Re: US UNI:EMBA Program. University of Utah
EMBA Program.
about the EMBA Program.
* Ranked #35 in the U.S. and 74 in the world by London-based Financial Times.
* Make an immediate impact with your MBA knowledge.
* Advance your career in a schedule designed for executives.
* Learn from highly-ranked faculty with top-level business experience.
Course Descriptions
>> Back
Our Executive MBA curriculum was designed with you in mind. Relevance and practicality are hallmarks of our courses. In addition to theory and principles, we teach new skills and techniques that you can immediately apply to your work environment. From the first day on, you'll see a difference in your business expertise and productivity—and so will your colleagues and clients.
FIRST YEAR
Intensive Week (Fall Semester)
Fall Semester
Spring Semester
Summer Semester
SECOND YEAR
Intensive Week (Fall Semester)
Fall Semester
Spring Semester
Intensive Week (Fall SEMESTER) - First Year
TEAM EFFECTIVENESS: An experiential course designed to enhance skills in creating, leading and participating in teams. Explores the role of teams in high performance organizations and introduces methods of ensuring a high level of team member capability, commitment, accountability and performance. Diagnosing and resolving team problems are also discussed. Intensive team activities are used throughout the course.
ETHICS & FOUNDATIONS OF BUSINESS THOUGHT: Personal and organizational values and ethics are discussed in an environment of competing and complementary rights and monetary goals. Readings of a classic nature are presented to underscore the timeless and multi-cultural nature of business and the relevancy of great works to today's business environment.
FALL SEMESTER - First Year
FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING: The course introduces the basic concepts, standards and practices of financial reporting to serve the needs of decision-makers. It covers basic financial statements, analysis and recording of transactions, and underlying concepts and procedures. It includes accounting for inventories, long-term productive assets, bonds, and other liabilities, stockholders' equity, and the statement of cash flows. It also provides students with the following: an understanding of how financial statements are prepared; the ability to interpret the information provided in financial statements; the ability to conduct a preliminary financial statement analysis of a firm; and the ability to forecast a firm's financial statements.
LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT IN HIGH PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATIONS: The course emphasizes human behavior concepts and principles useful in creating high performance work places. Personal leadership effectiveness is enhanced through self-assessment, feedback, and studying the practices of exemplary leaders. Methods of managing individuals, groups and organizations to elicit high levels of performance are introduced through discussion of topics such as motivation, power and influence, group behavior and teams, decision making, conflict and collaboration, organization design, culture, and leading change. Cases, group discussions and team exercises are used extensively in the course.
COMMUNICATIONS & INTERPERSONAL EFFECTIVENESS: Focuses on communication and interpersonal skills needed for success in leadership, team and high performance settings. Skills include communicating clearly, directly and supportively; listening; interpersonal problem solving; conducting interviews; facilitating group discussions and meetings; giving formal presentations, and using presentation software. The course includes skill practice, peer feedback, self-analysis, and role playing, videotaping and conducting formal presentations.
SPRING SEMESTER - First Year
STATISTICS: Statistics provides an overview of basic statistical concepts and methods for managers. The emphasis is on understanding the concepts and their application to the real world business data. The conceptual material focuses on the importance of statistical thinking to make sound business decisions. The statistical methods are implemented using a computer to analyze business and economic data sets, with emphasis on interpreting the output. Topics covered include descriptive statistics (how to organize data and display it graphically), probability theory, distributions (empirical, mathematical and sampling), statistical inference (hypothesis testing), and the study of relationships (regression and correlation).
CORPORATE FINANCE: Uses modern financial theory and analytical methods as the framework for decision-making by corporate financial officers. Topics include financial mathematics, valuation of financial and real assets, capital budgeting, capital structure, cost of capital, management of working capital, issuing bonds and stocks, mergers and acquisitions, and international finance. The overall framework is maximizing shareholder value.
MARKETING MANAGEMENT: Provides an overview and integration of major marketing management concepts and principles. The course covers the fundamentals of marketing strategy and the decisions related to marketing that must be made in every profit or nonprofit organization. Emphasis is placed on the application of these concepts to marketing decisions with the goal of developing or enhancing students' skills at critically thinking about marketing management issues. Topics for discussion will include external analysis of the competition and customer, internal analysis of the decision-making company, and formulation of marketing mix decisions.
INTERNATIONAL FINANCE: Good financial analysis requires the analyst understand how financial statements are generated in order to separate the economic process that generates the numbers from the accounting process that (sometimes) obscures it. By learning how to ask the right questions, we gain an understanding of the financial performance and financial position of the firm that ultimately helps us make better economic decisions. In this course we examine the impact of various accounting and financial reporting choices on reported income, assets, liabilities, stockholders' equity, cash flows, other relevant line items reported in the financial statements and relevant financial ratios. The specific topics we examine include: off-income statement stock compensation expenses, revenue recognition, earnings quality, off-balance sheet pension liabilities and off-balance sheet lease assets and liabilities. Much of our time is spent manipulating the financial data contained in the footnotes of actual financial statements.
SUMMER SEMESTER - First Year
MANAGERIAL ACCOUNTING: Focuses on firms' internal accounting information systems and their use in decision-making, planning and control, and performance evaluation. The objectives are threefold: to increase the students' understanding of the data accumulation and allocation processes; to illustrate the proper application of these accounting data to solving managerial problems; and to expose the students to the strategic implications and limitations of the accounting systems and data. Applications considered include cost estimation, pricing and product mix decisions, activity-based costing, measuring opportunity costs for decision-making and transfer pricing. As such, the course integrates the knowledge of firms' internal accounting systems with problems confronting managers in the areas of finance, accounting, marketing, operations management, and human resources.
OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT: Operations management studies traditional operations management theories and methodologies as well as many new and developing models and associated technologies that are reshaping the way that firms manage procurement, production, and distribution of goods and services in an increasingly competitive international marketplace. This course develops a systems-thinking approach that is critical for successful design and strategic management of world-class manufacturing and service operations. Topics covered include integrated product/process analysis and design, materials management, supply chain management, industry structure and virtual organizations, use of information technologies in the extended enterprise, service operations management, total quality management, experience curve concepts, technology management, project management, and current developments in operations strategy. Superior management of operations can result in considerable competitive advantages.
Intensive Week (Fall SEMESTER) - Second Year
NEGOTIATIONS & CONFLICT MANAGEMENT: The purpose of this course is to understand the theory and processes of negotiation in a variety of managerial contexts. The course is designed to be relevant to the various kinds of negotiation problems that are faced by managers. The course complements the technical and diagnostic skills learned in other courses. A basic premise of the course is that while a manager needs analytical skills to discover optimal solutions to problems, a broad array of negotiation skills is needed for these solutions to be accepted by others and implemented in collaboration with them. The course will allow participants the opportunity to develop these skills experientially and to understand negotiation in useful analytical frameworks.
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE THROUGH HUMAN RESOURCES: This course is designed to teach practical skills for managing human assets from the perspective of the general manager or leader. Topics include creating best practices in recruiting systems, performance evaluation systems, developing and managing people successfully, managing a reduction in force, and dealing with difficult conversations. This course demonstrates that proper management of human assets has the potential to be a source of sustainable competitive advantage for high performance organizations.
Fall SEMESTER - Second Year
STRATEGY: Strategy introduces the basic concepts and tools for formulating business strategy. Focuses on how firms can develop sustainable competitive advantages. Central topics include assessing industry economics and dynamics to identify strategic threats and opportunities, evaluating the profit potential of strategic resources and capabilities, and strategic diversification. Other topics include assessing actual and potential cost and differentiation advantages, vertical scope of the firm, strategic management of multi-business firms, global strategy, strategic alliances, competitive advantage and the internet, strategic management in technology-intensive industries, and strategy under uncertainty.
ECONOMICS: Teaches the basic principles of microeconomics and macroeconomics and their usefulness in making business decisions. The course covers supply and demand, individual's consumption, savings, and labor behavior. In addition, the course analyzes both short-run fluctuations and long-run growth of the aggregate economy. Topics include profit maximization, utility maximization, demand, supply, uncertainty, game theory, agency theory, booms and recessions, inflation and unemployment, monetary and fiscal policy, budget and trade deficits, and interest and exchange rates.
Spring SEMESTER - Second Year
ADVANCED MARKETING STRATEGIES: Advanced Marketing Strategies provides a forum for students to deepen their understanding of contemporary marketing and to develop skills for successful market development. Topics include areas such as new product development, new product introduction, the marketing, manufacturing, design interface, brand management, pricing, product line management, and channel development including emerging channels.
MANAGING IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY: This course focuses on the modern global environment of business and the strategic and organizational responses of firms to this environment. The first section of the course, Dynamics of the Global Environment, will cover topics such as the global capital system, international political institutions, cultural differences in a global world, and technology and the global system. The second part of the course, Managing the Global Enterprise, will move to firm-level issues, to include international and global strategy, organizing the global enterprise, and networks and alliances in global industry. The final section of the course, From Global to Local, brings environmental and corporate concerns into focus in the foreign market. It will cover such topics as market entry strategies, the impact of globalization on national cultures, the role of multinational firms from emerging markets, and in general the clash of the industrialized world and the developing world.
ADVANCED LEADERSHIP: PROBLEM SOLVING FOR BUSINESS ORGANIZATIONS: An important part of leadership and management consists of defining and attempting to solve many types of problems. This course brings together all the insights and skills that focus upon real and complicated problems. It addresses specifically two classes of problems, referred to as convergent ('Tame') and divergent ('Wicked'). Different methods for approaching these types of problems are discussed. These two quantitative techniques available for solving convergent problems will be considered, as will alternative approaches for addressing divergent problems. Class participants will enhance both analytical and creative thinking abilities to more effectively identify problems and potential solutions, allowing them to develop a whole new way of thinking about problems.
ADVANCED FINANCE: The objectives are twofold: to apply corporate financial concepts to case situations; and to introduce more advanced concepts in corporate and investment finance. Topics include financial statement analysis, forecasting of financial statements, estimation of a firm's required return, determination of appropriate capital structure, application of risk management, analysis of appropriate dividend policies, economic value-added analysis, and estimation of firm valuation. The above topics are focused on financial strategies from the prospective of management, lenders, and investors.
INTERNATIONAL FIELD STUDY: Developing a broad global perspective is essential to understanding the international business environment. Executive MBA students travel abroad the final session of their program. Students experience first-hand the strategic and organizational systems in the modern global industry. Observing business practices and customs and gaining an understanding of cultural, financial, and political ramifications will prepare you for business decision-making on a global level. Students will tour renowned firms and have direct contact with high-level executives and government officials. Previous Executive MBA classes have visited Argentina, Chile, China, the Czech Republic,Germany, Italy, Japan, and Switzerland.
rofessional MBA University of Utah