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MBA Essentials

A Mini-MBA Certificate Program

Who Should Attend

  • Professionals who need to learn basic business concepts, skills, and vocabulary in order to communicate and work more effectively with other functional specialists and senior management
  • Highly valuable for both technical and non-technical professions (engineers, scientists, software pros, health, legal, sports, etc.)
  • Individuals with some managerial experience who need a better understanding of basic business concepts and the skills to apply them on the job
  • Managers who want a taste of what it would be like “to get my MBA”
  • Anyone who faces increasing management responsibilities but may not have a formal business or management background

Value Added

In today's business world, doing your job successfully means being able to work and communicate effectively with specialists in all functional areas and senior management. To do this, you need to understand the foundations, concepts, and techniques that form the basis for management today. In addition, you need to know the basic business vocabulary that fosters easier communication and enhances overall individual and corporate performance.

In MBA Essentials, 10 outstanding Katz School professors expose you to all the management basics—plus cutting-edge theories and tactics—in each functional area. They also help you develop the skills you need to "think corporately" by tying together all the functions. You gain experience in team problem-solving and in applying your new techniques, strategies, and skills under your faculty's expert guidance.

Objective

  • To significantly enhance individual and organizational
    performance
  • To provide an understanding of the most important
    managerial concepts for each functional area
  • To help you develop basic management skills that will enable you to apply what you are learning on the job
  • To enable you to tie the functional areas together in
    order to increase revenue, control expenses, and
    promote productivity
  • To enable you to communicate and work more
    effectively with specialists in all functional areas and
    senior management
  • To create learning networks among executives to
    promote business opportunities

Outline

Business Ethics

  • Ethical leadership defined
  • Tools for ethical analysis
  • Leading and managing ethical organizations
  • Business ethics across cultural and legal boundaries

Cost Analysis

  • Basic cost terminology and concepts
  • Relevant cost information in planning and decision-making
  • Process, value chain, and cost structure linkages
  • Activity-based costing and activity-based management

Financial Accounting

  • Accounting terminology
  • Financial results of the organization's strategy
  • Financial statement analysis

Leadership and Communication

  • Behavioral science perspective of organizations
  • Empowering an organization
  • Motivation

Lean Six Sigma

  • Process improvement principles
  • Successful techniques for continuous improvement
  • Reducing costs, increasing speed and improving quality and service

Marketing

  • Value cycle
  • Value proposition and marketing strategy
  • Value delivery
  • Customer acquisition and retention

Negotiations

  • Conflict management
  • Win-win negotiations

Strategic Initiatives in Competitive Markets

  • The role of strategy and management systems in ensuring organizational success in a changing world
  • Fundamental techniques that support the development and implementation of strategy in organizations

Value Creation

  • Efficiency of capital markets
  • Corporate valuation
  • Value implications of corporate restructuring

Management Simulation

Experienced-based learning (EBL) is one of the defining characteristics of the Katz School. EBL is a powerful teaching tool because it requires students to apply the theories and knowledge discussed in the classroom to real-world situations. In MBA Essentials, this translates to a Web-based management simulation whereby teams of participants are given a company to manage. Teams apply the concepts covered in the program and compete against one another to maximize organizational performance.