MiM Curriculum

This course explores concepts and tools in economics and statistics, with a strong emphasis on developing basic quantitative analytical techniques. Excel spreadsheet capabilities serve as the platform for development of these analytical skills. The course utilizes both online and face-to-face content delivery methods.

By better understanding the way humans interact with their environment, organizations can come up with better solutions to problems. A design thinking approach can help with the challenge of preparing students for solving complex problems. The main theme for the class, design thinking, is a hypothesis-based process for generating and discovering possibilities for creating value, finding the productive combinations of means to achieve that value, and testing their validity. Design thinking rests on principles such as human-centeredness, problem framing, experimentation, visualization, and diversity. Students involved will work on a semester-long project focused on problem identification, ideation, prototyping, testing, and will come up with an ethical implementation plan.

This course provides students with the knowledge and skills necessary to prepare, analyze, interpret, understand, and use publicly available financial information to make informed decisions. Specifically, this course examines the preparation of corporate financial reporting, the use of a variety of tools to break apart financial reports into meaningful units for analysis, and the forecasting of financial statements.

Participants will examine value creation in a dynamic marketplace from a customer-driven approach, regardless of organizational role. Content includes a focus on exploration of ethical marketing activities in consumer, industrial, and service markets. Analysis will occur within the context of the global environment, broadly defined. Integration and application of the marketing management function with other parts of an organization will be highlighted.

This course will examine a variety of different perspectives on what makes someone a good leader. The course will also consider how leaders develop and use their power to influence others across multiple levels within the organization. Students will develop their leadership ability through self-assessment, personal reflection, feedback from others, and exercises that put them in realistic but challenging management situations.

This course provides students with quantitative skills combined with basic theoretical knowledge to make optimal financial decisions. The focus will be on practical application of financial calculations and concepts through case studies and real-world problems. The course will introduce the elementary concepts and calculations of the time value of money and free cash flow estimation as the basic tools for valuation, while the characteristics of investment securities are discussed from the perspective of the cost of capital for the firm. Capital budgeting tools for decision-making form the quantitative core of the course. Meanwhile, the skills to build and forecast financial statements are utilized for understanding day-to-day cash flow management.

The broad objective of this course is to provide students with a working knowledge of microeconomic theory as it applies to pricing, production, and investment. Microeconomics, because of its focus on the behavior of firms or consumers, helps organizations evaluate different courses of action. It identifies generalizable principles for firm behavior, industry structure, and market performance. The course will utilize a highly applied approach that presents situations and cases demonstrating a variety of economic conditions. Students are asked to evaluate and make decisions based on the data they find and theories they are provided.

This course explores the use of accounting information for internal planning, analysis, and decision making. The main objective of the course is to provide students with the knowledge to prepare, understand, evaluate, and use financial and non-financial reports used in managing modern firms. Managing and evaluating the modern firm requires financial and non-financial information about the firm’s products, processes, assets, and customers. This information is a key input into a wide range of analytical tools to support decisions: analyzing profitability of various products, managing product-line portfolios, setting prices, measuring and managing profitability of customers, making operational and strategic decisions, evaluating investments, investigating efficiency.

Understanding and applying business analytics is critical to good decision-making in the modern enterprise. Students will think critically about data sources and uses. The course merges theory and practice of descriptive, explanatory, predictive, and prescriptive analytical tools for business applications. Students employ data to gain insights into problems and opportunities, and apply these insights to assess alternative courses of action.

This course will prepare students for the challenges involved in managing others with an emphasis on managing employee performance to create a high performing workplace. More specifically, the course will help students to: identify employees who will be able to perform effectively on the job; create work conditions that foster high motivation, performance, and job satisfaction among employees; evaluate employee job performance and provide effective performance feedback; reward high performance; and deal effectively with employee performance problems. The course will also help students to develop the ability to communicate with employees in a supportive manner—an important skill when addressing employee performance problems.

Understanding and applying project management skills is critical to understand the value of setting up and managing a successful initiative. This course introduces activities necessary for managing and leading projects by examining the frameworks and techniques project managers use to complete projects on schedule, on budget, and within specified scope. In addition to developing the skills necessary to manage any project, this course will provide hands-on experience with Salesforce CRM implementation. In addition to learning the basic administration concepts needed to pass the Certified Salesforce Administrator exam, students will gain the skills necessary to manage Salesforce implementation projects, as well as how to administer and configure Salesforce and develop new applications utilizing the Force.com platform.

This course focuses on the role of teams in organizations, and the team characteristics that promote or hinder team effectiveness. Conflict within teams, including common reasons for conflict and strategies for managing conflicts, will be addressed. Particular attention will be given to understanding and managing the problem-solving and decision-making process within a team to ensure that high-quality decisions are made.

The internship experience provides students with the opportunity to better understand an organization and its industry, while providing a chance to apply business skills garnered earlier in the MiM program. It is heavily experiential in nature and should help MiM graduates feel positive about their abilities and their opportunity to impact organizations. Internship work will be monitored by the Lacy School of Business to assure that organizations employing interns are offering an opportunity for rigorous work that challenges a student’s capabilities.

In the final term of the program, participants apply their learned skills to solve a real-life problem. A client organization will introduce a relatively complex problem at the beginning of the term. Using their learned skills and a refined decision-making process, teams of students will analyze the problem, develop alternative, and formalize a recommendation. The clients will participate in face-to-face presentations.