Course Specific Goals

Resources, Stakeholders & Competitive Advantage (BA 520)

Identify an organization’s strategy and competitive advantage in the marketplace; explain the interrelationship between the organization’s resources and its strategy; identify the role stakeholders play in providing the resources and capabilities needed by the organization; and apply techniques for determining causality to the analysis of stakeholder effects on the resource base of an organization.

Administrative Control and Managerial Accounting (Acctg 533)

Design a performance-measurement system for an organization based on a causality analysis; apply performance measurement to help mitigate organizational tensions; apply performance measures to evaluate a strategy’s soundness and recognize that strategic decisions require the allocation of decision rights and resources among stakeholders.

Information Systems Management (MIS 580)

Explore organizational needs for information and how information systems meet those needs; and evaluate information technology acquisitions.

Managerial Leadership and Productivity (MgtOp 593)

Secure the cooperation of stakeholders to achieve organizational goals with specific emphasis on peers, employees below you, bosses above you, and actors outside your organization. This includes applying theories and techniques of team building, group dynamics, motivation, intra-organizational power and politics, goal setting, conflict management, persuasion, and workplace fairness.

Managing Value-Chain Partnerships (MgtOp 589)

Determine how to manage relationships with value-chain partners such as alliance partners, vendors, and distributors; evaluate the effect of partner relationships on other stakeholders, and evaluate how cultural differences affect partner-relationship management.

Marketing Management and Administrative Policy (Mktg 506)

Develop and justify an action-oriented marketing strategy and apply marketing theories and techniques to identify, evaluate, and quantify customer needs in order to determine if a market opportunity exists; estimate potential benefits to the organization of pursuing a market opportunity; evaluate the long-term sustainability of a market opportunity; identify the key success factors, necessary resources, and alternative approaches for pursuing a market opportunity; recommend a marketing strategy and next-step actions for pursuing an opportunity and evaluate the indirect and direct effects of recommended actions on stakeholders.

Problems in Financial Management (Fin 526)

Determine if an investment will increase or decrease the wealth of an organization.

Negotiation Skills (MgtOp 585)

Improve one's personal negotiation skills across many contexts and with a variety of stakeholders. That is, develop the interest-based bargaining skills that produce more creative, satisfying agreements that benefit all stakeholders and avoid the worst kind of compromises.

Strategy Formulation and Organizational Design (MgtOp 590)

Analyze an organization’s current competitive position with respect to the environment, the organization’s history, resources, and values. Students will then be able to prepare a theoretically grounded set of strategic recommendations for enhancing competitive advantage to build on the organization’s core competencies; develop a comprehensive plan for implementing proposed strategic recommendations that effectively align key strategic tasks with critical organizational components; develop a comprehensive plan for managing the process of strategic change that addresses how to clarify and redesign tasks, motivate change, manage the strategic transition, and shape the political dynamics of change; and evaluate the implications of a strategic decision on multiple stakeholders and recommend a strategic course of action that takes these implications into account.

Business Ethics and Public Stakeholders (MgtOp 587)

Examine the management of stakeholder relationships from a normative perspective to evaluate the effects of publics on organizational strategy, and apply a formal process to identify and address ethical conflicts between firms and stakeholders.

Statistical Analysis for Business Decisions (MgtOp 591)

Apply basic tools for forecasting market conditions that influence the organization’s strategic decisions. Both quantitative and judgment-based methods are explored. Explore simple, statistical tools that can be used to understand and manage stakeholder relationships.

Final MBA Examination (MgtOp 702)

Apply an integrated model to assess the opportunities and risks associated with a strategic decision, including an assessment of how key issues affect the organization’s stakeholders. As such, the strategic decision must have multiple stakeholder implications. Students will build on analyses from prior courses to create a deliverable to an organization.