EMBA Electives & Certificates

Entrepreneurial Finance 

In this course, we focus on financial economic foundations of a new venture. We examine a new venture’s financing options, appropriate capital and governance structures, and risk management tools at each stage of its lifetime, from idea to exit. These choices are complex in nature, create path dependency (i.e. have long-term repercussions for future financial decisions), and substantially influence the magnitude of economic value created and captured by the start-up, and how this value is distributed among its shareholders. 

Global Corporate Restructuring

This course covers ventures, family businesses, closely held firms, and corporate restructuring transactions both in the U.S. and in an international context. Students analyze different corporate restructuring strategies including mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, spin-offs and leveraged buyouts. The course integrates corporate governance and agency dimensions, financial and strategic management aspects, and legal and accounting considerations into a unified framework for investigating issues in unlocking hidden values for all stakeholders involved. 

International Finance

This course explores international financial instruments, markets and institutions. Topics include the nature of foreign exchange risk, the determination of exchange rates and interest rates, the management of foreign exchange risk with forwards and options, exchange rate forecasting, evaluation of international investments, currency speculation, the impact of monetary policy on exchange rates, and current developments in the international financial system. 

Mergers, Acquisitions and Other Reorganization Methods

The aim of the course is for students to understand the motivations, decision processes, transaction, execution and valuation consequences of financial, business and organizational restructuring by corporate units. The course facilitates developing the ability among students to plan, evaluate and execute corporate restructuring strategies using financial modeling and quantitative techniques. An additional objective of this course is to enable students to appreciate the fundamental issues involved in the structure and functioning of market for corporate control within the framework of finance theory. Students of this course must have a strong understanding of financial concepts and skills.

Sustainable Finance: Making the Business Case

This course equips corporate leaders with the knowledge and skills to navigate the intersection of finance, sustainability, and corporate responsibility, looking at both the connection between the sustainability performance and the financial performance of corporations and the various actors involved in sustainable banking and finance. Emphasizing real-world applications, the course fosters the ability to align corporate financial decision-making with sustainable development, the environment, and society. Based on case studies covering a range of industries, participants will explore the relevant regulatory frameworks and assess financial risks and opportunities tied to climate change, resource management, and ethical business practices – ultimately allowing them to apply the insights to their own organization. 

Value Investing from an Economic Perspective 

This course covers the basic theory and philosophy of value investing as it has developed since Graham. We will introduce and discuss the styles of important value investors including Graham and Buffett. We will present the basic techniques of investing: search, valuation, and the construction of a portfolio. We will use the framework developed to study specific companies.  

World Economy

This course studies the most important business regions in the world, including the U.S., Europe, Japan, China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa. The goal of this course is to provide students with a working knowledge of the economic drivers, challenges and opportunities that are present in these regions. Students also learn about the performance of equity and bond markets in different countries and the economic forces underlying oil and other commodity markets.

Launching and Leading Startups

This is a case-driven survey course that examines what it’s like to be in the shoes of an entrepreneurial CEO. Students explore some of the biggest and most challenging topics facing entrepreneurial CEOs, such as how to reduce the risks that are inherent in starting a new business, determine the best go-to-market strategies to gain customer adoption and execute with precision. The course targets not only entrepreneurs who want to start or buy their own businesses but also entrepreneurially minded students who, in short order, will be seeking to work within early-stage startups. The course also proves beneficial for “intrapreneurs” who will be innovating inside larger firms. 

Phase 0: Designing, Building and Communicating — Compelling New Ventures

This course has been designed to demystify the “fuzzy front end” of starting a new venture and to give you the tools and confidence to build and launch something of your own. You will learn how to identify problems worth solving, test your assumptions about possible solutions, adjust your initial hypothesis based on experimentation and market feedback, and ultimately accelerate the time between inspiration, execution, operations and growth. We will focus on the importance of achieving “Product Market Fit” — developing the right offer for the right customer — and convincing others to support you on your journey. 

Selling Yourself and Your Ideas

We spend much more time selling ourselves and our ideas than we think we do. And we have an increasing number of communications methods at our disposal. Being a powerful communicator means developing the agility to adjust your message, content, approach and style based on the method of communication you are using. It also means having a keen understanding of your audience, their expectations, and what success looks like. The overarching goal of this course will be to have an immediate positive impact on your outcomes by equipping you with a set of critical communications insights, skills, disciplines and tools to help you become a great communicator in any setting.

Entrepreneurial Selling

Selling is a life skill. Revenue is a daily pursuit. Are you willing to embrace the role as "Owner of Your Business" no matter what that means in your current context? Whether you manage a multi-national company or are venturing out on your own, you can’t afford to waste time guessing at foundational habits. This course will equip you with new practices for every client and team-member interaction — driving to objectively positive results.

Building and Scaling Intelligent Products: An Entrepreneurial and GenAI Perspective 

Two defining characteristics of the technology industry are its dynamic nature and the inter-connected nature of customers with technology products and services. This results in a continuous need for new products - and for managing all of the aspects of discovering, designing, developing, supporting and making money from these products. The executive MBA course on building intelligent products focuses on a transformative journey of crafting intelligent products that scale globally. Beginning with the success stories of industry giants like Uber and John Deere, participants will unearth the strategic intelligence that catalyzed their evolution into global technology powerhouses.  

Unlocking Executive & Enterprise Value with Generative AI 

Professionals who grasp AI concepts can make more informed decisions regarding the adoption, implementation & utilization of AI applications within their domains. They can recognize the potential of AI to drive innovation, identify new revenue streams, improve customer experience & operational efficiency...leading to competitive advantage. 

Top Question this course dives into: 

• Understanding Generative AI: What is Generative AI, and how does it differ from other forms of artificial intelligence?
• Strategic Importance: Why is Generative AI becoming increasingly important for businesses, particularly in competitive markets?
• Application and Impact: In what ways can Generative AI be applied in business settings, and what are its potential impacts on product innovation and customer engagement?
• Ethical and Legal Considerations: What are the key ethical and legal considerations that executives must be aware of when implementing Generative AI solutions?
• Future Outlook: How is Generative AI expected to evolve in the near future, and what should business leaders do to stay ahead in this rapidly changing landscape? 

Early Stage Investing and Fundraising 

When creating a new venture, early-stage fundraising can be an essential ingredient for a startup’s growth. However, for both angel investors (seeking to invest) and entrepreneurs (raising funds), this stage can be difficult to navigate, especially for those who are new to the process. This class explores the basics of early-stage investing and fundraising, where investors and founders come together to close a “deal”: the company receives funds in exchange for equity, and the investor hopes for outsized returns. These two roles depend upon each other and can be viewed as “two sides of the same coin”, with angel investors looking for startup deals on one side, and entrepreneurs pitching for funds on the other. We will therefore tackle both perspectives, considering “how should an angel evaluate this?” and “how should a founder approach this?”

Family Enterprises: Success and Continuity

This course is intended for students who come from business-owning families, whether they work for the family business or not. Topics range from values-driven culture to succession and family dynamics, continuity planning, leadership and strategic performance, and family constitutions and business governance. The course is also appropriate for those with family foundations, family offices, or family investment companies. 

Incentives, Organization and Strategy

This course explores how managers can design incentives that align with company objectives. The goal of the course is to offer a microeconomic approach to both the internal organization of firms and its relationship with the firms’ overall strategies. 

Leading High Impact Teams

This course examines the design, management, and leadership of teams in organizational settings. The focus of the course is on the interpersonal processes and structural characteristics that influence the effectiveness of teams, the dynamics of intra-team relationships, and sharing of knowledge and information in teams. 

Human and Machine Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a transformative technology and a modern day equivalent to fire in the early stages of human civilization. It is a tool that can be used to solve complex problems, make predictions, automate tasks, and enhance productivity. But like fire, its potential depends on how one wields it and it has a dual nature with potential for both good and bad outcomes. This course requires no prior technical knowledge and is designed for people who want to lead the deployment of AI systems in the real-world, manage data science, design, and product teams, and build and invest in AI companies. The goal of the course is to build intuition for what AI can do, how machine learning works, where these tools tend to succeed and fail, and how to navigate their business and ethical implications. 

Leading Organizational Transformation

This course takes the perspective of chief executives who operate at “height and scale.” It explores what management and leadership look and feel like when you oversee 1,000 to 100,000 people and $500M to billions in revenue and aims to equip prospective founders, investors and managers with cutting-edge knowledge and skills to make successful financing and investment decisions in entrepreneurial settings.

Influencing Decisions through Decks and Dashboards

Your value in an organization is largely driven by your ability to persuasively propose ideas and solutions that are driven by analyses of data and evidence. This course will review and implement research-backed guidelines, drawn from cognitive science, data visualization, graphic design, and data journalism, for powerfully leveraging your own brain to generate those ideas, and for effectively uploading them to the brains of your audience in engaging, clear, and memorable ways.

Leveraging Collaboration for Innovation

In this course, we provide participants with a rich set of concepts, frameworks and tools to improve their ability to build, manage, and profit from different modes of inter-organizational collaboration. It will focus on three particular manifestations of collaboration and opportunities for application using real-life cases from various industries. 

Winning with Networks

Leaders face new levels of connectivity, complexity, and unpredictability. This course prepares leaders to use the powerful tools of computational thinking and network analysis to better anticipate, understand, and respond to these challenges through in-depth training vis-a-vis diverse use cases, including patenting, innovation adoption, influentials, social contagion, crowdsourcing, hot streaks, and prediction markets.

Strategic Brand Management

This course aims to help you understand the role of branding and brand management, sharpen your skills in identifying and solving brand-related problems, and facilitate your ability to develop actionable brand management strategies. This course builds on the knowledge gained from the marketing management and marketing strategy courses to focus on developing successful strategies for building strong brands. 

Strategic Marketing Decisions

Making strategic marketing decisions isn’t easy; you have incomplete information, not enough resources, smart and driven competitors, and changing conditions. You also have to work with a team of people to get agreement and alignment. For this reason, understanding the core marketing concepts is not sufficient; you have to know how to apply the concepts in different and often challenging situations. This course is designed to help you make smart strategic choices, communicate your recommendation and get support. 

Designing Brand Experiences

In this course, you will learn how to meaningfully distinguish your brand in today’s hyper-competitive environment such that you gain mind-share and market share. You will engage with a range of actionable tools and methodologies that are designed to enhance brand distinctiveness and capture customer attention. 

Future Proofing Brands

In this course, you will learn how to build disruptive brands, that is, brands that redefine existing markets through the introduction of novel value propositions, customer segments, and technologies. You will engage with a range of actionable tools and methodologies that will enable you to develop disruptive brands in a systematic and comprehensive manner. 

Leading Product Organizations

Products are the lifeblood of growth and innovation, for large companies as well as for technology startups. There is a growing realization that enterprises need to create a product culture and an effective product organization. There is a growing demand for product leaders with the strategic, analytical and communication skills needed to drive product vision and product success. This course is designed to prepare senior executives for product leadership roles. You will learn how to craft product-led strategies that align with the mission and core values of your organization. You will understand how to use analytics to improve product portfolio performance and drive growth strategies while fostering a customer-centric culture in your organization. You will also learn how to manage relationships and communicate effectively as a product leader. The course has been designed to enhance your leadership, analytical, and customer empathy skills as you prepare to lead product organizations.

International Business with Chinese Opportunities and Challenges

This course aims to help students understand how to conduct international business in China, with China, or dealing with challenges relevant to China. The course covers a focused spectrum of international business topics relevant to foreign companies dealing with Chinese opportunities and challenges. The ultimate goal of the course is to equip students with the necessary knowledge and tools to succeed in the Chinese opportunities and challenges. In addition, this course is also targeted to help students understand global business issues with open-mindedness. 

Strategy Beyond Markets

This course teaches concepts, skills, and analytical tools for dealing with non-market issues, based on economic principles, political analysis, and to a lesser extent social psychology and law. They identify patterns of behavior and outcomes, ways of thinking about those patterns and outcomes, methods of analysis that facilitate understanding and prediction, and the shaping of strategies to improve business performance.