our attention to developing our marketing “tool box” in order to successfully implement our marketing strategies. This will include individual and integrated focus on product, distribution, pricing, promotion, and packaging decisions. This discussion and focus includes issues involved in managing the business, including profit analysis, marketing research, operations, etc. If you cannot do “the numbers,” then you will have a hard time becoming successful in the marketing field. Upon completion of this course, you should have the knowledge and analytical abilities necessary to successfully develop, implement, and evaluate an integrated marketing strategy. Additionally, your business communications skills should be enhanced, as your colleagues and I will challenge you to present and defend your analyses succinctly and clearly.

In this class, we build on the foundations learned in Managerial Statistics 1. Moving on from descriptive statistics, we will learn methods of creating predictive models with statistics. Students will learn more about making inferences and drawing conclusions about characteristics of a population based on sample information. The course also focuses on regression methods. And this course will go further in developing skills in the methods, and techniques of business. sectors. Students will further enhance their skills in technology and its application throughout the course, as they continue to use statistical packages and learn new competencies in their technology lab.

This class, in tandem with Managerial Statistics 1, will provide future business managers with the concepts and skills they need for success in all areas of the business world and will help them with managerial decision-making.

Operations is a core function in every organization and the largest portion of assets and employees in most organizations are engaged in this function. How it is managed affects not only other functions, but the ultimate success of the entity. This course is designed to provide you with the key concepts and tools in managing this function. Using case studies about real companies and original research, we challenge some of the conventional thinking and replace it with new approaches. Change the paradigm: more than the traditional vertical approach (“silo mentality”), the right business processes require a horizontal (“cross functions”) perspective. Quantitative methods are introduced within the context of critical evidence-based thinking and data analytics.

In this course, we will develop the analytical capabilities that form the basis for making financial decisions in corporations. The course focuses on the following topics: 1) the mathematics of time value of money and discounted cash flow analysis, with applications in a valuation framework; 2) valuation of bonds using various
mathematical models; 3) valuation of stocks using various mathematical models; 4) dividend and share repurchase policy; and 5) analytical models for valuing options. This course will allow you to gain an understanding of the important issues faced by corporate managers and the criteria that managers use to make financial decisions.

Understand international business through a macroeconomic lens. In this course, students develop critical thinking and business decision-making skills, learn the foundations of international business and economics that are necessary for managerial success, and incorporate ethical considerations into business decisions.

This course will examine the most pivotal question that a manager will face – “What do I need to do in order to build, motivate, lead and manage a high performing organization?”. It will explore how to do that at varying stages of organizational maturity – but especially at scale. It will focus particular attention on the most critical asset of most enterprises – people and how they behave towards each other. Drawing upon well-researched literature and current case examples, we will explore how inspirational and authentic leaders can make transformational changes in organizations and in their environments by more effectively managing their human capital. The first half of this course will focus on establishing sound organizational foundations for the enterprise. We’ll ask why does management matter so much, and why does good management make such a difference? How should you design (or re-design) the organization; recruit, inspire and develop people; build the most important institutional skills and core management processes; ensure that the enterprise is agile and adaptable to changing circumstances; create a motivational culture and working environment; and measure and track organizational performance and health? In the second half of the course, we’ll examine what it takes to manage a dynamic organization, going through episodes of challenge and change. How should you undertake transformational change programs; manage the particular complexities of post-merger integration; enable diversity and inclusion; meet overlapping and conflicting stakeholder demands; and handle significant managerial crises in the glare of public scrutiny? Throughout this course we will draw upon the latest research into organizational behavior at the enterprise level, and we’ll explore numerous examples of enterprises which have tackled – with greater or lesser success – a range of managerial challenges and opportunities.

The objectives of the Global Business Experience (GBE) are to (1) increase your understanding of business in a foreign setting, (2) increase your ability to conduct international business with comfort and confidence in a foreign culture, and to improve your managerial mobility – your ability and willingness to do a job wherever it needs to be done, (3) improve your problem-solving ability, analytical skills, skills of synthesis, and communication skills, (4) deepen your understanding of international business, macroeconomic, and policy issues as they apply in specific country situations, and (5) provide an opportunity for you to integrate and apply knowledge obtained from prior course work.

View past GBE Projects

This course develops considerably more sophisticated decision models based on your knowledge from Financial Markets & Corporate Analytics I. We study decision-making under uncertainty and applications of mean-variance portfolio models. The course includes regression analysis, sophisticated Excel modeling, spreadsheet applications, and elementary forecasting models to determine future optimal business decisions. We apply data from the quarterly Livingston financial surveys of economists and predictions for the growth of the money supply to develop economic forecasts applying regression models and spreadsheet applications, and discuss how firms use these forecasts to plan their budgeting and capital expenditures for short-run (3 months) and long-run (10 years) planning.

This course presents concepts related to microeconomics and competitive strategy. Microeconomics is the fundamental discipline (or “mother tongue”) of all business. Understanding microeconomic concepts allows managers to make better business decisions. Students will examine a number of economic concepts, including economic costs; supply and demand and market equilibrium; pricing, price elasticities and price discrimination; firm profitability; firm entry and exit; market and industry organization; game theory; market failures and regulation. Students will be exposed to mathematical and economic concepts using figures, spreadsheets, algebra and some calculus.

The emphasis of the course is the logistics or Supply Chain function in firms that source, produce, distribute and market in multiple nations. The management of the logistics in such firms differs from its domestic counterpart along several key dimensions. First, there is the need to be able to identify and analyze factors that differ across nations, which influence the effectiveness of this function. These include worker productivity, process adaptability, governmental concerns, transportation availability, and culture and so on. In addition, because of the distances involved, transportation and distribution are of greater significance. Finally, these geographically dispersed set of facilities and markets must be integrated and manage to enhance the strategy of the business unit. Therefore, some of the sessions of the course will focus on cross-national decisions and others will focus on managing across nations.

Throughout the course we will emphasize the role that emerging technologies are playing within the supply chain and e-commerce.

For the purposes of the course, the perspective will be that of the director of logistics or Supply Chain, vice-president of logistics or other, senior level general managers with primary responsibility for the production and distribution of manufactured products.

A major theme throughout the course is that sourcing, manufacturing and distribution are of primary importance in the formulation of business and corporate strategy. We want to look at the strategic decisions within logistics as they impact the ability of the firm to achieve its selected overall strategies.

This course emphasizes the development of accounting information for use in decision making and financial planning. A key objective is to understand the incentives of parties to the firm, and to evaluate the performance of managers from the perspectives of both corporate management and capital market participants. The course is relevant to a wide range of career objectives, including consulting, financial services, marketing and strategic management.

The global business policy environment is central to firms’ performance, as measured by shareholder value and in accordance with firms’ broader responsibilities to society. Discover the economic policies and issues that shape firms’ global trade and investment strategies, as well as those that heighten foreign competition and introduce investment risk. In contrast to a public policy perspective, we take the perspective of firms and managers and analyze and evaluate their strategies for dealing with uncertain policy environments around the world. Students will examine a number of strategic concepts, including value creation and value capture; industry organization; resources and capabilities; and competitive positioning. Students will be exposed to a number of mathematical and strategic concepts using figures, spreadsheets, and algebra.

This is the first of two elective courses that prepare students for strategic problem-solving roles – and especially for careers in management consulting or in-house strategy and business development. Frameworks, Methods and Contexts (FMC) is founded upon the central premise that consulting firms want people who are extraordinary problem-solvers and that problem-solving is a structured process that can be learned and applied. FMC delivers just such a structured process by helping you to:

– Learn problem-solving Frameworks (i.e. simplified and recurring analytical models to help frame and understand the nature of business problems);
– Apply proven Methods (i.e. analytical protocols for diagnosing problems and prescribing solutions);
– And apply them in a variety of Contexts (i.e. different types of problems in diverse industries and settings.

It also helps you to strengthen a fourth attribute of future business success – Intuition, which we define as the accumulated base of stored knowledge, experience and emotions. This is sub-consciously retrieved and confidently applied when needed.

During the course, we embed these 5 skills in an Analytical Process Map, which structures and sequences the problem-solving process. This encompasses the problem definition (“Situation, Complication, Question); the “Key Issue Analysis (KIA)”; the Work Plan and Process Map; the Storyline; and the Final Report.

We focus not just on the analysis and conclusions, but also on the Presentation of those conclusions – in pitch books, presentation slides, and “heavy decks”. We seek to ensure that all communications – whatever the format – are characterized by a clear storyline structure, a consistent format, a clean look and feel, and accurate navigation.

Students will choose from among several quantitative or technical elective courses.