The Management Division offers many of the School’s highest-rated elective courses. Management courses provide an interdisciplinary approach to complex business problems that will benefit all MBA students, regardless of their specific career goals.
Students interested in management as an area of focus are encouraged to complete four courses across the various areas including but not limited to management consulting, managing innovation and change, managing organizational resources, or strategic management. They may also consult with a faculty member to select management courses that best suit their career needs.
Core Courses
B6502 - Strategy Formulation
This course is about the determinants of firm performance. It develops an explanation as to why some firms perform better than others, and presents the analytical tools required to formulate successful strategies. Students will learn to analyze firms' competitive environments and to design a strategy that specifies appropriate long-term goals for a corporation, the businesses in which it will compete, how it will serve customers better than its competitors, and the capabilities that will be required in the service of these objectives. Learning is done primarily through discussion of cases and articles with supporting short lectures and written assignments.
6500 - Lead: People, Teams, Organizations
This course focuses on the skills sets needed to elicit high commitment and productivity from people and groups. Awareness of one's own values, beliefs, decision-making tendencies and behaviors is seen as a crucial first step in becoming a leader. Thus, a significant portion of the course consists of activities designed to enhance students' self-awareness. The course provides students with the interpersonal skills needed to motivate key actors in the workplace and to manage group dynamics so as to create synergy among group members. Methods of instruction include individualized feedback, cases, role-plays and experiential exercises.
Electives
B8510 - Managerial Negotiations
In managing human resources in an organization, many outcomes and decisions are determined by the process of negotiation. This course involves students in actual negotiating experiences to enhance their skills as negotiators. Concepts developed in the behavioral sciences, economics and game theory are used as guides to improve negotiating. Each fall and spring, one section of the course places emphasis on game-theoretical foundations of the negotiating process.
B8515 - Top Management Process
This course examines the ways general managers get things done. Typically, general managers work through processes-sequences of tasks and activities that unfold over time. The course explores six top management processes: strategic, resource allocation, decision making, learning, managerial, and change.
B8531 - Power, Influence & Networks
Power and influence processes are pervasive and important in organizations, so leaders need to be able both to understand power and to act on that knowledge. Organizations are fundamentally political entities, and power and influence are key mechanisms by which things get done. Therefore, this course has three objectives: 1) to increase students' ability to diagnose and analyze power; 2) to expose students to effective and appropriate methods of influence; and 3) to explain how power and influence can be used to build cooperation and promote change in organizations.
B8514 - Napoleon's Glance
This elective half-course offers a key skill for strategy, leadership, and decision-making in business, your career, and your personal life. Other courses teach the science of management, through analytical tools and techniques: this course teaches the art, through strategic intuition – otherwise known as Napoleon’s glance.
B8518 - Foundations of Entrepreneurship
Foundations of Entrepreneurship serves as the gateway course to the entrepreneurship curriculum at CBS. It provides a broad survey of concepts and concrete skills that will benefit not just aspiring entrepreneurs, but also those who want to work for an early-stage startup, operate entrepreneurially within a more mature organization, and/or invest in new ventures. Specific topics covered include: characteristics of successful startups and entrepreneurs; techniques for generating, identifying, and evaluating new ideas; forming and maintaining effective partnerships; customer discovery and acquisition; entrepreneurial finance; valuation and deal making; exits; entrepreneurship career tradeoffs; and learning how to pitch yourself and your business. This course is designed for students who have limited-to-no experience in the startup world, or have some experience but do not yet have a fully developed and vetted business idea or team.
B8513 - Personal Leadership & Success
Some of our most crucial skills in life have to do with how well we can manage our internal environment – our values, goals, mindsets, thoughts, emotions, and positive and negative drives – under ever-changing external circumstances. How quickly can we rebound from setbacks to execute our roles with renewed enthusiasm? How well do we direct our lives based on goals and values? Can we stay calm and focused in the face of intense work pressure? How can we cultivate a winner’s mindset that will allow us to perform at our optimum all the time? What does it take to successfully execute a “change program” in our lives? Personal Leadership integrates three sources of insight on mastering one’s inner environment – (a) Recent Scientific Advances (from psychology, neuroscience, psychotherapy, behavioral economics, sociology and medicine), (b) Inner Lives of Great Achievers (such as Lincoln, Gandhi, Mandela, Eleanor Roosevelt, Aung Sun Suu Kyi, Churchill, Martin Luther King, and Steve Jobs) and (c) Personal Reflections and Applications.
B8538 - The Leader's Voice: Communication Skills for Leading Organizations
Leadership roles can involve a wide range of communication challenges— mentoring a struggling colleague, persuading investors of your brand, rallying an auditorium of new employees, working the room at an industry event, handling tough questions from the media, running team meetings in ways that elicit candid conversation and learning. While all of us at CBS are strong communicators, few of us are adept at all these different kinds of communication. The goal of this class is to broaden your repertoire, to make you a more versatile communicator who can adapt your way of communicating to meet many different challenges. The world is full of communication experts: actors, screenwriters, coaches, political speechwriters, networkers, public relations experts, diplomats and so forth. This class draws on these different crafts and professions looking for tools and methods that help in the kinds of situations business leaders face.