Executive MBA | Core Classes & Electives

Translating business ideas into successful initiatives requires strong communication skills and the ability to connect with multiple diverse audiences. This course helps students become more effective communicators so that they can align their messaging with their business’s strategy and stakeholder expectations. Strategic communication helps students support and strengthen the potential success of business initiatives, and position themselves and their organization for effectiveness in an ever-changing world.

Professional Responsibility encourages students to think critically about the broader context and consequences of the decisions they make as managers. The course highlights how ethical considerations are important in the decision-making process, while helping students to develop the analytical reasoning skills needed to weigh competing ethical concerns. It also highlights the importance of understanding the interdependence of markets, ethics and law in a democratic, free market society.

Corporate accounting reports are an essential means of communication with market participants. This course introduces students to the concepts of financial reporting, the language of business, and its underlying assumptions. Students discuss the uses and limitations of financial statements and use financial-statement information to unlock critical insights into the evaluation of business performance and risk.

Firms and Markets presents the major tools and concepts of economic analysis and their application to both business decision making and the formulation of policies. The course covers determinants of product demand, decision making within different industry structures, competition, network economics, cost-benefit analysis, and the influence of government policies on firms and markets. Students develop analytic tools and frameworks useful across a range of business areas, including finance, strategy and marketing.

This course provides a survey of probability and statistics applicable to decision making in a business environment. It covers a range of foundational topics related to statistical analysis such as probability and probability distributions, sampling and statistical inference, and correlation and regression analysis. Focus is on application, and how statistical analysis can inform and aid in business decision making.

This course is about financial markets and how financial assets are valued, managed, and traded. Students analyze different types of assets (e.g. equities, bonds, and derivatives) and study important valuation frameworks (e.g. portfolio theory, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), etc.) and their applications. The goal of the course is to give students a solid understanding of how financial markets work and how to make sound investment decisions.

This course provides students with a systematic understanding of critical aspects of the international business environment, especially the basic workings of the macroeconomy. Students explore how GDP, labor markets and inflation are measured and the role of money, banks and interest rates in the economy. Students also explore the sources of economic growth and the role of currencies and international trade in global business.

This course delves into the history and emerging theories around inclusion, diversity, belonging, equity, access, otherness, and difference. It focused on how leaders can apply best practices, utilize cross-sector and interdisciplinary research, and build sustainable inclusive excellence programs within their organizations. Today’s business leaders must be well-equipped to understand and manage the challenges and opportunities posed by diversity and inclusion and their impact on business.

The Global Immersion Experience (GIE) is an experiential course that enables students to interact with companies, industries, financial institutions, and government leaders from around the world. 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.

Business leaders need to have a strong foundation in strategy in order to create value for their firms. This course focuses on both competitive strategy (positioning within an industry) and corporate strategy (managing multi-business or multi-location firms). It trains students to look outward to the environment and inward to the firm’s resources and capabilities as a basis for formulating strategy.

This course introduces the concepts, tools and processes used by today's marketing companies when developing and implementing marketing strategies. It highlights the importance of a marketing orientation regardless of functional responsibility, and provides an analytical framework for developing, pricing, distributing and promoting products and services.

This course focuses on how to effectively lead within an ever-changing world. It introduces some of the central theories and frameworks in leadership and helps students understand how to apply them to evaluate organizations and their leadership and to address critical organizational challenges. The course also helps students reflect on and develop the skills that are required for being an effective leader within an organizational setting.

This course is designed to assist students in developing the knowledge, skills, and perspective they need to understand and address environmental and social challenges in business, so that as leaders they reduce risk, create competitive advantage, and develop innovative services, products, and processes, all while building value for society and protecting the planet.

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 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.

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 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 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.

This course introduces the financing lifecycle of high-growth new ventures. It follows a successful startup’s path from founding through the stages of new venture finance. It covers not just venture capital (VC) financing, but also alternative instruments for financing early-stage enterprises such as equity crowdfunding and DAOs. Students come away with a concrete understanding of the basics of the VC industry, financial contracting in entrepreneurial finance, and how to value startups.

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.

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 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 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.

The objective of this class is to guide students through the complex, exhilarating, and sometimes surprising journey of self-discovery that leads to a life rich with meaning. The course grows out of the premise that the most fulfilling lives are those lived in your “Area of Destiny,” the intersection of your competencies, values, and the growing sectors that interest you. It concludes with a project in which each student identifies their own “Area of Destiny,” either newly discovered or confirmed, and the roadmap to it, now and in the future.

This course helps students develop their ability to analyze behavior in collective settings and their willingness to skillfully ACT within those settings. It is based on the premise that, regardless of one's position within an organization, leadership opportunities present themselves every day. It is up to you to recognize and take advantage of those opportunities. The course is also based on the premise that effective leadership requires an in-depth understanding of oneself, how organizations work, and how to work with and through other people

Developing business and marketing strategies and tactics are fundamental for all business professionals. This course aims to consolidate your learning from other Stern EMBA courses to develop that material into a cohesive and actionable Business / Marketing Plan and get the plan approved in the Board Room.

This course helps students develop a deeper understanding of how and why consumers behave as they do, how environmental factors affect choices and behavior, and the practical marketing implications of how consumers make choices. Students learn how theories of human behavior can be used to impact real-world marketing strategies and decisions.

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.

There is a growing gulf between ‘data scientists’ (statisticians/computer scientists) and business managers, aggravated by a plethora of machine learning algorithms and technical jargon surrounding those algorithms. The objectives of this course are to fill this gap by exposing students to the ‘linguists of data’, providing hands-on experience with cutting-edge tools and techniques including latest advances in LLM & Generative Ai , and helping students develop an intuition for how to generate insights from volumes of data.

This course gives students an introduction to how machine learning and generative AI works and transforms this technological foundation into an understanding of how to separate the hype from the reality in analyzing the immediate and long-term implications of artificial intelligence and platform business models. Students gain a basic understanding of AI under the hood while learning strategic frameworks that will guide effective business decisions about digital change. Key societal and policy issues ranging from employee reskilling and platform governance to algorithmic bias and AI alignment are discussed.

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.