Curriculum

This course provides participants with an opportunity to engage in learning experiences, case studies, simulations and reflection exercises designed to increase leadership effectiveness in both professional and personal contexts.  Students will develop an increased understanding of established leadership literature and models of effectiveness for leading self, others, teams and organizations, resolving conflicts and managing change.

Students will learn economic and other analytical techniques to support decision-making.  The core economic principles will be covered – supply and demand, pricing in a real world environment, pricing in auctions; macro economic core principles and institutions. This course will also build on the Data Analytics/ Stats module in Foundations 1, and will discuss confidence intervals, hypothesis testing,  ANOVA, and Regression analysis using in-class experiments and macro/micro datasets.

Understanding customers and what they value is critical for organizational success.  In this course, students will learn to look at the business from a customer perspective, learn key marketing concepts and understand how information and communication technologies can create value for customers.  The first part of this course will focus on strategies to satisfy customers via specific choice of product, price, promotion and distribution.  Emphasis will be placed on the importance of choosing appropriate target markets, as no business can satisfy all of the people all of the time.  The second part of this course will focus on leveraging technologies and vast amounts of online data to better understand and serve one’s customers.  Online strategies that add value to customers will be discussed.  This course marries key concepts from the worlds of Marketing and Information Systems.

MBA students will gain a cross-functional view of management from a variety of organizational functions to enhance your perspective and set you up for success throughout your MBA journey. Develop a comprehensive management skill set that will propel your thinking, value ROI and enhance your overall view on business. We will deliver a refreshing perspective on management theories that have stood the test of time, as well as leadership insights on new management concept, covering both qualitative and quantitative learnings.  The course will finish with a class case competition designed to have students integrate and demonstrate the various skills areas covered throughout the semester.

The objective of the course is to introduce students to both the fundamental concepts and practical issues in business finance and accounting. This course aims to improve students’ skills in interpreting, analysing, and applying accounting and financial information in order to make superior financial decisions. This course will provide students an introduction to financial statement analysis framework, cost management, breakeven and contribution margin analysis, and relevant costing. The course will also emphasize the following key concepts of financial management: capital budgeting, working capital management, and capital structure.

This course will expose students to the strategic and transformative role digital technologies and information systems can play in creating and sustaining a competitive advantage for organizations. Students will also be introduced to the most popular analytic tools to make business decisions both within a firm and across a supply chain in an increasingly digital environment. This course will emphasize the best practices required to unlock the full potential of organizational investments in digital technologies and systems, in addition to the use of state of the art analytic tools to prescribe the best course of action for different business problems.

This course is focused on the elements that enable organizations to create and sustain competitive advantage in a global economy.  Students will also examine globalization and the steps managers take to establish or expand their operations in international markets. Students explore the influence of forces such as culture, economics, politics and geography on management decision making.

Many different types of economic decisions require accounting data. This course is concerned with the analysis of and accounting for costs and the use of relevant accounting information in decision making. This course also highlights the development and presentation of management accounting information, and the use of these special-purpose accounting reports for planning and control.

This course provides an in‐depth understanding of the way companies make financial decisions. The material builds on concepts of the time value of money, risk/return analysis and corporate finance first encountered in BL601, and makes extensive use of the accounting concepts, especially the organization of the balance sheet and income statement. However, BL652 is more detailed and practical, focusing on applications of theory and the complications encountered in real firms and markets. Course coverage centers on advanced corporate financial management, including: project analysis and risk management; firm valuation as stand-alone and for mergers; capital structure and financial distress; models and principles of corporate governance.

This course equips students with an understanding of the domestic and international institutions (e.g., IMF, WTO, NAFTA, etc.), and forces that shape the environments facing business, not-for-profit, and public service organizations. This understanding comprises historical and current contexts, theory and the ability to devise strategic responses to the environment. Major topics include the structure and roles of government, culture and business ethics, international trade and investment, and foreign exchange.

Building on concepts learned in core, this course will help students develop a deeper understanding of marketing and its applications primarily through practical problem solving exercises. The students will learn how to use marketing principles to make better decisions, from high level strategic decisions to more granular, tactical ones centered on the effective deployment of the marketing mix elements. The course will be taught through a combination of cases, lectures, and projects.

Business processes take inputs such as materials, services and technology, add value and transform these inputs into outputs such as products and services. Operations managers design, manage and improve individual and supply chains of business processes. Some of the activities comprising operations management that will be covered in this course are: process analysis and quality improvement, planning and control, and supply chain design. The course shows how integration of operations management with marketing and accounting creates competitive advantage.

In this learning-by-doing course, students address an innovation challenge from a project sponsor, applying the concepts and methodologies of design thinking and strategic foresight. In combination with lectures, readings and other activities introducing design thinking and strategic foresight in a rigorous way, students will imagine multiple future scenarios through trend analysis to identify actionable and preferable opportunities for innovation by the project sponsor. Students apply methods and mindsets which empathize with the needs of affected end user groups. Based on the understanding of desired and required user experiences, students generate and test solution ideas for products and services with strong future market fit.

Strategic management focuses on the concept of strategy analysis, formulation, and implementation by exploring the functions and nature of general management. The course serves as an opportunity to develop skills for strategic thinking and analysis, leadership, communication, teamwork, and cross-functional integration.

The Strategic Integration Project course serves as the major capstone assignment to the BLPT MBA program. Over the course of one year, teams of students will work together to integrate and apply the wide range of knowledge and skills that they have developed throughout the program, using a host company as their basis of analysis. A key objective of this process will be to provide recommendations that will help the company improve its performance based on externally oriented or internally relevant metrics. Executives from the client companies will be invited to class to observe and assess final student presentations and reports. The course will be offered in a multi-term format (A/B/C).

This capstone course is intended to capture key learning points and reflections from your courses undertaken and your respective program experience to create a roadmap for your life journey beyond this program. The purpose of this course is to allow you to press the pause button and take stock of the breadth of knowledge gained and the ups and downs experienced, so you can comprehend the significant progress you have made. By reflecting on your progress, you have an opportunity to reassess your personal vision, life goals, career aspirations, priorities, and future personal and professional development. Throughout this course, you will gain clarity on your values, aspirations, and strengths, as well as how learned leadership and management practices could be incorporated into your profession and workplace. You will also gain a heightened awareness of who you are and identify professional pitfalls to avoid. You will develop your own structured personalized learning portfolios that you will be able to use with existing or prospective employers, as well as your own business and volunteer organizations that can help facilitate career progress and, more importantly, attainment of professional fulfillment and purpose.