MBA-Level Courses

The course is designed as a workshop in which law students and business students work together to structure and negotiate varying aspects of a private equity deal, from the initial term sheet stages, through execution of the purchase agreement, to completion of the financing and closing. Private equity deals that are economically justified sometimes fail in the transaction negotiation and documentation phase. This course will seek to provide students with the tools necessary to understand and resolve difficult issues and complete successful transactions.

This course will study the financial markets, and the financial intermediaries that make the markets operate. Attention will be given to both the short-term money markets, the source of temporary financing, and the long-term capital markets (bonds and stocks) as a source of more permanent financing. Among the institutions examined will be securities brokers and dealers, commercial and investment banks, and investment companies and investment partnerships. A natural extension of the study of institutions is a discussion of the role of central banks and their conduct of monetary policy. Emphasis will be placed upon financial innovation and the efficiency of financial markets will be questioned, while acknowledging the extensive regulatory structure that exists.

This course explores venture capital and private equity utilizing case studies, problem sets and extensive class discussion to build the intuition needed to understand the industry. There is an emphasis on honing skills necessary to understanding the financial and economic tools used in leveraged buyouts and venture capital investing. The class addresses (1) industry structure, strategies and motivations, (2) types of private equity transactions and, (3) transaction structures. The course prepares students interested in a variety of finance careers. See www.emoryprof.com.

The human desire to divine the future is as old as the hills: Records from 4,000-year-old Sumerian bullae (clay balls) indicate that farmers used futures contracts to hedge crop production. In turn, this gave profit-minded traders a reason to develop forecasts for price and production. Today, forecasting permeates all corners of the modern business world, as Amazon.com stocks inventory to future demand, fintech firms predict whether prospective borrowers will default on a loan, and hospitals generate real-time estimates of when patients will be discharged for capacity planning purposes. The aim of this course is to introduce students to the methods behind predictive analytics. The lectures will be interactive in nature and you will be required to work on in-class examples on your laptop. We will illustrate course concepts using the open-source statistical language R. R and the general programming language Python are the industry standards for data science, which you can use to acquire street cred with the tech crowd. Prior exposure to R is not required.

Supply chain management (SCM) is a core business activity for manufacturing and service firms. Recent events, starting with the U.S.-China trade war and followed by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have brought supply chain issues to the forefront. After this course, you will be able to: (1) Develop a right supply chain for your product or service; (2) Design a robust supply chain under operating uncertainty (tariffs, exchange rates, trade policy) and "black swan" shocks (e.g. pandemics); (3) Understand the value created by a supply chain and develop value-based pricing; (4) Reduce inefficiencies in your supply chain through an improved network design, better facility location, and inventory decisions; (5) Quantify carbon footprint of a supply chain; (6) Gather supply-chain intelligence from various data sources.

A key source of value is through the use of strategic partnering agreements, innovative distribution design, and understanding how customers want to buy. This course is about how to leverage value through the firm's distributor, supplier, and retailer networks to make products and services available at the right place and time. Topics include but are not limited to the following: how to manage multiple online and offline channels, how to structure and manage business partnerships for maximum returns, how to select and incentivize partners and how to design and redesign routes to market. We will also discuss conflict management, channels in emerging economies, and other generalizable frameworks applicable to a wide variety of B2B issues. Ideal for individuals targeting opportunities in consulting and strategy, organizational customer sales and procurement, marketing management, entrepreneurship and business development.

This course is designed for both specialists and generalists; namely, those who are pursuing a career in sales and business development, as well as those who will use sales skills in their careers. The course exposes students to the contemporary challenges faced in the selling process. The settings of the cases and exercises used in the course are quite diverse in terms of the sizes of the organizations involved and the types of markets that they serve. Therefore, the course is relevant to students whose interests are in general management, consulting, finance, and entrepreneurship as well as those who expect to work directly in sales and business development. The course centers on three themes: Personal selling, Sales management, and Selling into the channel of distribution. The objective of this course is to develop and enhance the skill set that students will need to pursue careers that involve selling and business development. By the end of this course, you will have acquired the skills that will allow you to enhance your firms' revenue, either personally or through a sales force. The course is chiefly concerned with sales management effectiveness, but also considers "personal selling" (a favored academic term), or person-to-person buyer-seller interactions. The first portion of the course examines personal selling from the standpoint of what makes a "good" salesperson - the skills, characteristics, and key behaviors important in professional selling, and in a more general sense the basis of persuasiveness and effective rhetoric in a commercial setting.

This course is designed to endow you with an entrepreneurial perspective, enhance your ability to use functional knowledge in an applied setting, and familiarize you with the skills and resources necessary for starting a new venture. By the end of the class you will be able to: (1) Identify trends and opportunities in the marketplace; (2) Formulate new venture ideas; (3) Analyze your market and validate your customer base; (4) Present a competitive analysis of a specific industry; (5) Create a revenue model, forecast costs and demand, and assess potential profitability; (6) Understand how financing, venture capital and valuation work; (7) Utilize a business model canvas; (8) Put together and present a business plan and pitch; (9) Analyze ventures, both inside and outside of corporations.

This course is also about using social capital to implement organizational change. The protagonist in this course takes and active role in managing networks to get things done. The key challenge is how to work with other people to make change happen. You create value through coordinating your personal contacts to diverse groups in an organization, coordinating employees within and between functional groups, and coordinating activities across organizations. This course is an introduction to using social network theory and analysis to effect this coordination and create value.

This course will help students translate organizational objectives into action through the design of effective performance measurement techniques, performance-based compensation schemes, and other management control mechanisms. There will be a focus on avoiding typical pitfalls that undermine the effectiveness of these design choices. In this course, students will learn: (1) The challenges of motivating employees; (2) Best practices in compensation design and performance measurement that help to align employees' decisions with organizational goals; (3) Typical pitfalls of compensation schemes and ways to avoid them; (4) Societal aspects of organizational pay practices.

Advanced topics and tools for analysis of decision problems, focusing on modeling the real-world complications. We address the issues of: too many alternatives (leading us to resource pricing, linear programming using optimization techniques); aversion to risk (utility); multiple, conflicting objectives (multi-attribute decision making and value-focused thinking); and too many, complex outcomes (Monte Carlo simulation). The primary course objective is to improve managerial effectiveness through clearer thinking about complex decision issues, and through the application of powerful analytical tools to a wide variety of common management problems.

Teamwork is prominent in a variety of organizational, social, and professional settings. Yet, many misconceptions exist about teams that hinder their effectiveness. The course will cover the theory and processes of group and team behavior. A variety of behavioral topics will be covered (e.g. innovation, power & politics, social networks) with an emphasis on group contexts.

This course in microeconomics will provide the fundamentals in understanding the how scarce resources and allocated in a system of unlimited wants. We will be examining how firms and workers respond to incentives, how tools & statistics help us determine the most efficient use of resources, how firms profit maximize and how markets arrive at equilibrium.

We live in a noisy world - the average person encounters 6,000-10,000 ads in a single day and our attention spans have perfected the art of tuning out. Becoming a compelling storyteller is your best chance to break through. The Content Marketing course is useful for anyone that needs to present to a stakeholder: brand to consumers, consultant to client or entrepreneur to investors. We will examine key social and digital platforms and how each monetizes. To dig into creating content, we explore sticky ideas, storytelling through screenplays and brand archetype.

The course provides students with several tools and concepts necessary for the contemporary practice of product management (PM) and brand management (BM). Students are exposed to the modern-day challenges faced by a broad variety of firms in developing and launching new products, managing their product lines, and creating and maintaining brand equity. Hence, the course is relevant to students whose interests are in general management and consulting as well as those who expect to work directly in PM/BM.

This course is designed to introduce you to some theoretical frameworks that will help you understand how consumers act, think and feel. You should be able to apply these frameworks to everyday marketing problems ranging from determining consumer needs to ensuring consumer satisfaction. Consumer behavior is an interdisciplinary field and as such, the theories in this course are based on psychology, sociology, economics and marketing.

This course is designed to help students develop fundamental data analysis skills needed to make informed marketing decisions. In this course, you will learn the scientific approach to marketing with hands-on use of databases, analytics and computing systems to aid marketing decisions. While quantitative methods will be employed throughout the course, the goal is not to produce experts in statistics; rather, you will gain the competency to interact with and manage analytics and research teams to provide insights for marketing decisions.

AI in Marketing examines the burgeoning role of AI in marketing decisions and actions. The course will adopt the customer equity framework, which links the value of the customer to the organization to the following components: customer acquisition, customer retention, and relationship development. The course will be built around these components, examining the application of marketing technology and AI to support growth through each component. We will use the customer journey to tie these components together.

Applied Entrepreneurship is an entrepreneurship class designed specifically for those interested in being future entrepreneurs, investors, consultants and anyone else interested in learning how entrepreneurship works.

Data Visualization will introduce students to the techniques and tools used to create effective visualizations that clearly and efficiently communicate relationships within data. Students will learn how to perform exploratory analysis through visualization, how to create professional looking visualizations for use in business reports and presentations, and how to design interactive visualizations and dashboards. The course will cover the common quantitative messages users attempt to understand or communicate from a set of data and the associated visualizations used to help communicate each message. These include time series, rankings, proportions, deviations, frequencies and distributions, correlations, categorical comparisons, and geospatial plots. Students will primarily utilize Tableau, but will be exposed other tools including Power BI and R. No prior coding experience is necessary.

This course is intended to give students an idea of the work conducted by investment banks. Areas reviewed will include debt financing, equity underwriting, merger & acquisition advisory assignments, and trading activity. Special emphasis will be placed on the methods commonly applied when conducting valuation, debt capacity, and transaction analysis. In addition, there will be summary of investment banking history and of the peripheral players (private equity and hedge funds) that interact with banks.

Compared to traditional investments, such as public stock, public bonds, and cash, alternative investments represent the largest and fastest growing asset class in the world. Alternative Investments include venture capital, private equity, real estate, hedge funds, and distressed securities. This class was designed specifically for executive MBA's interested in (i) how to start their own business, (ii) how to buy an existing business, (iii) how to invest in real estate, and (iv) how to optimize your personal investment portfolio. In addition this class is highly suitable for those students who have significant interaction with alternative asset managers. The class is divided into seminar-like sessions discussion (i) organization and strategy of the alternative investments industry, (ii) valuation, capital structure and term sheets, (iii) new venture financing, and (iv) deal structuring. The course is in a case/discussion format and is highly interactive. Four guest speakers will join us during the semester.

This course deals with the valuation and use of fixed income securities. It begins with the concept of the time-value-of-money and interest rates applied to bond pricing, and progresses through an examination of complex structured products and fixed income derivatives. Initially the focus is on the markets for fixed income securities, and the tools of pricing through the discounting of cash flows. Next, we study primary fixed income securities: Treasury bonds, corporate bonds, and municipal bonds. From there we move into the structured products of fixed income: mortgage-backed securities and CMOs. We conclude the course with coverage of fixed income derivatives, both over-the-counter (OTC) and exchange-traded (listed) products. Throughout, the course maintains a dual objective: to educate you in the principles of fixed income securities and structured finance, while at the same time giving you an understanding of how Wall Street is involved in the financial markets. At various times the material may appear advanced and mathematically technical. However, this course is intentionally designed to de-emphasize the technical aspects, and is suitable for students with no prior background in fixed income, and with a grasp of mathematics only at the level of high school algebra.

The objective and goal of this course is to broaden your awareness of the impact of global economic, financial, geopolitical, and demographic trends on business. The class provides conceptual frameworks and tools for analysis critical to conducting business in the international environment. Implications for human as well as economic development are discussed. The class will enable students to think globally and strategically; develop diverse perspectives on global business, the macroeconomy, and the future; read and analyze macroeconomic data releases; and understand the increasing global connections that impact business and finance. Also, the class will explore the evolution of macroeconomic policy and events as it pertains to recent events, including COVID-19 and its substantial global macroeconomic impacts (such as massive record-sized government deficits).

Introduces the framework of a value-based health care delivery system, organized around four key components: (1) what is a value-based framework for a delivery system, (2) the need for integrated care delivery at the practice unit, (3) creating system for outcome measurement and monitoring, and (4) the role of payers in encouraging value-based healthcare delivery.