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MBA Elective Course Descriptions
Subject to Change The MBA Program reserves the right to offer courses based on faculty availability to teach
Course Name/# Course Title Brief Description
An introduction to information technologies critical to business organizations.
BA 523 IT Strategy
Understand how macroeconomic events and policies affect the global economy and business decisions.
Includes the following topics:
Business, -Exchange rate regimes: pegs, crawls and the Euro
BA 545 Government, and -Unemployment, inflation and growth
International -Trade: NAFTA & other trade agreements
Economics -Development and Growth
-The financial crisis revisited
This one-credit course presents a CEO’s perspective on the key opportunities and challenges faced by
business leaders as they seek to adapt themselves and their organizations to today’s complex global
business environment. Course content is based on extensive research and first-hand experience
working with senior leaders from major corporations worldwide, including companies like 3M, Cisco,
Strategic Leadership Merck, UBS, IBM, Samsung, Daimler AG, BASF, Hewlett-Packard, ARAMARK, PwC and many others.
BA 565 Seminar The lessons learned from those benchmark companies and the evolving models of management they
are helping to create will form the backbone of a series of discussions on 21st century business
strategies and structures, as well as the new leadership competencies required to guide them.
The Professional Services Engagement Practicum for MBA students is a practicum experience in which
teams of three to five students work with a sponsoring organization to address a current business
challenge facing that organization. In doing so, students are expected to acquire fundamental
knowledge and skills related to project management as well as to apply the wide range of knowledge
and skills they have developed throughout their studies at Smeal.
The overall learning objective of this experience is to improve each student’s ability as a
Professional Services business professional with a particular focus on improving that student’s ability to:
BA 575 Engagement 1. enable a team’s success through effective leadership and collaboration
2. apply critical thinking and analytical skills to a specific business challenge
3. communicate effectively in a business setting (written, visual, and oral)
4. manage project work in order to effectively and efficiently deliver results in a professional business
setting
This course will provide a unique view of business issues that relate to sustainability and to a lesser
degree corporate social responsibility. Course will provide students with an understanding of how
BA 597 Sustainable Business environmental and sustainability issues are impacting business strategies, operations and ultimately the
Strategies top and bottom lines. We will also examine the external forces, such as environmental groups, policy-
makers, and “green” consumers, that impact business management.
Primary areas of focus include intellectual property ("IP") law (patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade
secrets) and antitrust law, as well as basic principles of U.S. law and the legal rules for related industry
practices such as licensing. Students will also learn the legal rules designed to encourage competition
BLAW 525 Business Law for (and punish anticompetitive behavior). Finally, the course will help students to better appreciate when
Innovation professional legal counsel is necessary, and how to manage those interactions more cost effectively.
Although the course will impart advanced legal concepts, prior coursework in business law is not
required.
This course is designed to illuminate the necessary entrepreneurial skills and the creation methodology
used to build a startup. Students will learn how to develop ideas and how to convert some of those
ideas into opportunities that, through iteration, become repeatable and scalable business
models.Successful entrepreneurs are not risk seeking mavericks. Instead, entrepreneurs utilize a logic
of control, known as effectuation, and must be structured and persuasive. Successful entrepreneurs
Starting and Growing must co-create opportunities with customers, suppliers and even competitors to integrate market forces
ENTR 502 a Business that shape their business model.
By focusing on the creation of an opportunity rooted in actual market conditions, this course provides an
applied approach to the field of entrepreneurship. Students will learn the basics of generating ideas,
creating value propositions, designing market based experiments, identifying customer segments and
communicating business concepts with multiple stakeholders.
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Course Name/# Course Title Brief Description
This course is intended to increase students' ability to be successful in (1) starting a new venture aimed
at social or environmental impact, and/or (2) being an effective social/environmental change agent while
working in a traditional corporate career. Learning outcomes include: • Understanding
of key features of social entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurial • Exposure to innovative business models aimed at societal problems
ENTR 597 Finance • Appreciation of how this approach can also be applied inside an existing organization
• Completion of self-assessment tool for entrepreneurial strengths & opportunities
• Ability to use analytic tools aimed at developing a social enterprise
Finance 550 is the first course in the Finance Concentration. The course builds upon and reinforces the
theoretical and institutional framework learned in introductory business finance courses, and primarily
Financial Analysis and
FIN 550 through the vehicle of case analyses, seeks to apply these concepts to real world situations. The topics
Valuation covered include financial analysis, financial forecasting, working capital management, securities
markets, and security valuation.
The course deals with the analysis of problems in international business finance and the impact of
evolving international payment systems on business. The focus will be on how decisions about financial
management are and should be made in the modern multinational enterprise. The impact that these
FIN 555 Global Finance decisions have on the worldwide allocation of economic resources and distribution of wealth will be
assessed. Other topics of discussion include: what are the financial risks inherent in these decisions?
What role can new financial instruments play in the management of these risks?
The purpose of this course is to introduce some of the important issues and problems encountered in
recognizing exposures to risk in both financial and non-financial firms, and to provide students with a
strategic decision-making perspective. Considerable importance will be placed on how exposures to risk
affect the firm, and how risk exposures can be re-engineered to enhance firm value. An introduction to
Financial Engineering financial markets and the major sources of risk exposure to the firm will be provided. Measurement of
FIN 577 and Corporate risk exposures will be discussed and various methods of managing and controlling risk will be explored.
Strategy Tools of the financial engineer—futures, options, swaps, and other derivatives—will be explained and
applications will be demonstrated.
The objectives of this course are to: describe important nancial markets, and develop
tools for pricing and managing different sources of financial risks. The course will
cover traditional securities, the term structure concepts as well as more recently
FIN 581 Financial Markets developed financial instruments. The course is rigorous and quantitative. Students
are expected to understand and apply quantitative methods. Examples illustrate
important real-world applications of the theory.
This course provides the rigorous theoretical foundations and vital tools needed to structure, manage
Modern Portfolio and monitor the performance of an investment portfolio. Topics include portfolio theory, the risk-return
FIN 583 Management: Theory relationship, asset allocation and security selection, style analysis and performance evaluation,
and Practice mutual/hedge funds.
The purposes of the course are to provide the student with (1) a fundamental understanding of the
Mergers Finance & finance and economics of the M&A marketplace, and (2) the basic skills needed to succeed in various
FIN 597 Economics professional capacities in the M&A marketplace, such as investment banker, management consultant,
strategic planner, and lawyer.
This course is an applied course designed to build on the fundamentals mastered in the
program’s core courses. The course provides tools to perform in-depth analyses of corporate
investment policy and corporate financial policy, geared toward maximizing shareholder value. We’ll
discuss the costs and benefits of M&A as an alternative strategy to organic growth and the tools for
resolving financial distress, including strategic bankruptcy. Following lectures, students are expected to
FIN 871 Strategic Financial learn by doing with extensive lab work (“application tests”). Prepared students will be familiar
Management with financial statements and will have a working knowledge of financial calculators and excel
modeling. The course consists of a combination of assigned reading, lectures, application tests (lab
work), case studies, and a substantial cumulative final exam.
Insurance 575 is an introductory survey course examining the evolving field of corporate risk
management. Risk management is a systematic approach used by firms to protect themselves from the
INS 575 Risk Management adverse financial consequences of risky events. This class explores the risk management decisions
facing firms, examining how they manage and protect themselves from loss.
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Course Name/# Course Title Brief Description
This course will help you to develop team facilitation skills. It focuses on observation, diagnosis, and
intervention skills for developing effective teams. Topics include diagnosing group dynamics, giving and
receiving feedback effectively, and facilitating cross-cultural communication and conflict management
within teams. You will experience team dynamics first hand as a member of a team in the class, engage
in self- and group-observation and practice facilitation techniques in the first year MBA student team to
which you are assigned as a facilitator. The course provides a real-time practicum in diagnosing team
MGMT 520 Team Facilitation issues and intervening to facilitate problem solving and resolution of team conflicts. Techniques for
diagnosing your own facilitation and conflict handling skills and for helping teams constructively deal
with conflicts will be integral parts of the course. Dealing constructively with diversity in teams will also
be addressed.
Innovation is a term frequently used in today's business environment, and its importance is only
growing. New products and services continue to bombard customers, and there is no end in sight to
what Schumpeter labeled as a process of creative destruction. Yet, while innovation is vital for a firm’s
wellbeing and growth, it is difficult to spawn and sustain. Those in charge of organizations must develop
an understanding of the challenges of and solutions to sustaining innovation. With this in mind, this
course will cover the following topics.
• Models of innovation and technological change
MGMT 551 Growth Innovation • Understanding the role of the past, present and the future
Strategy • Disruptive innovations
• Challenges of fostering disruptive innovations
• Organizational processes for sustaining innovation
• Appropriating the benefits of innovation
• The importance of standards
• Platforms and eco-systems
This course focuses on the "strategic" challenges facing the multinational firm. The types of questions
that we address are: Why do firms go abroad? What differentiates a "global" from a "multi-domestic"
industry? What are the sources of competitive advantage in a global context? Why and when do/should
companies engage in cross-border strategic alliances? What are the associated risks and how to guard
against them? What potential roles can foreign subsidiaries play in an MNC's global strategy? How do
MGMT 561 Global Business companies choose an optimal global structure? How do companies ensure coordination between the
center and the subsidiaries and among subsidiaries? How do companies manage strategic change from
one type of global strategy to another?
This course provides a pragmatic and ethical framework for analyzing the sources of power in
organizations and the circumstances that lead to its attainment and effective use. The goals of this
course are to help you learn more about the nature and sources of power in organizations and increase
your ability and confidence in diagnosing power situations, managing conflict, and using political
strategies in pragmatic ways to get things done in the workplace and other organizations. Topics
MGMT 565 Power and Influence covered include formal and informal sources of power, social exchange perspectives on power, network
structures and their consequences, organizational culture and symbolic actions, the bases of
interpersonal influence, and diagnostic tools and techniques to identify the "rules of the game."
Project Management and Delivery addresses concepts and methodologies associated with project
management and the delivery of non-repetitive business activities. In this course, students will learn
how to organize and manage work activities related to delivery of a collaborative venture that has
unique objectives along with a beginning and an end. More specifically, students will learn and apply
common project management tools and techniques used in various aspects of project management
including but not limited to requirements gathering, stakeholder analysis, project definition/charter,
project scheduling, project communication planning, risk mitigation planning, project budgeting &
control, project metrics/assessment, project documentation planning, and project closeout assessment.
Traditional and agile approaches to project management will be explored along with the benefits and
drawbacks of each approach. Strategic considerations will include identification of success criteria,
Management effective use of KPIs and performance metrics, timely identification and mitigation of project risk, team
formation, resource constraints, project sponsorship, leadership within a project management context,
MGMT 885 Consulting Methods &
Practice and management of scope creep.Project management is a set of competencies with wide applications
in almost every area of human endeavor. As students move forward in their professional careers, their
ability to effectively lead and manage project work (i.e., unique, non-repetitive, collaborative initiatives)
will be a significant determinate of their success. The objective of this course is to providestudents with
fundamental knowledge and skillsrelated to project management that will enable their professional
success.
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Course Name/# Course Title Brief Description
The purpose of this course is to understand the theory and practice of negotiation in a variety of
settings, with specific emphasis on multiparty contexts. 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
MGMT 821 Complex Negotiations skills and an understanding of multiparty dynamics are needed in order for these solutions to be
accepted and implemented. The course will allow students to develop these skills experientially and to
understand negotiation in useful analytical frameworks. Considerable emphasis will be placed on
simulations and cases.
The vast majority of new or revised business strategies – no matter how well crafted or
ingenious they are – fail in their implementation. In some cases, strategic plans amount to little
more than a top executive’s declarations or a powerpoint slidedeck. In other cases, they end up as
faint replicas of the original ideas. And in the most tragic cases, some perfectly sensible
strategies are so badly implemented that they cause outright company damage. Companies rise
and fall not according to their strategic brilliance or cleverness, but according to their ability to
execute on their strategic intentions.
This course addresses the managerial challenge of strategy implementation, particularly
by examining the organizational elements that must be drawn into line to support a strategy, as
well as the immense difficulties of changing an organization. As such, the course relies on two
overarching frameworks. The first is a model of organizational alignment; the second is a model
for managing the change process.
The course will emphasize application and practice, primarily by the use of cases. You
will be asked, class after class, to take the position of a senior manager or an advisor to a
manager, and develop answers to questions like these: What’s the real problem here? How are
Strategic the elements of the problem interconnected? What should be done? How, specifically, should we
MGMT 831 Implementation and go about it?
Change Strategy Implementation and Organizational Change will be relevant for a broad array of
students, including those hoping to be managers, consultants, investors, and entrepreneurs.
Because the course focuses on changing entire organizations (rather than small parts of
organizations), we will be primarily taking the point of view of senior managers. However, our
frameworks and tools, and the skills you will develop, will be useful to you early in your careers,
as you face the need to manage change in your own subunits, as well as the need to comprehend and
contribute to firm-wide changes.
This course looks at the key issues, concepts, and methodologies associated with business
transformation and management consulting. Students will explore the professional services industry,
industry best practices, and a variety of client contexts where advisory services are needed.
Additionally, students will learn common consulting methods and how to apply them in client
organizations, particularly at the top management level. A consulting-oriented solution development life
cycle is used as the organizing framework of the course. The primary phases of this framework include:
Business client qualification / validation, problem identification, data gathering, requirements definition, project
MGMT 880 Transformation planning, solution design, solution development, solution implementation, and client relationship
Consulting management. Students will learn to how to identify and define organization problems, highlight pain
points, map work flows, explore business models, investigate strategic alignment, develop
recommendations, present business cases, and deliver prototype solutions. The course will also enable
students to learn how to advise managers and present key points and recommendations in a direct,
clear, and compelling manner.
Students will learn to how to identify and define organization problems, highlight pain points, map work
flows, explore business models, investigate strategic alignment, develop recommendations, present
MKTG 532 Brand Management business cases, and deliver prototype solutions. The course will also enable students to learn how to
advise managers and present key points and recommendations in a direct, clear, and compelling
manner.
The creation, measurement and delivery of superior customer value in business markets is the focus of
this course. Successful market-focused business-to-business (B2B) organizations know the importance
Business Marketing of linking customer needs to the development of high value products throughout the value chain in a
MKTG 533 (B2B) global, electronic environment. And those successful organizations require that marketing be viewed as
an investment, with measurable results and not as an expense.
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