Business Administration - Eller College

Master of Business Administration

This class is designed to strengthen your customer management skills and further your understanding of a set of powerful ideas about how to manage customers for superior business performance. You will be exposed to a set of well-established and effective strategies to create, deliver, and sustain superior customer value, as well as some of the most novel and cutting-edge ideas in customer management. At the conclusion of the course, you will have acquired both formal frameworks and fresh ideas about how to acquire and retain customers.

Recent surveys indicate that innovation is at the top of the agenda for more than three-quarters of executives; at the same time, nearly as many report failing to meet their own hopes and expectations for their innovation initiatives. This graduate-level course will focus on what is increasingly understood to be a primary reason for the gap between aspirations and outcomes for innovation and entrepreneurship: the leadership and organization of the innovative process.  As companies shift their thinking about innovation from being a fundamentally technological or mechanistic endeavor to one that is more organic, creative, and human-centered, so have they shifted their management concerns. Among them:  What role does innovation play in overall strategy, and where does it fit into strategic plans? What kind of leadership (or leaders) is required to develop an innovative culture? What are the implications for organizational structure and process?  Is organizational innovations needed before companies can achieve their innovation objectives? Through readings, cases, exercises, and projects, we will explore these and related questions on the intangible contributors to innovative success for both existing and new firms in manufacturing, services, and nonprofits.

The Business for Entrepreneurs course will focus on topics of fundamental macroeconomics, accounting, management, and marketing.

This course is organized as an introduction to entrepreneurial principles for those seeking to develop an owner-operated, lifestyle business. The primary audience for this course is those interested in starting a business in the traditional small-business business model with the aim of achieving high growth. Participants will learn how to start, expand, and grow their businesses with an emphasis on learning practical skills, including effective leadership, negotiation, and managing conflict with confidence.

The purpose of this course is to build skills related to understanding accounting disclosures and using the information contained in financial statements. Course topics include profitability measurement, credit analysis, footnote analysis, forecasting and valuation. Cases and examples are used extensively to enhance understanding of key issues and concepts. 

This course designed to introduce students to fundamental theories and methods underlying the practice of financial valuation. The course will require students to apply concepts, principles, and analytical methods from FIN 510E in a comprehensive manner. Significant time outside of the classroom will be required for the project. This work is to provide students with experiences similar to those faced in the workplace where information is often imperfect and data is often vague or ambiguous.

The goal of the course is to provide students with a framework that will enhance their ability to analyze complex financial issues faced by real-world managers and to become proficient in solving such challenges via spreadsheet modeling.

The purpose of this course is to develop an understanding of current practices in investment management. The focus of the course will be on the selection of appropriate assets to meet specific investment goals and objectives. Course topics will will include an overview of securities and their markets, analysis of investor needs and the assessment of portfolio performance. Hands-on exercises and cases will be used to reinforce the understanding of course topics. 

This course focuses on integrated marketing communications, which includes packaging, advertising, websites, promotions, press releases, corporate facility design and layout, in-facility signage, employee attire, employee pamphlets, corporate policies, corporate communications and annual reports; all firm-authored communication to its various constituents. We will be evaluating the execution of planned and emergent corporate and marketing communications and designing integrated, effective, new brand communications. You will be responsible for conducting primary and secondary research, recognizing branding and communications theories in action and creating effective corporate communications and marketing campaigns. We will be focusing on healthcare. Specifically, we will be honing in on consumer data streams, improved diagnostics and consumer compliance to healthcare regimes.

This course is designed to introduce students to the complexities of social media marketing through revealing foundational theories and associated concepts of collective behavior, social influence and social media marketing.

This is a course in marketing strategy. The key objective will be the development of a long-term marketing strategy for a company or business organization by focusing on its customers, competitors and market opportunities. The course provides an opportunity to broaden your understanding of strategic marketing and to develop skills and gain experience in formulating, implementing and monitoring marketing strategy.

This course is designed to provide an overview of applied research methods as used in marketing research and as tools to help make effective marketing decisions. The course is for managers who will be using marketing data rather than those doing "marketing research."

Law permeates virtually all aspects of business, and a basic understanding of business law is critical for managers. In that regard, this course introduces students to the fundamentals of contract law, corporate law, securities regulation, employment law, mergers and acquisitions law and property law. We will cover the principal legal rules and issues in these areas and discuss how they impact business operations and transactions.

This course is designed to provide students with the knowledge and skill needed to maximize performance in today’s team-based work environments. The course will progress according to the classic forming, storming, norming, performing and disbanding model of team development. Students will, for example, learn how to identify the best team members, motivate the team to achieve organizational objectives, resolve conflict within the team and improve outcomes such as team decision-making and group creativity.

Successful leaders and managers understand that negotiation skills greatly aid them to achieve their own and their organization’s goals. This course introduces student’s to the basic elements of negotiations, including preparing for negotiations and selecting the best negotiation strategy.

Broad survey of the individual, organizational, cultural, social and ethical issues provoked by current and projected uses of networked computers on the internet. 

This course exposes students to a broad range of cyber and information security topics focused on awareness of confidentiality, integrity and availability. Course is approved by NSA/Committee on National Security Systems and accepted as a model curriculum course for the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA).

The objective of this course is to provide students with a thorough and operational knowledge of information security so that this critical area is recognized as a management issue and not an IT issue. 

Healthcare expenditures now account for more than 1/6 of Gross Domestic Product in the United States. This class will explore the sources of funding for those expenditures and the rapidly changing trends therein.

This course will explore the principles of High Reliability Organizations (HRO's) and apply them to healthcare organizations.  We will begin with investigating the need for a paradigm shift in healthcare culture that addresses healthcare reform, value-based purchasing, healthcare regulation and the increased complexity in healthcare that makes it nearly impossible to eradicate all healthcare errors.  The course will then explore High Reliability Organization Theory and the driving principles behind it.

Healthcare organizations need to adapt to the rapid changes occurring in payment models, delivery mechanisms, technological advances, disruptive innovations, and industry reorganization. This course covers theory and technique for leading organizations through transformation at the broad strategic level and in terms of improving operations, all within the unique context and challenges of the health care industry.

There are literally hundreds of different theories and models of leadership. Rather than studying these different theories and models, we will examine leadership from a practical perspective.  Across these theories, there is a common set of effective leadership practices.  These practices do not encompass everything a leader needs to do to be effective.  Nor do these practices address all the nuances of leading different types of people in different healthcare settings.  Nonetheless, they represent a foundation for exemplary leadership and if you can master these practices you will be more effective at leading healthcare teams, departments, and organizations.

This course focuses on the management and organization of health care delivery, particularly in the United States. The course examines the salient features of the health care context, the unique challenges these features produce for managers in that industry, and solutions that organizations have used to address those challenges. Micro to macro challenges and solutions are explored, with a particular emphasis on the ways that leadership, human resources, culture, operations, organization design, and strategy influence the quality, safety, and costs of care and the patient experience. Graduate-level requirements include a written single, 8-12 page paper (text only, not counting references, tables, charts, etc.)