Core Courses

Throughout the core courses, you’ll explore how globalization, entrepreneurship and technology are changing business practice, as well as build critical management skills in leadership, teamwork, integrative analysis, and oral and written communication. Recognizing that today’s business students need flexibility, students have various options for accelerating Smith’s 21-month MBA program should they choose.

Core Course Descriptions

BUSI 605 Culture, Ethics & Communication (2 credits)

Provides an opportunity for student discussion, debate, and dramatization of topics relating to ethics, corporate social responsibility, and culture relevant to the current business environment. Such issues are brought to life through a project relating to corporate social responsibility, guest speakers, role-plays, and student-created dramatic performances.

BUSI 610 Introduction to Financial Accounting; (2 credits)

Overview of financial accounting, periodic financial statements and the financial reporting process. Importance of financial statements as information source for creditors and investors and as a means by which managers can communicate information about their firms.

BUSI 611 Managerial Accounting; (2 credits)

Use of accounting data in corporate planning and control. Cost-volume-profit analysis, budgeting, pricing decisions and cost data, transfer pricing, activity-based management, performance measures, and standard costing.

BUSI621: Strategic and Transformational IT (Technology Selective)

Introduces students to the key issues in managing information technology (IT) and provides an overview of how major IT applications in today's firms support strategic, operational, and tactical decisions. Topics include: synchronizing IT and business strategy; the transformational impacts of IT; evaluating and coping with new technologies; governing, managing, and organizing the IT function including
outsourcing/off-shoring considerations; assessing the business value of IT and justifying IT projects; and managing IT applications in functional areas to support strategy and business process.

BUSI622: Managing Digital Business Markets (Technology Selective)

The objective is to understand the strategic and tactical issues involved in managing digital businesses and markets. Also, some of the characteristics of digital businesses and markets that make them unique and understand how companies can best manage them will be examined.

BUSI 630 Data Models and Decisions; (3 credits)

To develop probabilistic and statistical concepts, methods and models through examples motivated by real-life data from business and to stress the role that statistics plays in the managerial decision making process.

BUSI 634: Operations Management (2 Credits)

Operations management is concerned with efficient and effective design and operation of business processes for delivering products and/or services. Emphasis is given to process analysis and design, capacity management and bottlenecks, waiting lines and the impact of uncertainty in process performance, quality management, lean, six-sigma, and revenue management. .

BUSI 640 Financial Management; (3 credits)

Analysis of major corporate financial decisions using a market-oriented framework. Topics include capital budgeting, security portfolio theory, operation and efficiency of financial markets, options pricing, financing decisions, capital structure, payout policy and international finance.

BUSI647: Entrepreneurial Finance and Private Equity (Entrepreneurship Selective)

An advanced topics course in Corporate Finance. The major emphasis is how financiers help firms plan for growth and finance firms using different types of securities at different points in the industry's and firm's life. Securities will include private financings and placements, Venture Capital (VC), Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), Private Equity and Leveraged Buyouts.

BUSI 650 Marketing Management; (2 credits)

This course is an overview of decisions marketing managers make to create and maintain enduring customer-based equity. These decisions involve identifying marketing opportunities, selecting customer targets, effectively positioning products and services, and implementing competitive marketing support programs. Students will learn marketing decision-making models and how to apply them.

BUSI660: Entrepreneurship and New Ventures (Entrepreneurship Selective)

Provides an introduction to important tools and skills necessary to create and grow a successful new venture. Integrates research findings from a range of different practical and intellectual perspectives, including psychology, sociology, economics, strategic management, and history into practical, hands on lessons for an entrepreneur. Class projects provide the foundations for new, real businesses.

BUSI661: Creativity for Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs (Entrepreneurship Selective)

Examines the concept of creativity as it applies in today's and tomorrow's complex business environment. An overview of the cognitive foundations of creativity, examines many of the preconceived notions about creativity in business and discusses multiple ways in which creativity can help business leaders and entrepreneurs to succeed. Topics include creativity techniques for groups and individuals, creativity as a foundation to recognize business opportunities and develop innovative products and services, selecting ideas and making them stick, mental and organizational obstacles to creativity as well as an overview of electronic tools to increase creative capability.

BUSI 664 Leadership & Managing Human Capital; (3 credits)

Examines concepts of leadership and human resource management principles. Emphasizes skill building and creating a competitive advantage by creating a culture that develops extraordinary leaders and unleashes employee talent. Topics include leadership, decision making, communication and conflict, work motivation, teams, ensuring legal compliance and leveraging diversity, recruiting, selecting and retaining qualified employees who fit the job and the organization, measuring performance and providing feedback, and managing changes in leadership and HR strategy.

BUSI665: Integration and Teams

Provides students with the concepts, frameworks, tools and skills necessary for thinking and working in an integrative fashion across functional areas of a business in a team based environment.

BUSI667: Cross Cultural Communication and Teamwork

Provide managers a sound basis for developing such competencies. Specifically, we will develop an understanding of key cultural differences, and how these differences influence the management of individuals, groups, and organizations.

BUSI670 (758R-Spring ‘09): Corporate Social Responsibility and Ethics

This course examines the various expectations for socially responsible business conduct. Such expectations include sustainability, stability, and the ethical and legal expectations of different corporate constituencies. The course considers the role of individual managers and offers them specific frameworks and techniques for integrating social responsibilities and more traditional business concerns into business strategies which provide sustainable competitive advantages. Specific topics include the expectations of shareholders, employees, customers and governments as well the relationships between businesses and the natural environments and communities in which they operate.

BUSI672: Global Supply Chain Management (Globalization Selective)

Offers a practical blueprint for understanding, building, implementing, and sustaining supply chains in today's rapidly changing global supply chain environment. It will provide the student with a survey of the fast-moving Supply Chain Management discipline and practice, including the evolution of supply chain strategies, business models and technologies; current best practices in demand and supply management; and methodologies for conducting supply chain-wide diagnostic assessments and formulating process improvement plans.

BUSI673: International Economics for Managers (Globalization Selective)

Focuses on understanding critical aspects of the global business environment that influence firm decisions and behavior. Globalization is present in market competition, capital markets, and managerial talent as evidenced by free trade areas and economic unions forming, the volatility in global financial markets, and the continued rise of transnational firms. With globalization, the challenge for firms is to acknowledge, understand and act when appropriate - to act by sourcing, lobbying, and relocating value chain activities internationally. 

BUSI674: Globalizing the Enterprise (Globalization Selective)

Focuses on the "strategic" and "organizational" questions that a company must address as it globalizes its footprint. Among the questions that will be addressed are: What are the potential benefits, costs, and risks associated with going abroad? What differentiates a "global" from a "multidomestic" industry? What are the sources of competitive advantage in a global context?

BUSI 681 Managerial Economics and Public Policy; (2 credits)

Basic microeconomic principles used by firms, including supply and demand, elasticities, costs, productivity, pricing, market structure and competitive implications of alternative market structures. Market failures and government intervention. Public policy processes affecting business operations.

BUSI 683 The Global Economic Environment; (2 credits)

Relationship between national and international economic environments. Determinants of output, interest rates, prices and exchange rates. Analysis of effect of economic policies (fiscal, monetary, trade, tax) on the firm and the economy.

BUSI 690 Strategic Management; (2 credits)

Integrative strategic management focusing on strategy formulation and implementation in domestic and global settings. Industry and competitor analysis, industry and firm value chain, leadership, goal setting, organizational structure and culture. Case study approach to top management and organizational problems.

BUSI691: Integrative Business Plan Competition

Designed to inspire and enable students to develop new business products, services, processes and management models. Three-person teams create a business plan to commercialize an innovation and submit the plan to the MBA business plan competition. The plan can involve creation of independent ventures or ventures within an established business.