CURRICULUM

We prepare managers to anticipate, understand and embrace challenges — head-on.

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Year One: Developing the General Management Perspective
In the first year, you and your Kansas City classmates will take a deep dive into 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 your innovative second year the curriculum is taught in St. Louis at the main Washington University campus. Kansas City students will merge together with the St. Louis EMBA class to learn about the challenges that drive growth and reshape industries. 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
• Growing profitably and sustainably

We designed the second year curriculum to address top management challenges to: 

Give you the requisite tools to manage complex, unstructured business issues
Grow your network across the region and the globe

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 Kay Henry at 314-955-9009 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.

The Decisions around Business Ethics
This course imparts an understanding of how law, ethics, and public policy affect modern business.  This course aims to place ethical issues within a management context and challenge you to reflect on your own personal strengths and weaknesses as well as develop specific strategies for making a difference in the organizations to which you’ll belong. 

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.

Business Analytics for Decisions
Designed to develop quantitative analysis skills and reasoning abilities as they apply to business situations and decision-making contexts. It will guide students in determining what kinds of analytics they should be asking for given particular business circumstances. Moreover, the course will develop analytic reasoning and critical thinking skills that students will apply in other courses in the MBA curriculum. 

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.

Enterprise Risk Management
Enterprise risk can be thought of as the sum of all risks or as those that threaten organizational strategy and/or continuity. In either case, the board of directors must find a way to comprehend, scope and manage these risks as they vet the strategies of their firms. This course offers a unifying framework for thinking about Enterprise Risk Management. Overarching is a process that impels discussion of major risks as an integral part of strategy deliberations at the board level.

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.

Opportunities and Challenges in 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.