Executive MBA: New York City | Elective Courses

This course is designed to prepare students to interpret and analyze financial statements effectively. It expands upon financial reporting topics introduced in the core course in financial accounting. The course discusses each financial reporting issue in terms of its effect on assessments of a firm’s profitability and risk. This course is designed primarily for students who expect to be active users of financial statements as part of their professional responsibilities.

Having a perspective about how various industries make money is critical whether one analyzes a company for investment, advises its managers, manages its operations, markets its products, or chooses its capital structure. The course will provide a framework to analyze financial and strategic performance and to identify key drivers of business success.

Corporate Governance is a multi-faceted topic that has socioeconomic, ethical, legal, and regulatory dimensions. The goal of this course is to help students develop the skills to address critical governance issues and to recognize the workings of the governance ecosystem.  Students examine the roles and responsibilities of senior management, directors, shareholders and other stakeholders affected by a corporations’ environmental, social and governance policies, successes and failures.

In this course, students develop an understanding of how leading companies are embedding sustainability in their core business strategy and using it to drive innovation; operational efficiency; employee, supplier and customer loyalty; competitive advantage and value to society. Students become familiar with the key environmental and social issues affecting business today, explore the innovations developed by corporate leaders in pursuit of sustainability, become familiar with the latest research on sustainability, and develop some of the skills required for leading in this new social and political environment.

This course is designed to give students an understanding of the applied economics of healthcare. It provides an advanced critical analysis of the delivery of healthcare services and evaluates the responses of major players (hospitals, physicians, payers, life sciences, and new entrants to the market). A key goal is for students to understand why economics in healthcare is constantly changing and the major drivers impacting the healthcare system.

Private equity is the investment of capital in private companies to fund growth or in public companies to take them private. It is a significant source of capital for both new ventures and established firms. The objective of this course is to provide an overview of the private equity market from the differing perspectives of private equity investors (limited partners), private equity fund sponsors (general partners) and the managers of portfolio companies, by focusing on the nature of the market and the strategies employed. 

This course provides turnaround, restructuring, and distressed investing skills that exposes students to, and prepares them for, careers in the industry. The focus is primarily on corporate reorganizations ranging from small/mid-size businesses to large corporations. Topics include identifying distressed opportunities; distressed research analysis; and the sourcing of distressed opportunities. The class also discusses workout strategies; the fundamentals of bankruptcy and the bankruptcy-reorganization process; and career opportunities in the distressed investment business.

This course helps students develop an analytical framework for understanding how organizations make investment and financing decisions. Students also learn the theory and practice of various valuation techniques. There is an emphasis on understanding the theory and its applications to the real world as well as appreciating the limitations of existing tools in practical settings. Specific topics include capital budgeting, investment decision rules, discounted cash flow valuation, real options, cost of capital structure, dividend policy and valuation methods such as WACC and APV.

This course covers digital currencies, blockchains, and related topics in the fintech area. It explores the emergence of cloud-based digital currency systems, the threats that blockchain technology poses to incumbent firms, and their resulting attempts to co-opt the technology into existing business models. The course also covers related issues including hacking, “smart contracts,” governance, and emerging regulation.

This course focuses on institutional real estate investment, primarily within the U.S. market. It covers real estate property level valuation and risk analysis in the context of four group cases spanning industrial, office, retail and multi-family development. While primarily relevant to those in the real estate equity and debt investment arena, skills and concepts are relevant across investment sectors. Prior real estate investment experience is not required.

This course provides a broad overview of the financial service industry and of the forces that are continuing to change it worldwide. By the end of the course, students have a new perspective on the global financial system, and are well versed in the functioning of the industry, able to understand the financial press and associated economic commentary, and aware of the types of skills necessary to thrive in this industry.

This course covers a broad range of issues in corporate financial management. Students analyze the core financial decisions made by firms and their impact on the value of the firm in the financial market. Topics include financial planning and forecasting, project analysis and evaluation, resource allocation, capital structure policy and cost of capital, payout policy, corporate restructurings and firm valuation. By the end of the course, students are able to analyze a variety of corporate decisions, and understand how analyzing strategic and financial decisions from the perspective of value creation can improve managerial decision-making.

In contrast to the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), behavioral finance (BF) allows for the condition that investors and managers are not always rational and may make systematic errors of judgment that affect market prices. This course focuses on the insights and implications of BF theory, showing how it can explain otherwise puzzling features of asset prices and corporate finance. It identifies the assumptions of both EMH and BF, and the practical questions for real-world money managers in three instrument types: stocks, cryptocurrencies (fungible coins) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the problems of formulating and implementing successful acquisition strategies. It introduces a framework for thinking about acquisitions as a strategic investment where the bottom line is superior shareholder performance. The course approaches acquisitions as a multi-step strategic and organizational process drawing from the fields of strategy, negotiations, finance and organizational behavior. The objective is to enable students to act as a senior advisor regarding strategic M&A, and to assist them in becoming informed consumers of anything written on M&A success.

As part of the EMBA Program, students may participate in an optional second-year Global Immersion Experience, in addition to the required first-year GIE. Like the required GIE, this course enables students to gain an understanding of doing business in a given global region through exposure to business leaders and local organizations and institutions. Students travel internationally to a unique global market. In groups, they study the local market and produce a final business idea proposal based on learnings garnered during the GIE.

“Fintech” is the label for increasingly technological approaches to the main financial intermediation functions: payments, capital raising, remittances, managing uncertainty and risk, market price discovery, and mediating information asymmetry and incentives. Consumers today bank via mobile apps integrated into social media, institutions trade electronically, and robo-advisers make decisions about investment portfolios. This interdisciplinary course provides an introduction to the emerging fintech field.

This course focuses on the tactics and skills needed to not only manage critical conversations but also to identify them in advance with the objective of maneuvering the ultimate outcome to one’s advantage. This course reinforces core communication skills and teaches advanced communication techniques through intensive drills and immersive scenario-based role playing sessions.

This course is geared toward deepening students’ understanding of the challenges, techniques, and opportunities associated with initiating and implementing major changes in an organization. The objective is to prepare managers and leaders, or their consultants and advisers, to meet the challenges of organizational change successfully. Students learn how to diagnose change issues, understand the perspective of change recipients, and appreciate the role of leadership and the elements necessary for sustaining change.

This course provides an understanding of business planning techniques that transform ideas into viable commercial businesses. Students conduct the market, organizational, operational, strategic and financial analyses that are required to produce a venture concept and an actionable business plan.

This course considers the ways in which political processes and power structures influence decisions and choices within and by organizations. Students develop skills in diagnosing and using power and politics in organizational settings, with the goal of enhancing their job and career effectiveness.

This course focuses on the business decisions, management processes, and leadership skills necessary to anticipate, plan for, manage through, communicate about, and recover from crises. Students learn how companies and their stakeholders behave when things go wrong, how leaders can maintain the confidence and trust of internal and external stakeholders, and how to; navigate a crisis in a way that protects long-term business interests and delivers on critical business strategies.

Game theory studies competitive and cooperative behavior in strategic environments, where the fortunes of several players are intertwined. It provides methods for identifying optimal strategies and predicting the outcome of strategic interactions. As well as learning the underlying theory, students learn how game theory can be applied to business.

This course is designed for students who wish to better understand and further develop their innate potential and propensity to lead others. As leaders rise in their careers, they need multiple and often conflicting constituencies on board to follow their vision. This course helps students hone some of the essential self-reflective skills needed to give form and substance to such vision. It is also of value to students who wish to have a broad understanding of the content and context of leading.

Negotiation is the process by which people work together to achieve mutually agreeable outcomes and/or resolve differences. This course provides students with frameworks and concepts for understanding the negotiation process and the opportunity to improve their negotiation and conflict resolution skills. The learning method is experiential. Students engage in a series of negotiation simulations designed to give them experience with a range of different types of negotiations. Emphasis is on principles, strategies and tactics for reaching effective outcomes.

This course explores the many dimensions of new venture creation and growth and new business formation in independent and corporate settings. It integrates academic and practitioner views of the challenges facing entrepreneurs and investors involved in entrepreneurial, venture capital and private equity investment activities. The course draws on a variety of disciplines, including management and finance, to develop frameworks and techniques needed to plan, start, evaluate and successfully operate ventures.

This course provides an understanding of the cultural, political, competitive, technological, legal, and ethical environment in which multinational firms operate. It introduces a range of tools and techniques for assessing foreign and global conditions, opportunities, and threats. Students examine how firms build strategic capabilities, collaborate across boundaries, develop coordination and control, and manage activities and tasks, as well as challenges of worldwide functional, subsidiary, and top-level headquarters management.

This course provides an understanding of the skills that are required to manage and grow small to mid-sized firms. Students study the typical problems and opportunities that confront such organizations and use a variety of disciplines including management, strategy and entrepreneurial finance in order to formulate courses of action in the face of incomplete information.

This course is an experiential learning opportunity where students work in a team to tackle a business issue or opportunity for a client, while applying in real time the key steps of the consulting process they are learning in the classroom. Students discuss their challenges, approaches and recommendations in class while benefiting from the guidance and expertise of the instructor and a seasoned strategy consulting professional. They learn how to break a complicated problem into pieces that can be individually and methodically addressed.

This course provides an appreciation of the role of brands in consumer decision making and in creating value. It focuses on the core principles underlying a consumer-centric approach to brand strategy and on the research tools that illuminate the meaning and strength of a particular brand. Students learn to think creatively and critically about the strategies and tactics involved in building, leveraging, defending and sustaining inspired brands.

This course focuses on the research methods used to understand consumers and their behavior as a basis for managerial decision making. Students learn how to judge the value and trustworthiness of different types of consumer research, with the goal of developing, implementing and evaluating effective marketing strategies. They also learn how to gather and evaluate marketing data.

This course leverages marketing tools and frameworks for understanding how business can interact with issues related to sustainability. It examines how traditional marketing strategies can be incorporated into and/or modified in domains in which sustainability is critical. Students learn the role that marketing can play in creating a more sustainable society.

In this course, students learn about cutting-edge trends in social media, and develop a toolkit to evaluate disruptive mobile technology. They also learn how to apply these tools to write a Fortune-100 level social media marketing plan.

This course provides a framework for understanding the various technologies impacting media and marketing in the marketplace today, including emerging next-generation technologies. It also provides students with a structure for assessing the opportunities and challenges of innovations in a 3‐5 year time horizon.

The course is designed to provide students with a framework for understanding the entertainment, media and technology industries, and their intersecting points. It covers recent activities in key sectors of the entertainment universe: movies, television, cable, OTT, social media, publishing, sports, music, gaming and live entertainment.

This course is designed to equip students with the frameworks, techniques, and latest thinking on assessing and formulating pricing strategies. Students learn the process of making pricing decisions that accounts for underlying consumer behavior, and explore innovative approaches for setting prices across diverse industries.

This course introduces the basic principles and techniques of applied mathematical modeling for managerial decision making. Students learn about some of the more important analytic methods (e.g., spreadsheet modeling, optimization, Monte Carlo simulation) to recognize the assumptions and limitations of those methods and to employ them to make data-driven decisions. The course covers a wide range of application areas.

This course focuses on the role of operations as a source of competitive advantage. Topics include capacity planning and efficient resource allocation, strategic process design, global supply chain management and sourcing, and revenue management. The course approaches operations from the perspective of the general manager rather than an operations specialist.

This course gives an introduction to, an overview of, and a comparison between the various statistical methods that are used to analyze datasets, both small and large. It is geared towards helping managers understand these methods so that they can converse with the analytics groups in their organizations.

In this course, students learn the principles of technological innovation driving major business transformations and leading to the creation of more intelligent and agile enterprises. Emphasis is on understanding both business problems and underlying technologies and how the two interact.