Detailed First Year Curriculum

General Management Perspectives

Quarter AUTUMN QUARTER Critical Analytical Thinking Course Name Course Description Critical Analytical Thinking (CAT) will address issues that transcend any single discipline or function of management. In 16-person sections, you will analyze, write about, and debate fundamental issues, questions, and phenomena that arise in many forms in management. CAT will enhance your ability to identify critical questions when exploring a new business issue, to parse issues, to develop reasoned positions, and to make compelling arguments. This course emphasizes frameworks for conducting ethical analysis (on what basis can you say that a course of action is or is not ethical), the analysis of ethical dilemmas (how do you think about situations in which different ethical precepts collide), and how to deal on a day-to-day basis with the practical issues of ethical behavior in organizations. This course is taught in Winter Quarter. *Taught in Winter Quarter The economies of the world are ever more closely linked. Record levels of international trade and investment are achieved every year. Cross-border mergers and acquisitions are booming. Few businesses today can avoid being connected to the world economy, and it is quite likely that the process of globalization will continue at this pace. To succeed as a leader in your career, you will need to be able to think systematically about the challenges brought about by globalization. This course is designed to help you develop as a leader in this international environment. This experiential course focuses on questions such as: How do we maximize the performance of the teams we become a part of? What interpersonal skills give us influence? Which

Ethics and Management*

Global Context of Management

Leadership Labs

interpersonal strengths can propel us to our next promotion? What development areas might prevent our ascension to the executive suite? The Leadership Labs are designed for deep selfreflection about what behaviors we choose to use, the consequences of those behaviors, and given choices, how we might be even more productive. Each Lab session includes progressively more difficult business simulations facilitated initially by Arbuckle Leadership Fellows, then Faculty, and then finally, the most challenging cases are facilitated by experienced senior GSB alumni in our final examThe Executive Challenge. This course covers the foundations of finance with an emphasis on applications that are vital for corporate managers. We begin with an overview of accounting fundamentals, including basic financial statement analysis. With this background, we will then consider the major financial decisions made by corporate managers both within the firm and in their interactions with Managerial Finance investors. Essential in most of these decisions is the process of valuation, which will be an important emphasis of the course. Topics include criteria for making investment decisions, valuation of financial assets and liabilities, relationships between risk and return, market efficiency, capital structure choice, payout policy, the effective use and valuation of derivative securities, and risk management. Managerial Skills In the Managerial Skills Labs, we examine several common managerial challenges faced by executives. Together with faculty, students explore these topics using four case examples, each asking students to evaluate a series of situations, develop alternatives for their resolution, and ultimately recommend and implement a course of action from the point of view of the company's owner/manager. We have selected small to midsized businesses as the context for these discussions in order to highlight the impact that key decisions and their implementation can have on the broader organization. Class preparation should include not only analysis and conclusions, but also

specific recommendations on implementation. Students should come to class prepared to role play important conversations between management and other key individuals. This course introduces you to the structures and processes that affect group performance and highlights some of the common pitfalls associated with working in teams. Topics include team culture, fostering creativity and Managing Groups coordination, making group decisions, and and Teams dealing with a variety of personalities. You will participate in a number of group exercises to illustrate principles of teamwork and to give you practice not only diagnosing team problems but also taking action to improve total team performance. Building on the discipline of social psychology, this course helps you cultivate mindsets and build skills to understand the ways in which organizations and their members affect each other. You will learn frameworks for diagnosing and resolving problems in organizational Organizational settings. The course relates theory and research Behavior to organizational problems by reviewing basic concepts such as individual motivation and behavior; decision making; interpersonal communication and influence; small group behavior; and dyadic, individual, and inter-group conflict and cooperation. This course examines fundamental issues of general management and leadership within an organization. You will learn about setting an organization's strategic direction, aligning Strategic Leadership structure to implement strategy, and leading individuals within the firm. You will study the interplay among formal structure, informal networks, and culture in shaping organizational performance.

General Management Foundations

Quarter Course Name Course Description

WINTER/SPRING QUARTERS

General managers require a sophisticated understanding of what one can (and cannot) infer from data, and how to use those Data Analysis and inferences to make good decisions. Our courses Decision Making in data analysis provide the analytical techniques for using data to make appropriate inferences and good decisions. Business leaders must read, understand, and use corporate financial statements. The baselevel and accelerated courses in this area are broad courses in how financial accounting information is produced and used. The Financial advanced applications option assumes Accounting knowledge of most of the information in the base-level courses and covers advanced financial reporting topics, including consolidation, derivatives, hedging, leases, revenue recognition, variable interest entities, and equity compensation. The human resources of an organization are often the most valuable assets of the organization, and the assets that are most difficult to manage. Drawing on the disciplines Human Resource of economics, social psychology, and Management organizational sociology, the course offerings in Human Resource Management give you frameworks and concepts that help you manage your organization's personnel. Knowledge of technology (computing, networks, software applications, etc.) is a prerequisite for a successful manager. Understanding the implications of technology for management, strategy and organization is even more important. So rather than just look at Information a snapshot of the current status of different Management technologies (which will obviously change over time), the Information Management courses focus on management issues, such as: How do information technologies create value? How do you implement them? How do they affect the structure of competition? Managerial To evaluate business strategies and outcomes, Accounting you must understand the many ways that firms account for, control, and manage costs. Courses in this area explore alternative costing methods and how the resulting cost information can be

Marketing

Microeconomics

Modeling for Optimization & Decision Support (MODS)

Strategy Beyond Markets

Operations

used for decision-making, planning, and performance measurement. These courses introduce you to the substantive and procedural aspects of marketing management. Youll learn about analyzing the needs and wants of potential customers, and creating and delivering goods and services profitably. The discipline of microeconomics is the foundation of much of what you study in business school, as well as being a tool of analysis of specific market and non-market interactions. The base-level course provides you with the essential frameworks and concepts to study market equilibrium, firm and consumer behavior, and competitive interactions through the lens of microeconomics. The advanced applications option spends less time on the basics and instead applies those basics to specific contexts, such as auctions, price discrimination, and business strategy. Disciplined thought is often based on analytical models: simplified, quantitative depictions of a complex reality that allow you to focus your attention on a few key issues. Management runs on numbers and models. Whatever is your current level of modeling skills, improving those skills is a key to success. Even if you never construct models yourself, as a manager you will be a consumer of them; to be an intelligent consumer, you must know from experience the strengths and weaknesses of quantitative models. Markets and the business environment are increasingly interrelated; conversely, the profitmaximizing activities of firms often give rise to issues that involve governments and the public. As a business leader, you will need to participate in complex decision-making involving the legal, political, and social environments of business. This area considers the strategic interactions of firms with important constituents, organizations, and institutions outside of markets. This area addresses basic managerial issues arising in the operations of both manufacturing

and service industries. You will learn about the problems and issues confronting operations managers and gain language, conceptual models, and analytical techniques that are broadly applicable in confronting such problems.