Curriculum

Action Learning Projects (I & II)

Action Learning Projects (ALPs) are a practical and high-impact way to develop your ability to think and lead across an organization by applying what you have learned in the classroom. ALPs are like a class project, but the difference between the typical class project and these transformative projects is the difference between a glass of skim milk and a milkshake. ALPs create practical learning experiences by integrating knowledge gained from the core curriculum and focusing on real business problems in real-time – outside the risks and demands of your day-to-day job.

Business Communications

This course refines student’s skills in written and oral communication to internal and external audiences. Through analyses and practice of communications strategies adopted by successful business professionals, students learn to create effective written communication and compelling oral presentations.

Corporate Finance (I)

This course presents the central concepts and analytic methods of corporate finance. Students will learn about the structure of financial markets, the techniques and language of finance, and the various responsibilities of the corporate financial manager. In particular, the following issues will be addressed: the objective of creating shareholder value, valuation of corporate securities, including stocks and bonds, the risk-return relationship and its implications for finance and financial techniques for evaluating corporate investments.

Corporate Finance (II)

This course builds on EMBA 632 (Corporate Finance I) by applying many of the concepts and tools introduced in the earlier course to understand key corporate finance issues, including Corporate Valuation, Corporate Financing, Risk Management and Corporate Restructuring.

Data Analysis

Many different skills are required in arriving at informed managerial decisions. Among these are analytical and quantitative skills. Data Analysis is one in a sequence of two courses that seeks to develop these two important skills. More formally, the goals of this course are: to introduce basic statistical techniques: summarizing and presenting data; confidence intervals and hypothesis tests; regression analysis.; to implement these techniques using spreadsheets; and to become active users of data analysis in making managerial decisions.

Decision Modeling

The applicability and use of decision and management science models have increased dramatically in recent years due to the extraordinary improvements in computer, information and communication technologies. These developments in hardware and user interfaces such as spreadsheets have been complemented by the availability of large volumes of data, such as the automatic capture of point-of-sale information, and easy access to large databases. Personal computers and friendly interfaces have become effective “delivery vehicles” for powerful decision models that were once the exclusive province of experts. The course will examine ways in which complex managerial problems can be tackled with decision models using spreadsheets.

Entrepreneurship

Introduces students to tools and skills needed to create and grow a successful new venture as well as evaluate the potential of new ventures and entrepreneurs for those in venture finance. The course integrates research findings from a range of different practical and intellectual perspectives, including psychology, sociology, economics, strategic management and history into practical, hands-on lessons for an entrepreneur. Class projects provide the foundations for new, real businesses.

Ethical Leadership

Teaches students how to: recognize the scope of managerial agency and the economic, legal and ethical responsibilities to various stakeholders; conduct elementary ethical analyses of managerial situations using the principal schools of ethical reasoning; identify the economic and ethical properties of a market mechanism and the means for addressing the limitations of a market; and recognize ethical leadership as the exercise of managerial agency in changing existing values and practices.

Executive Powers and Negotiation

Examines ways to expand your power and influence capabilities, as well as enhance your negotiation skills. Guides you in obtaining personal insights into your own approaches, strengths and weaknesses. Provides the opportunity to develop and implement a negotiation plan to apply the course principles in a personal or professional setting.

Financial Accounting

Focuses on the preparation, understanding and analysis of financial statements: income statement, balance sheet and the statement of cash flows. These statements report a company’s profitability and financial health and are useful to all economic agents who are engaged with the firm. These include investors (actual and potential), employees, customers and governments. The overall objective of this course is to provide students with the concepts and tools needed to understand and effectively use a company’s external or financial accounting information system.

The Global Economic Environment

Provides managers with the tools necessary to intelligently interpret the national and international economic environment, including the impact of economic policies on the economy and the firm. The course develops basic macroeconomic theory to enable managers to critically evaluate economic forecasts and policy recommendations and then apply these concepts in a series of case studies.

Leadership and Teamwork

Builds on students’ leadership experience to extend their theoretical knowledge and applied skills. Using assessment tools, exercises, films, cases and other assignments, students gain a stronger understanding and skill set to excel in leadership positions today. Also provides an overview of the key issues related to managing human capital in organizations. Covers critical issues that every professional needs to know, regardless of functional area, and examines them from both a strategic and a tactical level that should be relevant to all practicing managers and leaders.

Managerial Accounting

Helps to analyze financial as well as nonfinancial information in planning, control and decision making. Managerial accounting is primarily concerned with helping managers make effective decisions related to utilization of resources, cost analysis, performance evaluation, etc. The overall objective of this course is to provide you with the concepts and tools needed to understand and effectively use a company’s internal or managerial accounting information system.

Managerial Economics and Public Policy

Examines basic microeconomic principles used by firms, including supply and demand, elasticity, costs, productivity, pricing, market structure and competitive implications of alternative market structures, market failures and government intervention, and public policy processes affecting business operations.

Marketing Management

Focuses on the development and application of a framework governing the marketing process with emphasis on strategic decisions including market segmentation, target market selection and brand positioning. Discussions include: the marketing concept, promotion strategies, go-to-market plans, pricing and sales force management.

Operations Management

Examines the strategic role that the operations function can play and offers specific tools and techniques that the firm can use for strategy execution. Covers concepts of operations management applied to both manufacturing and services, including operations strategy, analysis of process flows and bottlenecks, waiting line models, total quality management, Six Sigma and lean management.

Organizational Change

Develops the fundamental knowledge and skills of students who plan to work with organizations as change agents, whether internally or externally as outside consultants. This course draws on literatures from organizational behavior, organizational change and development, organizational structure, human resource management and strategic management to identify and understand critical factors and underlying processes that drive for and against organizational change. This course also provides students with useful models, tools, and skills for leading and managing organizational change effectively.

Strategic Information Systems

Examines how to identify transformational technologies and develop strategies to take advantage of them, including case studies to illustrate managerial decisions about technology as well as lectures that help frame the issues. The course is focused on management issues and is suitable for the student with no IT experience, as well as for students with technical backgrounds who want to understand how to manage IT in the firm.

Strategic Management

Analyze and identify profit opportunities and threats in different industry and competitive environments; Analyze and identify a firm’s valuable assets, resources and capabilities and how they might be protected, leveraged, and extended in the market; Learn how to organize your company to be the best prepared to adapt its strategy over time as the market environment changes; and how to use organic growth as well as mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, alliances, and divestitures to ensure that the firm maintains the proper scale and scope to compete effectively over time.

Supply Chain Management

Examines management decision making in the design and implementation of supply chains, including expansion overseas. Orients the student to the field of supply chain management through cases and lectures on the importance of the field. Closely examines critical decision making in the global supply chain, including managing the overall synchronization of demand and supply, buyer/supplier collaboration, and performance score carding.

Opening Residency: Introduction to Fundamentals of Business

Our two-day, on-campus experience is designed to welcome you to the Smith School community. You’ll get started on coursework, get to know the faculty and staff at the University of Maryland, College Park, and join classmates in the program for some team building.

Capstone Residency: Integrative Business Simulation

The capstone experience will help students appreciate the value and interconnectedness of the various functional business areas. The capstone will result in much stronger knowledge of all business areas and a more marketable online MBA degree.

Finance Electives

Applied Equity Analysis

This course is designed to apply the core academic concepts to real-world application of the content. The analytical framework and valuation techniques, as well as the practical market information students learn in this class,  will be useful for careers in corporate finance, asset management, research, sales, trading, financial market regulation or financial journalism.

Commercial Bank Management

The financial crisis and subsequent far-reaching overhaul of the financial services sector in the form of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, punctuates the critical need for understanding bank structure and their activities, risks and regulatory oversight. Banks are unique among other corporations in their ability to transform liabilities such as deposits into earning assets. The course focuses on bank structure and regulation, governance, asset and liability management and risks affecting financial institutions associated with bank activities.

Financial Restructuring

Examines alternative ways to increase firm value through corporate restructuring, including mergers and acquisitions, spin-offs, carve-outs, leveraged buy-outs, and bankruptcy restructurings. Focus is on theory, practice, empirical evidence, and legal constraints related to each of these forms of restructuring, and emphasis is placed on valuation analysis and strategic considerations.

Information Systems & Business Analytics Electives

Data Mining and Predictive Analytics

In business magazines, on TV, and in boardrooms, “big data” and “data analytics” are hot topics. Interest is high as vast quantities of data are being generated these days, including new types of data such as web traffic, social network data, and reviews and comments on websites. This data is a valuable resource that, when used correctly, can create a not only a competitive edge for companies but can lead to better decision making in all sectors of society.

This is the first course in data analytics focusing on descriptive and predictive analytics. This course is intended to provide an introduction to the tools and techniques of data analytics that are central to the analysis of data, with a focus on classification and prediction. A particular emphasis will be placed on understanding the data analytics process, and the outputs of different methods; less attention will be placed on the analytical and algorithmic interpretation of details of the methodology. The focus will be on business applications and examples from Marketing, Finance, Healthcare, and Operations will be used to illustrate the breadth of applications of Data Analytics in Business.

Managing Digital Businesses and Platforms

At the beginning of the 21st century, our economy is increasingly becoming “digital”, i.e. shifting to products and services that have fewer “physical” components and more “information” and “network” components. Music and news are just two examples of industries where each new generation of products and services tends to have fewer “atoms” and more “bits”. Apple, Facebook, and Google are examples of companies that derive their value from tying together groups of users in a network. Such digital businesses have a number of unique and unusual properties that set them apart from physical businesses and fundamentally change the structure and competitive dynamics of their respective industries. In this course, we will examine some of the characteristics of digital businesses and markets that make them unique and understand how companies can best manage them.

Social Media and Web Analytics

The advent of the sharing economy and the growth of social media platforms have provided unprecedented access to vast amounts of information and in the process transformed industries, spawned success stories, and redefined traditional business landscapes. This course will examine the strategic implications of these technological developments for businesses, consumers, and society at large.

In this course, we will review concepts and principles related to online platforms, social media, and web analytics, and examine the opportunities and challenges associated with business use of social media and web technologies. Through a combination of readings, simulations, case discussions, presentations, and hands-on projects/assignments we will learn about (i) the characteristics of networks, platforms, social media, and the sharing economy, and their potential to transform businesses and society, (ii) emerging business models and social media strategies, and (iii) approaches that businesses and policy makers can use to evaluate, apply, and leverage these technologies.

Marketing Electives

Consumer Behavior

The field of consumer behavior involves the study of the processes involved when individuals (or groups) select, purchase, use, or dispose of products, services, ideas, or experiences to satisfy needs and desires. This course is intended to enhance your understanding of consumer behavior and how it can be utilized by marketing managers to develop effective marketing strategies.

Questions we will answer include:

• What factors determine whether consumers will pay attention to the information you provide to them about your product or service?
• what factors determine whether they will be able to remember this information?
• what actions can you take to persuade people to try your product?
• when people try your product, what factors influence their evaluation of it?

Understanding all of these factors is essential if you are trying to get a customer to choose your product or service repeatedly over time, in addition to generating word-of-mouth for your product. Understanding consumer information processing also is critical to the successful design and implementation of marketing research. We find that students enjoy learning about consumer research and often end up discovering as much about how they themselves are influenced by marketing actions as about how they can influence others.

Customer Equity Management

This course focuses on managing customers of a business – whether in B2B or B2C space – as a portfolio of “equity”, focusing on understanding the current and future value of customers to the business that can aid in selective acquisition, development, and retention of customers using latest developments in information technology. Course participants will examine the conceptual foundations of customer equity, its measurement, its strategic implications, its use for determining the return on marketing investments and its implementations in different business contexts through a variety of cases spanning both B2C and B2B space. The objective of the course is to examine the strategic and analytical aspects of customer equity in equal measure so that participants will have a deeper understanding of the power of customer equity management and how to put it to work effectively in their business.

Marketing Analytics

To succeed in today’s highly competitive and rapidly evolving market landscape, managers need access to timely and quality data to inform their decision making process. Marketing Analytics is an organized way of discovering, analyzing, interpreting and communicating data to drive effective marketing decisions. This course is intended for those who expect data-driven marketing to be an important part of their professional work. The quality of marketing decisions made depends on the care exercised in executing the various steps of the decision-making process. The course will cover the following topics: basics of the marketing research process, exploratory, descriptive and causal research approaches, types and sources of secondary and primary marketing data, information collection and measurement, data analysis and interpretation and relevant applications to marketing decisions. The course will involve a mix of case discussions, exercises, hands-on activities and a group project to help students apply their learning in class towards the practice of making effective data-driven marketing decisions.

Supply Chain Management Electives

Global Trade Logistics

In today’s international landscape, firms that want to “globalize” their operations must be aware of international distribution systems, governmental restrictions on the movement of goods, export and import documentation and the various players involved in worldwide trade. You can build that knowledge with this course. Get an in-depth view of logistics and supply chain issues related to import/export management. Learn how to operate industry-relevant, cloud-based SAP software. Apply case and theoretical material to examine international issues and then use your new skills to help your organization succeed under global competition.

Innovative Solutions to Supply Chain Challenges

In supply chain management, innovation is in constant demand. With this course, you can learn how to make positive changes in your role through supply chain coordination/collaboration strategies and planning and product intermodal operations. Each week’s topic is explored through a computer simulation that allows you to address industry topics in an interactive and illustrative manner.

Supply Chain Risk Management

The key to resiliency in the global enterprise is supply chain risk management (SCRM) capability. With this course, you can develop your skills in risk identification, assessment, and mitigation, master industry standard software like Resilinc and learn to enable a team experience with cloud-based supply chain risk analytics and management software, the basis of SCRM.

Supplemental Electives

Corporate Venturing

This course explores the skills, techniques, and strategies that are required to instill entrepreneurial behavior and subsequent venture activity in established and large organizations.

The class explorers current concepts on how organizations “venture” by creating new businesses within their organization and how these organizations find and groom individuals to take on the role of “Intrapreneurs”, the corporate equivalent of the entrepreneurs. Students are encouraged to bring their experiences with the organizations they are currently with or have been to contribute to discussions on various aspects of Corporate Venturing.

At the core of the assignments is a real-life effort to describe, define and structure a corporate venturing process for an organization of the student’s choosing (mostly their current organization). A carefully crafted team project put students in charge of creating a real-life venture for an organization to apply concepts and learning in parallel to the class process.
The class will also discuss and explore the obstacles that organizations typically face when trying to become more “intrapreneurial” and why intrapreneurs are still a rare but sought-after breed of employee.

International Business

Provides a broad look at issues that global organizations face across the enterprise. The course explores international marketing, finance, management and organizational behavior strategies. Students taking the course receive a global business perspective.

Global Study

While traveling abroad with a professor, students visit companies to enhance their business acumen and apply their knowledge and skills to solve a cross-border, cross-cultural business challenge. Students choose courses based on opportunities to develop expertise in their area of interest and based on the opportunity to network with colleagues, faculty, and international business executives in their field.

Sustainability: Economics and Strategy

The goal of this course is to better understand the overarching issues of sustainability, consider them in a series of industry specific examples and highlight market based solutions to these problems. Within each context, we examine the underlying market failures that lead to suboptimal social and/or environmental outcomes along with commonly employed economic solutions to these problems. This course is designed to give you tools for solving sustainability related problems for both for profit and not for profit companies.