CURRICULUM

Year One: Developing the General Management Perspective
In the first year, you'll immerse yourself in fundamental business functions and processes. You'll build on concepts introduced during the opening residency and explore the synergies and complexities of business disciplines. You'll develop critical-thinking, analytic, quantitative, negotiation and problem-solving abilities. Case studies, skill-building exercises and assignments encourage immediate application of management theory to your workplace challenges.

Year Two: Developing Strategic Vision 
In our innovative second year, you'll be immersed in the challenges that drive growth and reshape industries. We asked top executives at leading corporations to tell us about their most difficult and persistent business challenges. We designed our curriculum to address these issues and give you the requisite tools to manage in a complex, unstructured business environment. The curriculum incorporates an interdisciplinary, team-taught approach to four top management challenges: developing leadership in the organization, operating strategically in global and emerging markets, creating a culture of innovation and creativity, and, as an overarching them, growing profitably and sustainably. 

Year Two Courses:
Leadership Theme — Advance your leadership effectiveness while learning how to identify and develop other leaders within your organization. Create resiliency by encouraging the professional development of others through strategic succession planning. 

Innovation and Creativity — Managing the Innovation Process. A core business process associated with organizational survival and growth; and the evolution of knowledge creation, testing and implementation.

Sustainable, Profitable Growth — Strategies for Growth. Evaluate how organizations make the best choices on mergers and acquisitions, learn how to foster organic growth, and develop tools and strategies that will help your organization generate and sustain profitable growth.

Global and Emerging Markets — Profiting from the Opportunities and Meeting the Challenges of the Global Economy. Learn how to manage global issues, including international economics, culture and the geopolitical landscape. Evaluate growth opportunities and competitive threats affected by events and innovations outside traditional home markets. As part of the Global theme, you'll examine global economies and industries firsthand during an international residency.

Along with your coursework, you will attend four Professional Development Workshops to develop skills to navigate your career path. Your leadership development is a systematic, integrated process grounded in the measurement and assessment of management skills; interpersonal, team and leadership competencies; and cultural awareness. It combines theory and repeated application over time. In addition, it involves faculty and peer feedback and coaching. At the conclusion of the program, a required capstone project draws on your study group's accumulated skills and knowledge to derive applied solutions for one of your own business challenges.

Study Teams
With Olin’s emphasis on leadership, study groups are an essential part of the Executive MBA experience. Study groups help individuals balance work, family and school demands, and classmates can support each other by sharing assignments and collaborating to enrich the learning experience. When forming study teams, program administrators work hard to create groups with functional diversity, experience and talents and to create maximum peer learning opportunities and synergies.

Transfer of Credit
Olin’s Executive MBA Program may accept up to nine credits of graduate level course work taken at another AACSB accredited institution, if the Academic Review Committee judges the courses to be equivalent to Olin MBA classes in quality and content. If you are considering a transfer, please contact Debra Williams at 314-955-8079 for additional information.

Course Descriptions
Team Development and Assessment
Develops the conceptual tools and basic skills needed to manage people in organizations. Considers the basic problems that confront every manager: communicating effectively, negotiating sound agreements that build lasting relationships, managing the inevitable conflicts that arise in every organization and exercising leadership in work teams.

Strategic Management
Explores general management skills in analyzing, formulating and implementing strategies. Students will develop skills in assessing internal capabilities and resources, evaluating industries and competitive environments, and exploring strategic options. This course will help students understand the fundamental task of the general manager, which is to develop strategies that deliver a competitive advantage.

Managing Projects
Provides concrete tools and concepts for project management. Takes a broad definition of "project" and survey applications across a number of industries, including, but not limited to, the software industry, construction and high-tech industries. The class is taught in an interactive case-based format. Students are expected to actively participate — providing insights and vignettes from their own experiences with project management. Students will understand why many projects fail, know the critical success factors, be able to define and analyze work breakdown structures and critical paths for projects, and understand the impact of uncertainty on project management.

Financial Accounting
Focuses on understanding and interpreting financial statements, the effects of managerial decisions on those statements, and the limitations of financial reporting. Gives attention to the rules and conventions for reporting financial information used in assessing the amount, timing and uncertainty of future cash flows.

Negotiations and Conflict Management
Managers spend the majority of their time negotiating — from schedules and vacation time to resource allocations to mergers and major policy decisions and their implementation. Skillful negotiation is a critical component of the toolbox of the successful manager. The purpose of this course is to improve students' abilities to diagnose conflict situations and to analyze, plan and conduct negotiations. The course material addresses negotiation as an effective means for implementing decisions and strategies and resolving conflict in a variety of settings. Course format will involve simulated negotiation and experiential exercises.

Using Data for Business Decision Making
Provides a working knowledge of the tools and techniques used in the quantitative analysis of real-world business data. Topics include probability, expected value, variance, confidence intervals for estimating population parameters, hypothesis testing and single/multiple linear regression as well as nonlinear regression. Lectures are based upon a variety of concrete business examples that illuminate general statistical principles. The use of statistical software programs is emphasized.

Market and Consumer Focus
Focuses on key marketing strategies and tactics that enable a business to attract, satisfy and retain customers by creating real customer value while growing profitability. Emphasizes locating, understanding, educating and cultivating the right customers and defining the right offerings for those customers, at the right prices, using the right marketing communications and promotions delivered through the right channels and supported by the right service at the right time.

Managerial Economics: Incentives, Markets and Competition
Examines the decisions of consumers and firms and the ways in which they interact in various market settings. Among the topics considered are consumer behavior and consumer choice, decision making when outcomes are uncertain, and the way in which firms' decisions are impacted by technology, input cost and the various competitive settings in which they operate. Emphasis is placed on concepts and tools that will be particularly useful in the study of marketing, finance and competitive strategy.

Strategic Cost Accounting and Control
Studies the nature, design and decision-facilitating role of cost systems and focuses on the effects of strategy, technology and the environment on cost system designs. The course introduces basic cost concepts and develops techniques such as cost drivers, activity-based accounting, customer profitability, value-add and valuechain analysis, and target costing. It analyzes the role of cost information for tactical and strategic decisions. Tools such as budgets, variance analysis, benchmarking, transfer pricing and balanced scorecard are used to illustrate planning, control and performance measurement systems that facilitate successful implementation of organizations' strategies.

Managing Operations
Deals with the process by which organizations convert inputs (e.g., labor, material, equipment, knowledge) into outputs (goods and services). Focusing on strategic and tactical issues, the course covers the following subjects: product/process management, total quality management, capacity management, customer loyalty and services, inventory management, supply chain management, product development; and facility location and sourcing. Different industries, including services, as well as international operational issues are covered.

Navigating the Macroeconomic Environment
Focuses on macroeconomics, the branch of economics that deals with the overall performance of the economy, including the rate of growth of income, interest rates, employment, inflation and productivity. In this course, we study how the interaction among households, producers, government, central banks and financial markets affects this performance. The focus of the course is current economic events and issues.

Corporate Financial Management
Examines the financial analysis of projects. There are three principal questions we will answer in the course: What are cash flows, how do you discount cash flows, and what is the cost of capital? To answer the first question, the course will include a brief study of financial planning. In answering the second question, we'll learn time-value-of-money calculations and simple models for valuing bonds and stocks. The cost of capital is an opportunity cost – by what shareholders lose by not investing the funds themselves. The company creates value for shareholders if it earns more on investments than shareholders could earn themselves on investments of comparable risk. To understand what "comparable risk" means, we will study the theory of investments. We'll also look at the financing options available to companies and examine whether and how a company can lower its cost of capital and create value for shareholders through its financing choices.

Competitive Industry Analysis
Uses economic and game-theoretic models to analyze behavior of firms. Focus will be split between evaluating the competitive environment within industries and developing competitive strategies that are responsive to specific competitive forces facing individual firms. Topics typically covered include models of price and quantity competition, barriers to entry, commitment strategies and credible threats, product differentiation, vertical integration, research and development, and patenting strategies.

Thematic Curriculum: Strategic Management Challenges
During the thematic segment of the program, you and your classmates will grapple with the top management challenges facing global businesses today. You'll apply functional knowledge gained during the first half of the program to complex, unstructured business problems. The current thematic curriculum includes modules on leadership, globalization, innovation and growth strategies.

Leadership and Influence in Organizations
Leadership is more than just managing subordinates or leading a team. True leadership in contemporary organizations requires the capacity to manage all kinds of relationships and a realistic understanding of one's own strengths, weaknesses and leadership style. This theme provides an appreciation for, an understanding of and tools for dealing effectively with the variety of relationships that determine one's success as a leader.

Profiting From Opportunities and Meeting the Challenges of the Global Economy
From multinational conglomerates to domestic family-owned businesses, few companies are insulated from the effects of globalization. This module provides an opportunity to learn how to shape and execute a business response to the opportunities and risks presented by an increasingly global marketplace. It draws on prior lessons in economics, finance, marketing, organizational behavior, operations and strategy. Topics include market selection; penetration of emerging markets; global supply chain management; and management of financial, currency and country risk.

Strategies for Growth
During this module, students examine a variety of alternatives to organic growth, including acquisitions, mergers, diversification, spin-offs and vertical integration. This course focuses on leveraging resources and competencies, defining horizontal and vertical boundaries, evaluating diversification and crafting organizational design — and applies financial methods for evaluating options, such as discounted cash flow, multiples and liquidation value analyses.

Managing the Innovation Process
The objective of this course is to develop skills needed to manage the complex, multistage process of innovation under highly uncertain conditions. It explores three clusters of topics; creativity and the evaluation of ideas; the systematic management of the innovation process and the organization of knowledge; and management of uncertainties, particularly those related to competition and disruptive innovation.