Executive MBA Curriculum

MBA 711 is a fully online course that focuses on written communication skills for professionals, emphasizing the critical role effective, carefully crafted written communications play in successful business and nonprofit leadership. Students prepare various short pieces of writing throughout the semester, such as memos, emails, and letters. Topics include business/corporate, technical, and persuasive writing; and grammar, mechanics, and style (this course uses APA).

Dealing with emerging trends in information technology (IT) and its management, this course is particularly useful for students managing or working closely with IT initiatives such as ERP, CRM, SaaS, Business Intelligence, e-commerce, supply chain management, disaster recovery, telecommunications, networking, ethics and privacy. Students taking this course will become familiar with fundamental concepts and terminology of modern information technology management.

Strategic Analysis introduces the concepts within business strategy as a competitive advantage, by framing the fundamental relationship between strategy and operational effectiveness. It prepares students to develop and present a strategic plan by working on an individual and/or team basis using industry-leading tools such as value chain analysis, benchmarking, and Blue Ocean strategy. Best practices in strategic methods are applied to for-profit and not-for-profit sectors in both U.S. and global contexts, with an emphasis on critical analysis and ethical leadership behaviors across industries.

This course focuses on decision making as a fundamental activity of professionals working in any management discipline. Modern leaders need to deal with a myriad of factors that affect the achievement of their goals. This course addresses the fundamental problems that occur in managerial decision making at both the theoretical and a practical level. At the theoretical level, students will learn what we currently know about making effective decisions. At the practical level, this course offers the opportunity to learn a decision-making framework widely used in organizations, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). This method combines simplicity with rigor and has been successfully applied to make decisions in economic, social, political and technological environments.

This course focuses on organizational development and transformation. The world is constantly changing, and we live in what leadership theorist Peter Vaill once described as “permanent white water”- a churning, ever-moving, sometimes dangerous environment. As business leaders, we must know how to embrace and lead change for the optimal achievement of goals and organizational strength. This course reviews leading change issues and strategies and will help you understand and manage the dynamics of change on a personal, organizational, and global level.

Introduces the MBA student to theories and techniques critical to the function of business analytics as defined by The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). Discussions focus on framing the business problem or question, framing the analytics problem, managing data, selecting the analytics approach, and addressing the business problems/questions based on data analysis results. Discussion will also involve understanding the basics of good research design methodology (quantitative and qualitative) and the applications of those methodologies in current business/professional research. Students will discuss evidence-based decision making, and work on real or simulated analytics projects using analytical packages and statistical tools.

This course examines corporate financial management and financial planning. Topics include: financial statements, financial statement analysis, working capital management, time value of money, cost of capital, long-term debt, capital budgeting, stock markets, investment banking, mergers, international financial management and current issues in the global economy. This course will afford the student the opportunity to examine several functions and responsibilities of a corporation’s accounting and finance departments.

This course examines five process groups and ten knowledge areas of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^®). The five process groups are: Initiating the project, planning the project, executing the project, monitoring, and controlling the project, and closing the project. The ten knowledge areas are: Integration management, project scope management, schedule management, cost management, quality management, resource management, communications management, risk management, procurement management, and stakeholder management. The purpose of this course is to develop project management expertise through theoretical discussions and hands-on applications. Students will examine specific aspects of project management through simulated projects.

This graduate-level course will introduce essential concepts and strategies for effective project management in the context of health care. Topics will include project selection, project initiation, defining scope, identifying project teams, defining project goals, time management, implementation activities, and project monitoring.