UVa Course Catalog (Unofficial, Lou's List)
Complete Catalog of Courses for the Darden School of Business    
Class Schedules Index Course Catalogs Index Class Search Page
These pages present data mined from the University of Virginia's student information system (SIS). I hope that you will find them useful. — Lou Bloomfield, Department of Physics
Graduate Business
GBUS 7100Global Leadership Explorations - Part I (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Each location chosen for our GEMBA residencies offers a broad set of opportunities for building global awareness as well as allowing more integration opportunities across courses. Global Leadership Explorations are a series of courses that will leverage the "why" we are in a certain location and "what" we can learn about ourselves, our companies, business and our world.
GBUS 7101Global Leadership Explorations - Part II (1.5)
Each location chosen for our GEMBA residencies offers a broad set of opportunities for building global awareness as well as allowing more integration opportunities across courses. Global Leadership Explorations are a series of courses that will leverage the 'why' we are in a certain location and 'what' we can learn about ourselves, our companies, business and our world.
GBUS 7102Global Leadership Explorations - Part III (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Each location chosen for our GEMBA residencies offers a broad set of opportunities for building global awareness as well as allowing more integration opportunities across courses. Global Leadership Explorations are a series of courses that will leverage the 'why' we are in a certain location and 'what' we can learn about ourselves, our companies, business and our world.
GBUS 7103Global Leadership Explorations - Part IV (1.5)
Each location chosen for our GEMBA residencies offers a broad set of opportunities for building global awareness as well as allowing more integration opportunities across courses. Global Leadership Explorations are a series of courses that will leverage the 'why' we are in a certain location and 'what' we can learn about ourselves, our companies, business and our world.
GBUS 7104Global Leadership Explorations - Part V (3)
Each location chosen for our GEMBA residencies offers a broad set of opportunities for building global awareness as well as allowing more integration opportunities across courses. Global Leadership Explorations are a series of courses that will leverage the 'why' we are in a certain location and 'what' we can learn about ourselves, our companies, business and our world.
GBUS 7105Leading Global Enterprises (1.5)
The LGE course provides a critical introduction to many of the key challenges managers face in Leading Global Enterprises. Along with the other courses in your first On-Grounds, LGE provides you a rich opportunity to understand the challenging task you face as a global leader and serves as a bridge to the courses you will take throughout the program.
GBUS 7106Understanding Global Markets (1.5)
The UGM course addresses the key issues facing managers interacting with global markets, both product, as well as financial markets. It is an introduction, which builds a foundation for the individual courses (FMP, GEM, MKT, STR), which will go into greater depth covering these issues in the continuation of the program. It is cross-disciplinary, and aims at developing a global, cross-disciplinary perspective for all students..
GBUS 7107Managing Global Processes (1.5)
Managing Global Processes develops a sense of executing strategy in a global organization. The focus will be on the company's processes through study of decision making regarding best choices, the global supply chain, and ultimately the activities that are managed by understanding the firm's revenues and costs.
GBUS 7108Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Growth (2)
This two-credit course will focus on the source, development (or refinement), and growth of new ideas in an organization's ecosystem. In 15 classes, each two hours long, students will be exposed to the systems and processes that enable organizations to develop and sustain a culture of innovation.
GBUS 7109Leading Global Strategic Change (2)
This two-credit course presents students with multiple challenges of designing and implementing change at several levels including organizational, departmental, team, and individual. The course will build on topics introduced in leadership in organizations, management communications, strategy, and ethics.
GBUS 7110Global Business by the Numbers (2)
This two-credit course presents students with a variety of problems that require managers of global organizations to take a quantitative approach to understand and solve. The course is designed as an application and extension of the principles of accounting, finance, and decision analysis. The problems considered are more complex than those introduced in the core of the GEMBA program.
GBUS 7111Creating the Future (3)
This three-credit course is project-based and meant to be a capstone to the GEMBA program. As such, it is intended to integrate what the students have learned and how they might think proactively about the future and the role their MBA education might play in society.
GBUS 7113Global Leadership Explorations - Part III (1.5)
Each location chosen for our GEMBA residencies offers a broad set of opportunities for building global awareness as well as allowing more integration opportunities across courses. Global Leadership Explorations are a series of two-week courses that will focus on why students are in a certain location and what they can learn about themselves, their companies, business and the world.
GBUS 7114Global Leadership Explorations - Part VI (3)
Each location chosen for our GEMBA residencies offers a broad set of opportunities for building global awareness as well as allowing more integration opportunities across courses. Global Leadership Explorations are a series of two-week courses that will focus on why students are in a certain location and what they can learn about themselves, their companies, business and the world.
GBUS 7116Explorations in Enterprise Leadership Part I (1.5)
Washington, DC region provides a wealth of opportunities for engaging directly with topics relevant to the challenges of leading a global firm, exploring the challenges of managing diverse stakeholders, & discussing how we can leverage concepts from across our curriculum as we manage the uncertainties facing contemporary leaders. Course provides a diverse range of leadership experiences & topics.
Course was offered Fall 2019, Fall 2018
GBUS 7117Explorations in Enterprise Leadership Part II (1.5)
Washington, DC region provides a wealth of opportunities for engaging directly with topics relevant to the challenges of leading a global firm, exploring the challenges of managing diverse stakeholders, & discussing how we can leverage concepts from across our curriculum as we manage the uncertainties facing contemporary leaders. Course provides a diverse range of leadership experiences & topics.
GBUS 7118Explorations in Enterprise Leadership - Part III (1.5)
Washington, DC region provides a wealth of opportunities for engaging directly with topics relevant to the challenges of leading a global firm, exploring the challenges of managing diverse stakeholders, & discussing how we can leverage concepts from across our curriculum as we manage the uncertainties facing contemporary leaders. Course provides a diverse range of leadership experiences & topics.
GBUS 7119Explorations in Enterprise Leadership- Part IV (1.5)
Washington, DC region provides a wealth of opportunities for engaging directly with topics relevant to the challenges of leading a global firm, exploring the challenges of managing diverse stakeholders, & discussing how we can leverage concepts from across our curriculum as we manage the uncertainties facing contemporary leaders. Course provides a diverse range of leadership experiences & topics.
GBUS 7210Leadership Communication (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course gives students the guidance and hands-on experience that will allow them to communicate effectively as managers and leaders. Students will examine communication strategies essential for success in business, identify their personal strengths and goals, and practice activities that build upon proven competencies and offer practice in new approaches. Students will gain comfort and skill in a personal communication style that is authentic, credible, and authoritative. The course will improve students' understanding of and ability to apply communication strategy, and will help them not only appreciate the power of personal and organizational narratives but also deliver successful written documents and oral presentations.
GBUS 7215Leadership Communication (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course gives students the guidance and hands-on experience that will allow them to communicate effectively as managers and leaders. Students will examine communication strategies essential for success in business, identify their personal strengths and goals, and practice activities that build upon proven competencies and offer practice in new approaches.
GBUS 7231Global Economies and Markets (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course applies the ideas and methodologies of economics to the analysis of the business environment in which firms operate and managers make decisions. The course expands students' knowledge of global economies and markets in three dimensions. First, it delivers insights and tools for analyzing markets in the global economy by studying such topics as competition, market structure, efficiency, industry equilibrium, and change. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 7232Global Economies and Markets - Part II (1.5)
This course applies the ideas and methodologies of economics to the analysis of the business environment in which firms operate and managers make decisions. The course expands students' knowledge of global economies and markets in three dimensions. First, it delivers insights and tools for analyzing markets in the global economy by studying such topics as competition, market structure, efficiency, industry equilibrium, and change. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 7235Global Economies and Markets - Part I (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course applies the ideas and methodologies of economics to the analysis of the business environment in which firms operate and managers make decisions. The course expands students' knowledge of global economies and markets in three dimensions. First, it delivers insights and tools for analyzing markets in the global economy by studying such topics as competition, market structure, efficiency, industry equilibrium, and change.
GBUS 7236Global Economies and Markets - Part II (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course applies the ideas and methodologies of economics to the analysis of the business environment in which firms operate and managers make decisions. The course expands students' knowledge of global economies and markets in three dimensions. First, it delivers insights and tools for analyzing markets in the global economy by studying such topics as competition, market structure, efficiency, industry equilibrium, and change.
GBUS 7238Global Economies & Markets - Part IV (0)
This course applies the ideas and methodologies of economics to the analysis of the business environment in which firms operate and managers make decisions. The course expands students' knowledge of global economies and markets in three dimensions. The ultimate objective of the course is to help students develop frameworks for analyzing both opportunities and risks when operating in the global business environment.
GBUS 7251Financial Management and Policies - Part I (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This corporate-finance course focuses on corporate policy and the tactics that increase the value of the corporation. The course starts by stressing how managers interface with the capital markets to learn the return required by the firm's different investors. This required return, or cost of capital, is used later as the key variable to assess whether capital-investment proposals can create value for stakeholders. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 7252Financial Management and Policies - Part II (1.5)
This corporate-finance course focuses on corporate policy and the tactics that increase the value of the corporation. The course starts by stressing how managers interface with the capital markets to learn the return required by the firm's different investors. This required return, or cost of capital, is used later as the key variable to assess whether capital-investment proposals can create value for stakeholders. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 7257Financial Management & Policies (Part III) (1.5)
This corporate-finance course focuses on corporate policy and the tactics that increase the value of the corporation. The course starts by stressing how managers interface with the capital markets to learn the return required by the firm's different investors. This required return, or cost of capital, is used later as the key variable to assess whether capital-investment proposals can create value for stakeholders.
GBUS 7258Financial Management & Policies (Part II) (1.5)
This corporate-finance course focuses on corporate policy and the tactics that increase the value of the corporation. The course starts by stressing how managers interface with the capital markets to learn the return required by the firm's different investors. This required return, or cost of capital, is used later as the key variable to assess whether capital-investment proposals can create value for stakeholders.
GBUS 7260Financial Management and Policies - Part IV (1.5)
This corporate-finance course focuses on corporate policy and the tactics that increase the value of the corporation. The course starts by stressing how managers interface with the capital markets to learn the return required by the firms different investors. This required return, or cost of capital, is used later as the key variable to assess whether capital-investment proposals can create value for stakeholders.
Course was offered Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
GBUS 7272Accounting for Managers (3)
Offered
Fall 2024
As the language of business and the cornerstone of the financial capital markets, accounting provides terminology, frameworks, and concepts with which to understand and analyze the financial consequences of business activities. As these activities have become increasingly complex and global, the task of presenting timely, relevant, and reliable financial information to interested internal and external users has become more challenging. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 7275Accounting for Managers - Part I (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
As the language of business and the cornerstone of the financial capital markets, accounting provides terminology, frameworks, and concepts with which to understand and analyze the financial consequences of business activities. As these activities have become increasingly complex and global, the task of presenting timely, relevant, and reliable financial information to interested internal and external users has become more challenging.
GBUS 7276Accounting for Managers - Part II (1.5)
As the language of business and the cornerstone of the financial capital markets, accounting provides terminology, frameworks, and concepts with which to understand and analyze the financial consequences of business activities. As these activities have become increasingly complex and global, the task of presenting timely, relevant, and reliable financial information to interested internal and external users has become more challenging.
GBUS 7277Accounting for Managers (Part I) (1.5)
This course consists of two complementary components: managerial accounting and financial accounting. Managerial accounting has an internal focus and pertains to the collection and analysis of financial information relevant to business operations, including costs analysis, product and service costing, planning, budgeting, and performance evaluation.
GBUS 7278Accounting for Managers (Part II) (1.5)
This course consists of two complementary components: managerial accounting and financial accounting. Managerial accounting has an internal focus and pertains to the collection and analysis of financial information relevant to business operations, including costs analysis, product and service costing, planning, budgeting, and performance evaluation.
GBUS 7279Accounting for Managers - Part III (1.5)
The primary purpose of the first-year program ACC core course is to provide students with considerable financial-statement, financial-analysis, and financial-management expertise in order to enhance their decision-making capabilities. This course consists of two complementary components: managerial accounting and financial accounting.
GBUS 7281Accounting for Managers - Part IV (0)
The primary purpose of the first-year program ACC core course is to provide students with considerable financial-statement, financial-analysis, and financial-management expertise in order to enhance their decision-making capabilities. This course consists of two complementary components: managerial accounting and financial accounting.
GBUS 7291Marketing (2)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course provides students with an introduction to consumer behavior and marketing analytics. Its goal is to expose students to difficult marketing issues that both U.S. and foreign companies face.
GBUS 7292Marketing Part II (1)
This course provides students with an introduction to consumer behavior and marketing analytics. Its goal is to expose students to difficult marketing issues that both U.S. and foreign companies face. Prerequisite: GBUS 7291
GBUS 7295Marketing Part I (1.5)
This course provides students with an introduction to consumer behavior and marketing analytics. Its goal is to expose students to difficult marketing issues that both U.S. and foreign companies face.
GBUS 7296Marketing - Part II (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course provides students with an introduction to consumer behavior and marketing analytics. Its goal is to expose students to difficult marketing issues that both U.S. and foreign companies face.
GBUS 7297Marketing - Part III (0.75)
This course provides students with an introduction to consumer behavior and marketing analytics. Its goal is to expose students to difficult marketing issues that both U.S. and foreign companies face.
Course was offered Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015, Fall 2014
GBUS 7298Marketing - Part IV (0.75)
This course provides students with an introduction to consumer behavior and marketing analytics. Its goal is to expose students to difficult marketing issues that both U.S. and foreign companies face.
GBUS 7311Operations Management (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course is designed to convey to students both the fundamentals of operations and the understanding that the link between operations and firm performance is a crucial source of competitive advantage. Managing the underlying processes by which firms create and deliver value is at the heart of the operations function in every line of business, and this course focuses on how to do this well. Prerequisite: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 7312Operations Management - Part II (1.5)
This course is designed to convey to students both the fundamentals of operations and the understanding that the link between operations and firm performance is a crucial source of competitive advantage. Managing the underlying processes by which firms create and deliver value is at the heart of the operations function in every line of business, and this course focuses on how to do this well. Prerequisite: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 7315Operations Management Part I (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course is designed to convey to students both the fundamentals of operations and the understanding that the link between operations and firm performance is a crucial source of competitive advantage. Managing the underlying processes by which firms create and deliver value is at the heart of the operations function in every line of business, and this course focuses on how to do this well.
GBUS 7316Operations Management - Part II (1.5)
This course is designed to convey to students both the fundamentals of operations and the understanding that the link between operations and firm performance is a crucial source of competitive advantage. Managing the underlying processes by which firms create and deliver value is at the heart of the operations function in every line of business, and this course focuses on how to do this well.
GBUS 7317Operations Management - Part III (1.5)
This course is designed to convey to students both the fundamentals of operations and the understanding that the link between operations and firm performance is a crucial source of competitive advantage. Managing the underlying processes by which firms create and deliver value is at the heart of the operations function in every line of business, and this course focuses on how to do this well.
GBUS 7318Operations Management - Part I (1.5)
This course is designed to convey to students both the fundamentals of operations and the understanding that the link between operations and firm performance is a crucial source of competitive advantage. Managing the underlying processes by which firms create and deliver value is at the heart of the operations function in every line of business, and this course focuses on how to do this well.
GBUS 7320Operations Management - Pt III (0)
This course is designed to convey to students both the fundamentals of operations and the understanding that the link between operations and firm performance is a crucial source of competitive advantage. Managing the underlying processes by which firms create and deliver value is at the heart of the operations function in every line of business, and this course focuses on how to do this well.
GBUS 7321Operations Management - Part IV (0)
This course is designed to convey to students both the fundamentals of operations and the understanding that the link between operations and firm performance is a crucial source of competitive advantage. Managing the underlying processes by which firms create and deliver value is at the heart of the operations function in every line of business, and this course focuses on how to do this well.
GBUS 7341Leading Organizations (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
High-performing organizations are driven by leaders who enable people to be effective in their jobs. This course helps students cultivate mind-sets and use tools to influence behavior in organizations. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 7342Leading Organizations (3)
High-performing organizations are driven by leaders who enable people to be effective in their jobs. This course helps students cultivate mind-sets and use tools to influence behavior in organizations. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 7343Leading Organizations (1.5)
High-performing organizations are driven by leaders who enable people to be effective in their jobs. This course helps students cultivate mind-sets and use tools to influence behavior in organizations. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 7344Leading Organizations (1.5)
High-performing organizations are driven by leaders who enable people to be effective in their jobs. This course helps students cultivate mind-sets and use tools to influence behavior in organizations. In the first part of the course, students will master several foundational skills, including how to take a global-leadership point of view, identify critical business challenges, understand the drivers of those challenges.
GBUS 7345Leading Organizations - Part I (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
High-performing organizations are driven by leaders who enable people to be effective in their jobs. This course helps students cultivate mind-sets and use tools to influence behavior in organizations.
GBUS 7346Leading Organizations Part II (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
High-performing organizations are driven by leaders who enable people to be effective in their jobs. This course helps students cultivate mind-sets and use tools to influence behavior in organizations.
GBUS 7347Leading Organizations - Part III (0.75)
High-performing organizations are driven by leaders who enable people to be effective in their jobs. This course helps students cultivate mind-sets and use tools to influence behavior in organizations.
GBUS 7348Leading Organizations (Part I) (1.5)
High-performing organizations are driven by leaders who enable people to be effective in their jobs. This course helps students cultivate mind-sets and use tools to influence behavior in organizations.
Course was offered Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015, Fall 2014
GBUS 7349Leading Organizations (Part II) (1.5)
High-performing organizations are driven by leaders who enable people to be effective in their jobs. This course helps students cultivate mind-sets and use tools to influence behavior in organizations.
GBUS 7351Decision Analysis (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Business decisions, both tactical and strategic, are frequently made difficult by the presence of uncertainty in the resulting consequences. This course presents a philosophy for framing, analyzing, and proactively managing decisions involving uncertainty, whether the uncertainty results from general conditions or the actions of competitors. The course will focus on making the uncertainty explicit so that it can be objectively analyzed. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 7352Decision Analysis - Part II (1.5)
Business decisions, both tactical and strategic, are frequently made difficult by the presence of uncertainty in the resulting consequences. This course presents a philosophy for framing, analyzing, and proactively managing decisions involving uncertainty, whether the uncertainty results from general conditions or the actions of competitors. The course will focus on making the uncertainty explicit so that it can be objectively analyzed. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 7353Leading Organizations - Part IV (1.5)
High-performing organizations are driven by leaders who enable people to be effective in their jobs. This course helps students cultivate mind-sets and use tools to influence behavior in organizations.
Course was offered Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
GBUS 7355Decision Analysis - Part I (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Business decisions, both tactical and strategic, are frequently made difficult by the presence of uncertainty in the resulting consequences. This course presents a philosophy for framing, analyzing, and proactively managing decisions involving uncertainty, whether the uncertainty results from general conditions or the actions of competitors. The course will focus on making the uncertainty explicit so that it can be objectively analyzed.
GBUS 7356Decision Analysis - Part II (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Business decisions, both tactical and strategic, are frequently made difficult by the presence of uncertainty in the resulting consequences. This course presents a philosophy for framing, analyzing, and proactively managing decisions involving uncertainty, whether the uncertainty results from general conditions or the actions of competitors. The course will focus on making the uncertainty explicit so that it can be objectively analyzed.
GBUS 7357Decision Analysis - Part III (0.75)
Business decisions, both tactical and strategic, are frequently made difficult by the presence of uncertainty in the resulting consequences. This course presents a philosophy for framing, analyzing, and proactively managing decisions involving uncertainty, whether the uncertainty results from general conditions or the actions of competitors. The course will focus on making the uncertainty explicit so that it can be objectively analyzed.
GBUS 7358Decision Analysis - Part I-G (1.5)
Business decisions, both tactical and strategic, are frequently made difficult by the presence of uncertainty in the resulting consequences. This course presents a philosophy for framing, analyzing, and proactively managing decisions involving uncertainty, whether the uncertainty results from general conditions or the actions of competitors.
GBUS 7359Decision Analysis - Part II-G (1.5)
Business decisions, both tactical and strategic, are frequently made difficult by the presence of uncertainty in the resulting consequences. This course presents a philosophy for framing, analyzing, and proactively managing decisions involving uncertainty, whether the uncertainty results from general conditions or the actions of competitors.
GBUS 7380Business Ethics (Part 1) (1.5)
The purpose of this course is to enable students to reason about the role of ethics in business administration in a complex, dynamic, global environment. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to think deeply about the nature of business, the responsibilities of management, and how business and ethics can be put together. Cases without easy answers that raise a range of problems facing managers in the contemporary business environment will be used. Discussions will focus on developing a framework for analyzing the issues in moral terms and then making a decision and developing a set of reasons for why the decision was justified. Students will be pushed to think carefully about how they make decisions and develop their capacity to defend their decisions to other stakeholders. This is important as a way not only to foster integrity and responsible decision making, but also to push students to take leadership roles in dealing with complex and difficult choices they will face in their careers. Operating from a managerial perspective, students will address a range of themes in the class, including basic concepts in ethics, responsibilities to stakeholders and the building blocks of markets, corporate culture, the sources of ethical breakdowns in organizations, managerial integrity, value creation, and personal values and managerial choice.
GBUS 7385Business Ethics (1.5)
The purpose of this course is to enable students to reason about the role of ethics in business administration in a complex, dynamic, global environment. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to think deeply about the nature of business, the responsibilities of management, and how business and ethics can be put together.
GBUS 7400Strategic Thinking and Action (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course develops students' ability to analyze the organizational and external factors essential for crafting and executing a firm's strategy for sustained success. The course draws heavily from the key concepts, frameworks, and tools of strategic management. Taking an action orientation, it reinforces and revitalizes the general-management perspective, the core mission of the school. Because of increasing global interdependence and an ever-shifting business environment, it emphasizes both the dynamics and the global aspects of strategic management. Topics include developing and evaluating strategy, building firm capability and sustaining competitive advantage, analyzing industry evolution and global rivalry, and linking strategy and execution. Course objectives are accomplished through exposure to cases from a range of industries and managerial settings. By providing students with an opportunity to apply analytical skills they learn in various first-year courses, the course fosters an integrative mind-set that will enable MBAs to operate at multiple levels and in different functions in their business careers.
GBUS 7401Strategic Thinking and Action - Part II (0.75)
This course develops students' ability to analyze the organizational and external factors essential for crafting and executing a firm's strategy for sustained success. The course draws heavily from the key concepts, frameworks, and tools of strategic management.
GBUS 7402Strategic Thinking & Action (Part I) (1.5)
This course develops students' ability to analyze the organizational and external factors essential for crafting and executing a firm's strategy for sustained success. The course draws heavily from the key concepts, frameworks, and tools of strategic management. Taking an action orientation, it reinforces and revitalizes the general-management perspective, the core mission of the school.
GBUS 7405Strategic Thinking and Action (1.5)
This course develops students' ability to analyze the organizational and external factors essential for crafting and executing a firm's strategy for sustained success. The course draws heavily from the key concepts, frameworks, and tools of strategic management. Taking an action orientation, it reinforces and revitalizes the general-management perspective-- the core mission of the school.
GBUS 7500Innovation, Design, and Entrepreneurship in Action (IDEA) (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This action-oriented, team-based course will engage students in a live field project over the course of seven weeks and will build upon the required First Year curriculum. IDEA is an innovative offering grounded in the approaches of design thinking, agile project management, data analytics, effectuation, and lean start-up. The course is centered on team-based field projects addressing real world global challenges.
GBUS 7510Business Resources Management Program (3)
The Business Resources Management Program will be a four-week course of instruction in the concepts and practice of business administration. The course will be designed with one goal in mind - to accelerate the career development of high potential , Junior Grade Navy Officers. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden Ex. Ed. - Navy Officers
Course was offered Spring 2012, Spring 2011
GBUS 7600Data Vistualization and Analytics (1.5)
This course is designed for the student who wants to be optimally prepared to perform quantitative analysis at a level consistent with (and exceeding) expectations for MBA interns in positions where quantitative sophistication is required. Its only prerequisite is the first-year Decision Analysis course; no additional quantitative experience or acumen is required. The course will focus primarily on data analysis, used to both gain useful insights into relationships and make better, more useful forecasts. In addition to more advanced treatment of regression analysis (the goal being for students to be able to build and apply sophisticated regression models), students will become familiar with other common approaches to forecasting, such as rudimentary time-series analysis. Students will also improve their ability to structure, analyze, and manage situations involving uncertainty and risk, using simulation (Crystal Ball), decision trees, and the other tools introduced in the required Decision Analysis course. Finally, the course will introduce students to the concepts of optimization using Excel's Solver add-in, used to determine how to optimally allocate resources in situations involving complex trade-offs.
GBUS 7601Financial Reporting (1.5)
This course is intended to provide students with a comprehensive conceptual and applied understanding of our society's accounting and financial reporting system and an in-depth look at the numerous factors that managers and executives must consider as they confront complex and difficult financial accounting and reporting issues. Students will examine significant financial accounting and reporting issues from both a rigorous theoretical perspective and an informed practical perspective. Students will explore such traditional issues as revenue recognition, inventory valuation, and leases, and such contemporary issues as mergers and acquisitions, intangibles, and financial derivatives. Although the primary focus of the course will be on accounting and reporting practices in the United States, students will also address selected differences between U.S. accounting standards and international accounting standards. How the major accounting scandals that have occurred in recent years have affected the financial reporting process and those who have the responsibility for insuring the accuracy of a company's published financial statements will also be addressed. [l1] By the conclusion of this course, students should be reasonably proficient at understanding, interpreting, and analyzing the information contained in corporate financial statements and their related footnotes, and also be able to assess the overall quality of a company's financial reporting, identify the critical accounting policies, and make an assessment regarding the reasonableness of those policies and their supporting estimates and judgments.
GBUS 7602Global Financial Markets (1.5)
This course emphasizes the development of technical skills that enable students to improve their understanding of global financial markets. The course focuses on the key drivers of movements in currency and interest-rate markets around the world, as well as the important institutions and players that impact those markets. Students will examine how interest rates are impacted by such factors as central-bank behavior, fiscal policy, the state of the business cycle, productivity, inflation expectations, and international capital flows. For currencies, students will develop two related tool kits: one that is useful for understanding the drivers of orderly changes in exchange rates, and a second, through the construction of an early-warning system, that focuses on factors associated with large and potentially disorderly depreciations. Students will also investigate ways in which firms and investors manage interest-rate and currency exposure, as well as how countries manage exchange rates. The course, which includes both technical readings and cases, should appeal to a broad array of students, especially those who wish to pursue careers in investment banking, international finance, and general management.
GBUS 7603Valuation in Financial Markets (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course focuses on how financial assets and firms are valued in financial markets. It directly extends and strengthens the corporate finance principles from the required first-year Financial Management and Policies course by applying valuation models to real financial data and assets. The course contains three modules: firm-valuation techniques, option-pricing principles, and fixed-income valuation. The first module extends the first-year finance course by considering more difficult firm valuations as well as alternate techniques for valuing firms. The second and third modules relate to the capital markets for which valuation principles from options and fixed-income instruments are used as building blocks to decompose the valuation of complex financial instruments.
GBUS 7604Communicating through Leadership Presence (1.5)
The aim of this course is to help students have confidence in their unique perspectives and to develop leadership communication skills that fully, creatively, and effectively express their insights. Topics introduced in the required Management Communication course, communication strategy, credibility, storytelling, persuasion will be further examined, specifically in the context of oral communication. .
GBUS 7605Strategic Communication (1.5)
Expanding on the model of first semester Management Communication, this course emphasizes how general managers can, through communicating with a consideration of changing contexts, further an organization's strategy and remove obstacles to implementing that strategy. Students will explore how in today's rapid pace of change in communication technology, the corporate communication function must communicate authentically to and align messages with all stakeholders while managers at every level will be increasingly expected to clearly articulate corporate strategy and goals. Many internships end with a presentation or report and seek three capabilities: mastery of key MBA concepts, solving an enterprise level problem, and superior communication skills. By moving from analysis to articulation and implementation, the communication perspective is especially suited to integrating key concepts in order to solve larger analytical problems. This class will use cases as a basis for such daily exercises as media training, financial conference calls, and action plan pitches and will conclude with a substantive presentation driven by student interests.
GBUS 7606Marketing Intelligence (1.5)
This course is designed to familiarize students with the market research tools and techniques commonly used by Darden students in marketing internships and graduating students who pursue careers in marketing. The course will cover the basic techniques for market sizing and expose students to important sources of secondary marketing information. It also will cover a number of important primary research topics, including questionnaire design, focus groups, perceptual mapping, conjoint analysis, and market experiments. Course content will feature a combination of cases, exercises, lectures, and a group project. The market intelligence topics will be addressed in the context of important marketing issues such as positioning, target market selection, assessing brand meaning, value pricing, and evaluating communication effectiveness. The emphasis in the course is on the planning and design of gathering marketing intelligence and basic level analysis. Advanced techniques in data analysis will be taught in the Marketing Analytics course.
GBUS 7607Establishing Yourself at Work (1.5)
This course prepares first-year students for their summer internships. Using full-length feature films, the course shows students how to get the most out of their summer internships and, in the process, teaches them career-management skills that will help them become more effective leaders in their careers after Darden. The course addresses critical well-researched joining-up phenomena such as letting go of the current engagement, establishing credibility, learning organizational norms, socialization, self-management, the locus of control, the effects of compromise, joining work groups and teams, adult-learning theory, orientation to hierarchy and power distance, managing upward, abrasive personalities, and consolidating experience-based learning. It is designed to capitalize on the literature and research bases provided by neurolinguistic programming, habitual behavior, and rational-emotive-behavior constructs in order to ensure that students will fit in quickly, gain influence rapidly, learn consistently, and outperform their competition. The provocative films encourage student engagement and, perhaps, life-changing debate.
GBUS 7608General Management and Operational Effectiveness (1.5)
This course addresses topics and subjects likely to be experienced by MBAs seeking positions or internships in general-management career-development programs or consulting firms with a strong interest in good operations-analysis/management skills. The topics covered in this course are likely to be encountered by rising MBA students in their summer internships or by recent graduates in their first few years out of school. Topics will include, but will not be limited to, such areas as competitive cost analysis, lean thinking in services and manufacturing, and six-sigma project design and implementation. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 7609Entrepreneurial Thinking (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course is about learning to think and act entrepreneurially in order to create new value in the world through new products, new solutions, new ventures, new business units, new distribution channels, new firms, new business models, new technologies, and business transformation. The emphasis will be on the art and science of 'creating something new from little.' The orientation in the course will be to challenge students to think about how they can create, finance, and build or change a productive business organization with commonly available resources (e.g., intelligence, insight, energy, initiative, and personal relationships). Students will learn to use this orientation wherever new-venture creation may occur, namely, through the actions of an independent entrepreneur or in a large, established firm.
GBUS 7610Creative Capitalism (1.5)
The first six to eight sessions of the course examines the process of creating value for multiple stakeholders and focuses on business models that 'make a difference' by combining traditional value for financiers with the broader concept of value for stakeholders (including financiers). Pre-requisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 7611The Consulting Process (1.5)
This course is intended to introduce students to the consulting process and to help them identify and refine the skill sets necessary for successful consultation. The course is designed specifically for students interested in pursuing consulting internships and careers but who do not have significant consulting experience prior to Darden. Approximately half of the course will focus on the cognitive processes involved in framing and designing the engagement specifically, hypothesis generating and testing, using a set of video cases that track the work of actual consulting teams as they move through the processes of initiating and completing client projects. The other half will address a more tactical set of issues around engagement work-planning, data-gathering, field-interviewing, and communicating with clients. The course will include the use of cases and exercises and the completion of a final project presentation. Students will be assigned to a consulting team to work with throughout the course.
GBUS 7612Speaking about Business (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
By exploring in more depth the strategies of communication framed in the First-Year Management Communication course, this course offers students the opportunity to obtain the polished presentation skills, particularly oral, so necessary for a successful career.
GBUS 7613Sustainability, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1.5)
This (SIE) course provides students with practical information on the expanding frontier of innovation and entrepreneurial activity where ventures combine profitability with environmental performance, environmental health improvements, and expanded community prosperity.
GBUS 7614The Adrenaline Innovation Project (1.5)
This one-week course offers students an opportunity to immerse themselves in the product development process. Students will work in teams during the week to develop a product prototype based on an initial concept. Teams will define product and market characteristics, design packaging, make choices regarding suppliers and distribution channels, and develop product financials.
GBUS 7615Develop an Entrepreneur's Mindset (1.5)
Students interested in creating a start-up or innovating within a large corporation will learn the fundamental tools that expert entrepreneurs and innovators use to launch a product. The one-week course will expose students to an integrated experience of identifying a problem, defining several solutions, defining their customers, and testing their solutions with real customers.
GBUS 7616Leadership Ride: Lesson in Leadership - Gettysburg (1.5)
This elective course brings to life the American Civil War through readings and sessions with Gary Gallagher, world-renowned American Civil War historian, and an intensive two-day visit to the site of the Battle of Gettysburg. While visiting the battlefield, students will examine how Union army and Confederate army commanders faced their moments of decision.
GBUS 7617Integrated Marketing Communications and Promotion (1.5)
This course addresses topics and subjects typically experienced by MBA students seeking positions in firms with an emphasis on marketing and sales. The terms promotion and integrated communications are used in the broadest sense. The first part of the course will cover basic topics in advertising strategy.
GBUS 7618Effectual Entrepreneurship (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Through a combination of cases and experiential exercises this course brings to students what expert entrepreneurs have learned the hard way. Expert entrepreneurs are people who have built multiple ventures including successes and failures and taken at least one company public.
GBUS 7619Paths to Power (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Power, status, and influence are topics that make many people somewhat uncomfortable. However, they are fundamental realities in much of organizational life and are the mechanisms by which things get done. Being an effective leader and change agent requires both understanding power and acting on that knowledge. This class is about power: how things get done, how to build and wield influence, and the multiple ways to accomplish these objectives.
GBUS 7620Interpersonal Communications (1.5)
This course looks at the barriers that limit individual and institutional networks and explores the ways in which networks can be expanded and strengthened resulting in more effective interpersonal communications. Students will learn that managers who understand and identify such networks are better informed, more effective, and more influential in their positions. Also included in the course will be the study of interpersonal, social, and organizational networks, how they can be created, and why they are valuable. Although the course will build on a number of the concepts presented in First-Year Management Communication, including audience analysis and persuasion, it will focus most closely on the role that storytelling plays in network creation and expansion. Instructional methodologies are a balance of cases and presentations, along with technical readings where appropriate. Leveraging our diverse community, role playing, impromptu speeches, narratives, more formal presentations, and some short written work will be used to build the skills necessary for effective networks. Students may choose a final presentation and paper to complete the course.
GBUS 7700Customer Centricity: A Strategic Approach (1.5)
The course takes the viewpoint that the best way to create and keep a customer is to: (i) identify customer needs and translate them to attractive value propositions, (ii) integrate customer understanding across the organization, and (iii) align the organizational structure to both satisfy current customer needs and adapt to changes in customer needs better than competitors. To be truly customer focused and market-driven.
Course was offered Spring 2021
GBUS 7805Experiential Learning - Part I (1.5)
In these courses, students are engaged in applying the knowledge and experiences of the MBA Program within their business and job settings. Because participants in the MBA Program for Executives are employed on a full-time basis, they have the unique opportunity to immediately apply part or all of the learning.
GBUS 7806Experiential Learning-Part 11 (1.5)
In these courses, students are engaged in applying the knowledge and experiences of the MBA Program within their business and job settings. Because participants in the MBA Program for Executives are employed on a full-time basis, they have the unique opportunity to immediately apply part or all of the learning.
GBUS 7807Experiential Learning-Part III (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
In these courses, students are engaged in applying the knowledge and experiences of the MBA Program within their business and job settings. Because participants in the MBA Program for Executives are employed on a full-time basis, they have the unique opportunity to immediately apply part or all of the learning.
GBUS 7808Experiential Learning-Part IV (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
In these courses, students are engaged in applying the knowledge and experiences of the MBA Program within their business and job settings. Because participants in the MBA Program for Executives are employed on a full-time basis, they have the unique opportunity to immediately apply part or all of the learning. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden Students.
GBUS 7809Experiential Learning - Part V (1.5)
In these courses, students are engaged in applying the knowledge and experiences of the MBA Program within their business and job settings. Because participants in the MBA Program for Executives are employed on a full-time basis, they have the unique opportunity to immediately apply part or all of the learning.
GBUS 7810Action Learning - Part VI (1.5)
In these courses, students are engaged in applying the knowledge and experiences of the MBA Program within their business and job settings. Because participants in the MBA Program for Executives are employed on a full-time basis, they have the unique opportunity to immediately apply part or all of the learning.
GBUS 7815Leadership Residency 1-Leading Change (3)
Offered
Fall 2024
Leadership Residency 1 challenges students to develop an understanding of and an appreciation for taking an enterprise perspective when making any management decision. Students will learn what an enterprise perspective involves, what it means to manage/lead with an enterprise perspective, and what the implications of that perspective for themselves as leaders are. The course is a mix of traditional academic pedagogy and experiential activities.
GBUS 7816Envisioning Your Future (3)
The Leadership Residency 2 consists of three modules that support the main topic of the course and offer students an opportunity to reflect on various sides of changing. Leaders Changing Organizations explores different ways leaders can conceptualize change in order to implement it.
GBUS 7817LR3: Leading in Emerging Economies (3)
This course follows MBAExec core courses and is a capstone for the MBAExec integrated core curriculum. It provides students with an opportunity to learn, first-hand, the challenges of doing business in an emerging economy, emphasizing the global dimension of leading with an enterprise perspective. Leadership Residency 3 gives students a context for examining and evaluating their own readiness for global leadership.
GBUS 7818Leadership Residency II (1.5)
The capstone of the MBA for Executives program. Students will consider their futures, the futures of their organizations and, most important, the leadership role they will play in the future of their organizations. Innovative thinking is the dominant theme of this course. Prerequisites: Restricted to executive Darden Students
GBUS 7888Darden Business Foundations (3)
Offered
Fall 2024
The Part Time opening residency prepares Part-time MBA students for success in the core Darden curriculum and Darden classroom by providing foundational knowledge of the core language of business practice and application of tools across disciplines to solve business issues. Students will develop their competency to develop and work in diverse teams, foster an inclusive environment, and establish community norms as leaders.
Course was offered Fall 2023, Fall 2022
GBUS 7889Organizational and Individual Change (3)
The course serves as both a capstone at the conclusion of the PTMBA students' core requirements and as a launch pad to prepare students for success in the impending electives portion of their Darden experience. Across modules, the week is designed to be active and experiential, getting the students out of their routine classroom environments and personal comfort zones.
Course was offered Spring 2024
GBUS 7899Professional Advancement Course: Full-time MBA (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Professional Advancement Course Full-time MBA is designed to help MBAs in the residential full-time program adopt new behaviors and reach their potential as leaders. Successful career professionals are intentional, have a strong sense of self, and take ownership over outcomes. This course invites students to build on their learnings from the first year, enhance their career skills, and further define their professional path forward.
GBUS 7900Professional Advancement Course (1.5)
This course is designed to provide the skills and perspectives MBA for Executives students need to advance their careers. There are two components: a highly individualized coaching experience and a series of cohort-based experiences intended to develop leadership skills. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden Students
GBUS 7901Professional Advancement Course - Part I (1.5)
This course is designed to provide the skills and perspectives MBA for Executives students need to advance their careers. There are two components: a highly individualized coaching experience and a series of cohort-based experiences intended to develop leadership skills.
GBUS 7902Professional Advancement Course - Part II (0.5 - 2.5)
This course is designed to provide the skills and perspectives MBA for Executives students need to advance their careers. There are two components: a highly individualized coaching experience and a series of cohort-based experiences intended to develop leadership skills.
Course was offered Spring 2018, Spring 2017, Spring 2016
GBUS 7903Professional Advancement Course - Part III (0.5)
This course is designed to provide the skills and perspectives MBA for Executives students need to advance their careers. There are two components: a highly individualized coaching experience and a series of cohort-based experiences intended to develop leadership skills.
Course was offered Summer 2018, Summer 2017, Summer 2016
GBUS 7905Business Fundamentals (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
The purpose of this course is to develop the basic skills and context of business decisions that will provide a strong foundation for students at the start of the Executive MBA program. The course is multi-disciplinary in its approach and will focus on providing a framework and set of core skills in the context of the types of business decisions that the students will face throughout the program.
GBUS 7994Strategic Analysis and Consulting (1.5)
A "deeper dive" into the strategy concepts introduced in the first year Strategy course, with an orientation towards the practice of consulting, translating analysis into recommendations. Heavy emphasis on problem definition & hypothesis testing in the first half. In the second half, explore effective strategies for articulating the findings & recommendations from strategic analyses, both verbally & through slides, spreadsheets, & graphics.
GBUS 8000TNon-UVa Transfer/Test Credit (3)
GBUS 8005Business and Transformation in the Southern Region of the US (1.5)
This course will leverage unique aspects of the business environment, historical / cultural context, and social setting to provide insights into a distinctive part of the world, in this case the Southern United States. The course will include the opportunity to understand how these states, localities and regions are seeking to create unique economic zones and compete for business investment to drive growth.
GBUS 8008Democracy and Financial: Politics, Markets, and Institutions (3)
Today's students likely have an incomplete awareness of the crisis. More broadly, present and future policymakers risk repeating history as the memory of the 2008 crisis fades. It is important that the rising generation of leaders appreciate the causes and consequences of this crisis in anticipation of future crises. Such historical familiarity will be important for the development of leaders in government, business, NGOs, and households.
GBUS 8009International Exchange (0)
Offered
Fall 2024
Course needed to confirm students' exchange program of study.
GBUS 8010International Exchange (0)
Course needed to confirm students' exchange program of study.
GBUS 8011Ambicultural Strategy (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course aims to foster an ambicultural or both-and perspective that will benefit participants professional and personal endeavors. Ambicultural organizations, managers, and strategists transcend contradictions by embracing the best of different cultures and practices while avoiding the worst. Integrating opposing managerial concepts and practices can lead to fresh ways of thinking in the new global reality and inform managers.
GBUS 8012Deviant Marketing (1.5)
This course is intended for students who are interested in gaining a deeper understanding of new trends in the marketplace but most importantly for those aspiring to change consumer behavior. It is targeted to students interested in careers in marketing in broad terms, from consumer goods to nonprofit management to technology.
GBUS 8013Strategic Corporate Governance (1.5)
Exploration of the theoretical and conceptual foundations of corporate governance alongside contemporary issues and debates. Although the principal focus of this course is on the strategic role of corporate governance, the course materials and class discussions will reflect the fact that the study of corporate governance is a wide-ranging field that builds upon organizational behavior, ethics, law, finance, accounting, and other disciplines.
GBUS 8014Strategic Thinking (1.5)
This course explores different approaches to strategic cognition. Where do good strategic ideas come from? How can we cultivate innovative strategic thinking, in different ways and through different approaches? What is the role of analytical approaches to strategy? What is the role of strategic intuition and creativity? How can you increase your capacity as a strategic leader and a strategic thinker?
GBUS 8015Behavioral Decision Making (1.5)
In this course, students will examine many behavioral anomalies and, more important, explore some frames that explain these apparently irrational behaviors. The emphasis of the course is on solving practical business problems.
GBUS 8016Strategic Intuition and Eastern Philosophy (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, and Confucianism focus on how to clear one's mind. This course will explore how military, political, and religious philosophies from India, Japan, China, and Thailand inform Western strategic thinking with the goal of learning how to apply these philosophies to the making of business strategy.
GBUS 8017Leadership, Music, and the Creative Arts (1.5)
This course explores the connections between leadership and the creative arts, using the vehicle of musical composition, skill building, and performance. As such it serves as a formal complement to the Leadership, Ethics, and Theater course, and students are urged to take both concurrently. This course utilizes experiential methods and gives students real practice in such leadership tasks as active listening, giving and receiving feedback.
GBUS 8018Economic Inequality and Social Mobility (1.5)
The United States and many other countries face a trio of inequalities: income, wealth, and opportunity. While income inequality is a well-accepted result of a capitalist economy, the degree of inequality has been steadily increasing since 1979. Many including Nobel Prize winning economists Robert Schiller and Joseph Stiglitz state that economic inequality is the defining challenge of our time.
GBUS 8019Defining Moments (1.5)
Seasoned leaders will tell you that there were defining moments - those particular instances in which their values and judgment were tested in an inescapable way - that played a disproportionate role in how they and others thought about their success. Navigating these defining moments well usually requires strong communication. Economists Robert Schiller and Joseph Stiglitz state that economic inequality is the defining challenge of our time.
GBUS 8020Corporate Communication (1.5)
This course examines the contemporary practice of corporate communication, which has been defined by one practitioner as 'the clear articulation of corporate strategy and goals internally and externally as well as the understanding and removal of issues blocking the implementation of that strategy.' The course focuses on recent developments in corporate communication and the way intangible assets increasingly provide companies with competitive advantage and a key hedge against risk. Students will explore the ways in which corporate communications align key messages to multiple stakeholders and assist in the management of crises; the process of building reputation and corporate brand; the reasons why new information about the impact of communication enhances the quality of managers' decision-making ability; and how the growing role of corporate citizenship and environmental sustainability in corporations plays a significant, if sometimes controversial, part in managing reputation. At no time in the recent past have so many issues threatened corporate reputation. Therefore, the area of corporate communication is particularly relevant to all future managers. Students will respond in writing to one of the course readings, present on a current topic derived from course themes, and provide a writing assignment or CD based on their presentation.
GBUS 8021Communicating New Business Ventures (1.5)
This course is designed to identify the fundamental communication skills required to introduce innovations, either within large corporations or in new start-ups. The premise of the course is that the best ideas in the world will remain unrealized without the entrepreneur's ability to communicate the elements of his or her business model so that vision, strategy, and tactics become clear to business partners and investors.
GBUS 8022Transforming Societies (1.5)
This course seeks to equip students with basic economic and development concepts and tools in order to enhance their problem-solving skills, and to deepen their understanding of socioeconomic issues and how business, entrepreneurs, and markets can promote human development and transform societies across the world. We will tackle issues in the social sector, sustainability challenges, problems of the underserved, and other urgent issues.
GBUS 8023China in the World Economy (1.5)
To prepare business students for engagement with China, this course explores the fundamental forces that shape its business environments. We start with an analysis of China's economic and political systems and then move to investigate the unique features of its labor, financial, and real estate markets. The course will also examine how foreign businesses succeed and fail in the world's most dynamic economy.
GBUS 8024Strategy Execution (1.5)
Strategy execution has become a critical differentiator among firms seeking breakthrough financial performance. In this course, we develop an analytic approach that combines four domains (alignment, architecture, activation, and ability) into an integrated approach to firm performance. Throughout this course we use cases and applications to translate concepts and frameworks into real-time action learning projects with sponsoring companies.
GBUS 8025Financial Innovation: Opportunities and Problems (3)
In this course students will study financial innovation, both in its contemporary manifestations, as well as in history. Generally, the course recognizes that the business and economic context creates challenges and opportunities for financial innovators to respond with new designs for markets, institutions, products/services, instruments - and even government policies.
Course was offered Fall 2017, Fall 2016
GBUS 8026Financial Crises and American Democracy (1.5)
This course reviews 12 financial crises in American history. It integrates perspectives from finance, law, system dynamics, politics, and history - it is an exploration into financial civics, or how the markets, institutions, and instruments in finance have interacted with the public will (democracy) and its instrument, the regulatory establishment.
Course was offered Spring 2018, Spring 2017
GBUS 8027Interpersonal Behavior (1.5)
Increases awareness of the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, provides practical experiences that give opportunity to improve their interpersonal effectiveness. Topics Communication, Feedback, Performance Appraisal, Active Listening, Working with diversity, confronting problems in working relationships. Emphasis on future management contexts, learn how others perceive you & what behaviors enhance or detract from interpersonal effectiveness.
GBUS 8028Corporate Strategic Leadership: Major Concepts from Strategy Consulting (1.5)
Every corporation must grapple with a host of strategic issues and the development of a strategy-the integrated set of actions required to achieve the vision of the company-is a complex exercise that is more than a set answer at a given moment in time. As setting and developing strategy is an on-going process, there are opportunities to approach it from many different approaches or with new conceptual tools.
GBUS 8030Challenges to Health Care: A System Overview (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course looks at the healthcare industry from the standpoint of the manager or entrepreneur who seeks to understand the fundamental challenges now occurring. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden Students.
GBUS 8031IPADE Doing Business in Mexico (1.5)
Learn about the countries that are considered as Emerging Markets, the role that they all play in the actual globalized world and their impact in the world's economy. Enrich the interaction with other international and Mexican MBA students. Explore Mexico as an Emerging Markets and experience the Mexican culture It includes classes conducted by IPADE professors on the Mexican economic, political and social environments.
GBUS 8033Digital Marketing (1.5)
The digital marketing course prepares students for the variety of ways interactive communication and positioning may be part of their future careers whether they are CMOs thinking strategically or CEOs asking the right questions of an ad agency. Interactive technology is driven by innovation, making it difficult to study one text or conclude that one static model works best.
GBUS 8038Equities (1.5)
The Equities course is designed for students interested in a career in investment management. The primary purpose of the course is to teach students how to value publicly traded equities. The valuation tools considered begin with the discounted cash flow and multiples techniques introduced in First Year Financial Management and Policies and the elective, First Year Valuation in Financial Markets. These techniques are augmented with other approaches as explained by a series of practicing money managers and equity analysts who serve as guest lecturers throughout the course. The course is premised on the assumption that the stock market is efficient overall but that valuation for certain equities varies at times from the true intrinsic value. In such a market, the careful application of fundamental analysis can uncover overvalued and undervalued companies. Similarly, the course entertains the application of technical analysis as a method for interpreting market psychology and its influence upon stock valuation over time. In addition to the specifics of valuation, the course explores the ways that these tools are used to value stocks.
GBUS 8042The Spirit of the New Workplace (1.5)
This seminar invites students to explore the possibilities of human organization and assess their core values, assumptions, beliefs, and expectations about work. The course format is a one-week exploration of the role work plays in the lives of individuals and communities around the globe. It is designed to prompt students to begin a lifelong quest for learning about who they are and how best to perform and lead others to success in an ever-changing business climate. By coupling a general management perspective on current workplace issues and trends with each student's sense of self, the course is about discovering what work can be at both the individual and the organizational levels. Through large and small group discussions of cases and readings, various experiential activities, body awareness and movement exercises, journaling and free writing, guided meditation, and individual reflection, each student will have the opportunity to discover what is true for them and move forward with that knowledge. Before the start of the course, each student is required to choose, read, and summarize a book that is relevant to the course. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8045Introduction to Real Estate Finance and Development (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course introduces students to analytical techniques and terminology specific to the real estate industry. The real estate industry includes a broad range of real estate products, and each market for these products is unique. Students will consider such topics as an historical overview of the industry, techniques of financial analysis and financing alternatives, commercial and residential development, current concepts of real estate development, cap rates, appraisal methods, commercial products such as office buildings and retail, residential products such as apartments and houses, leasing, and property management. The course should appeal to a broad array of students especially those considering careers in real estate or who expect to be involved in real estate transactions. For those students with no prior experience in real estate but who want to enter the field, the course, with its exposure to the industry nomenclature, will be of tremendous value in the job search. The principal modes of instruction include readings, cases, and speakers from the industry.
GBUS 8047Pricing (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course focuses on common pricing problems that face management in wide variety of industries. Students will learn the mathematical, economic, and psychological tools that allow managers to analyze a situation and recommend an appropriate pricing strategy. In some cases, most notably consumer packaged goods, this will require the analysis of large (scanner) data sets that allow students to model the relationship between regular prices.
GBUS 8048Human Capital Consulting (1.5)
This course addresses how firms manage human resources as a source of competitive advantage. Specifically, it is designed to help students develop a deeper understanding of the processes and practices inherent in strategy implementation, the role of human capital and talent management (source, develop, deploy, evaluate, engage, reward, retain) as a foundation for strategic capability, and the role of the HR function.
GBUS 8049EU in the World Economy (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
The European Union (EU) is the second largest economy in the world after the United States and the second largest trading partner of the United States. The US and EU are each other's largest export markets. The EURO is the second most traded international currency after the $US. This course uses cases and other materials to explore the fundamental differences and similarities between the EU and the US.
Course was offered Summer 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
GBUS 8050Cross-Cult Summer Internship (1)
Cross-Cult Summer Internship
GBUS 8051Digital Operations (1.5)
Digital technologies are influencing every facet of business including Operations. This course will comprise a mix of case studies & guest speakers to enable a deeper exploration of the impact of emerging technologies on the operations function. Designed for those pursuing careers in General Management, Operations, or Consulting, the course will start with a strategic perspective of pure-play models & digital transformations of traditional players.
GBUS 8052Marketing Leadership (1.5)
Leading a marketing organization presents a unique set of leadership challenges, which every aspiring marketing leader will need to understand and manage as they navigate careers as leaders in the most dynamic function in the modern business enterprise -- marketing.
GBUS 8053Sustainable Global Value Chains (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course will use a mix of case studies and simulation to understand the sustainable operations practices within the agriculture, apparel, electronics, energy, healthcare, and pharmaceutical sectors. It will bring together concepts on supply chain integrity; responsible business conduct; supply chain security and transparency; national and international regulations and policies that impact global value chains.
GBUS 8055Experiments and Causal Analytics (1.5)
This course will immerse you in the world of experiments and confront you with the managerial challenges involved in drawing economically meaningful causal conclusions from real-world data. This course is relevant to students going into technology, consulting, health care, and venture capital, as well as those taking general management roles or joining early-stage firms.
Course was offered Spring 2023, Spring 2022
GBUS 8058Disruption, Response, and Transformation (1.5)
This course focuses on disruption as a source of transformational change within a firm, an industry, or society. Disruptions generally require organizations to significantly change their operations, resource allocation, or business model. Examining disruption through three different lenses--customer (including technology), societal, and political--the course teaches students how to harness disturbances to drive positive change at their organizations.
GBUS 8059FinTech (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
The purpose of this course is two-fold 1) to provide students knowledge and skills needed to understand the mechanisms driving many innovations in FinTech, 2) to prepare students for careers in the technology space, particularly those focused on financial services. Examples of topics that would be covered in the course include blockchain, cryptocurrency, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending, digital payment & banking, robo-advising, & microfinance.
Course was offered Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
GBUS 8060Sustainable Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1.5)
The purpose of this course is to provide students with practical information on the growing frontier of innovation and entrepreneurial activity at the nexus of business and natural systems. The term 'sustainable business' refers to competitively advantageous strategies and practices firms adopt to grow revenues, cut costs, improve market share, enhance brands, and redesign products and processes to reduce or eliminate adverse environmental and health impacts. Students will study trends and science driving the growing demand for clean technology and life cycle product designs. Students will look at drivers of corporate innovation, strategic shifts, and new markets, learn skills to help identify market opportunities, and understand the tools, concepts, and frameworks used by companies currently pursuing sustainable business opportunities. Through the use of articles, technical notes, cases, and guests, the course examines company strategies and practices while providing history and frameworks for context and comprehension.
GBUS 8061Emerging and Frontier Markets (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course analyzes the challenges and opportunities in Emerging and Frontier Markets. The superlative performance of EFMs has been the growth story of the past two decades. Understanding the functioning of these economies is a critical factor for the successful operation of a global enterprise.
GBUS 8063Telling Financial Stories (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
In spite of the saying, financial numbers rarely speak for themselves. Telling Financial Stories will help future consultants, bankers and general managers interpret financial data in a number of challenging settings in which strategic company and leadership objectives are on the line. Students will learn frameworks for messaging to inform and influence, with topics ranging from reporting corporate earnings to pitching a startup.
GBUS 8065Managing Sustainability from the Inside Out (1.5)
In this class students will explore the theory & practice of sustainability, with focus on ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) principles in practice, as well as exploring more traditional corporate social responsibility & the ecosystems involved in both (corporate & private foundations, NGO's, UN agencies, governments).
Course was offered Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
GBUS 8066Thinking of a Master Plan: Non-Profit Mgmt, Metrics & Impact Making (1.5)
Working insight into the economic, strategic, and socio-political factors underpinning social impact. Students will learn to assess organizational capacity and the structures, processes and human capital necessary to effectively manage an enterprise. A deeper understanding of non profits and the environmental and social problems they address.Learn to adapt and fine tune their professional skills in a different sector.
GBUS 8067Managing Innovation (1.5)
Develop in students an understanding of the process view of innovation and how it is executed. Equip students with the tools to structure the "right" innovation processes for their own organization and to link innovation to the organization's business strategy. Enable students to view innovation management from the lenses of different individuals/functions in the organization.
Course was offered Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
GBUS 8069Whose Streets?!: ESG Strategies from Wall Street to Main Street (1.5)
Institutional investors increasingly rank serving a social purpose as a factor garnering high regard. How people define serving a social purpose varies widely however. Corporations have a unique value add in terms of expertise, human resources, public influence, and unrestricted funds. But do corporations embrace a social purpose in ways that deliver quantifiable outcomes for a range of stakeholders, as well as economic performance? This course provides an expanded vision of competitive strategy and ethics by incorporating social purpose as a source of new business opportunities, improved productivity, and competitive differentiation and at the same time minds the gap between policy and practice.
Course was offered Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
GBUS 8070Sustainability in Depth: Studies in Innovation (1.5)
This course is a reading seminar designed to familiarize students with core writings on entrepreneurial ideas as they intersect with natural systems concerns. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8072User Experience (UX) (1.5)
The course approaches digital product and technology creation through the lens of user experience (UX) design: the practice of placing people and their needs in the center of research and design work. Such work includes everything from creating enjoyable user experiences to ethical and safe interactions between the user and the product. Students learn to apply the insights from their quantitative and qualitative user research to design.
Course was offered Spring 2024
GBUS 8075Entrepreneurial Finance (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Applies financial methods and practices to the development of early-stage companies. The goal of EF is to help managers make better investment and financing decisions in an entrepreneurial setting. The course covers the stages of a venture's life from raising startup financing to arranging an exit. The course also provides an overview of the private equity industry and the institutional structure for raising early-stage financing.
GBUS 8079Doing Business in Argentina-Seizing Opportunities in Emerging Markets (1.5)
Insight into Latin American business world, showcasing its comprehensive dynamics, opportunities and challenges, while using case method-based lectures, company visits and conferences. Participants will delve into Latin America's business setting and reality, building a strong elite corporate network of peers from other business schools around the world.
GBUS 8090Corporate Governance (1.5)
This course covers the topics with which boards of directors and CEOs most commonly deal. The course begins with coverage of the legal obligations which directors must fulfill such as planning for the selection of the CEO, appraising CEO performance, organizing an orderly and timely succession, and insuring that management development and succession planning permeate the top three levels of the organization. The general topic of management compensation will be covered including management contracts, parachutes, non-compete agreements, salary systems, various incentive systems, and the roles and merits of stock options and restricted stock, as well as how corporate and business unit strategies and operating plans must be approved and monitored. Students will examine a board's involvement in decisions about issuing debt or equity, paying dividends, or repurchasing stock, as it meets its fiduciary role with regard to management, internal auditors, internal controls, the SEC and other required reporting, legal liabilities, and payment of taxes. The course examines how boards monitor and approve corporate and business unit strategies and operating plans to insure compliance with the foreign corrupt practices acts, OSHA, EPA, and EED, among others, and how the boards deal with a number of external events, including hostile takeover attempts, stockholder activism, proxy fights, class-action suits, derivative-action suits, and business disasters. Finally, the course covers processes for reviewing the performance of individual directors, the board, and the CEO.
GBUS 8092The Business of Advocacy: Public Policy and Regulated Industries (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Corporations, industries, and their associations all rely on advocacy to help improve policy and regulatory conditions that affect their business. Effective lobbying requires business insight and includes an enterprise risk management approach to ensure all business processes, strategies, and actions comply with relevant laws. This course is interested in the strategic importance of regulatory engagement and advocacy to a company¿s bottom line.
GBUS 8106Acquisition of Closely-Held Enterprises (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course focuses on the process of acquisition of a business entity. Students will be shown the tools they need and the process to follow to successfully acquire a business of their own. Among the major topics covered will be the search process, assessing and valuing the business, financing consideration, negotiating, and closing the deal. The course may be of interest to those MBA students who are interested in leveraged buyouts, investment banking, venture capital, and other related careers. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8107Fixed Income Instruments (1.5)
This is a technical course about fixed income instruments. It is designed for finance students with an emphasis on those topics necessary to secure a position with an investment bank or money management firm or to pass the Chartered Financial Analyst exam. The course covers market conventions about yield and the valuation of securities. It is built around risk management techniques, trading strategies, and portfolio design. Students will be expected to utilize and gain some proficiency on with Bloomberg information. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden Students.
GBUS 8110Humanitarianism and INGOs - Is the Model Fit for Purpose or Obselete? (1.5)
This class will explore the global humanitarian system and response to man-made and natural disasters -- its development and rapid growth in the past 50 years, the actors involved including UN agencies, INGO's, local NGO's, corporations, and local communities.
Course was offered Spring 2023
GBUS 8125Storytelling with Data (1.5)
Data visualizations weave information and visual storytelling into insights that add business-relevant value through compelling arguments that inspire people to action. This course will explore how to construct data visualizations by employing storytelling, visuals, color schemes, key verbs, call outs, BLUFs, and other related data visualization elements. Students will learn how to use data visualization tools and become better presenters.
GBUS 8130Prototyping and Product Development I (1.5)
This action-oriented course takes students through the key steps involved in developing a new product or service. The learning process will be highly experiential as students work in groups to develop a viable new product or service via a hands-on team project. Each team of students will identify market (user) needs, develop alternative product or service concepts to meet those needs, flesh out the concepts through a process of iterative design.
GBUS 8137At Your Best - Resilience, Communication and Leadership (1.5)
This course focuses on the human need to recover and restore energy on an ongoing basis. After all, when you feel overwhelmed or depleted, it's hard to communicate and lead at your best. The course begins by taking inventory of your resilience, communication and leadership practices, then encourages you to build on your strengths as you sample new methods designed to build resilience of body, mood, mind and spirit.
GBUS 8149Media & Entertainment Businesses (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
The course is designed to help students increase their media literacy, deepen their knowledge about media and entertainment industries, gain critical analytical skills specific to analyzing media data, and design media and business strategies for media and entertainment emerging business models and dynamic customer bases.
Course was offered Fall 2023
GBUS 8150Post-Merger Integration (1.5)
Building on the First Year Strategic Thinking in Action course, which covers mostly business-level strategy, this course addresses two issues in strategy: the role of acquisitions and diversification in corporate strategy and the achievement of merger objectives (usually, synergies) after the deal is done. Students will tackle the challenges and problems most businesses encounter in integrating acquisitions with the understanding that according to research 65% to 85% of most mergers fail. Students also will learn how to distinguish between different types of mergers and to discern the appropriate tools required for integrating two or more separate organizations. By the end of the course, students should be able to contribute to any post-merger-integration-strategy consulting engagement, corporate development activities, and M&A practices. Instruction for the course consists of cases, exercises, and a variety of readings from business and history.
GBUS 8151Writing for Impact and Influence (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
The course will provide insights and techniques into drafting informative and inspiring team- and organization-wide email broadcasts, executive briefs, business and funding proposals, and strategic planning documents. Additionally, students will be exposed to best practices in creating internal and external web content, infographics and design elements, speeches, investor communication documents, and company mission statements.
Course was offered Fall 2023
GBUS 8155Talent Trailblazers: Leading Change and Managing Talent (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course will introduce a strategic, resource-based approach to talent mgmt, which features generative practices that systematically bring out the best in people at work. We will focus on three core talent mgmt practices; alignment, engagement, and development. Through multimedia case studies and accompanying readings, students will examine how these interrelated practices help people "get connected" to work
GBUS 8156Creating a New Normal (1.5)
The COVID-19 pandemic has effectively upended social and professional spheres of life. We are living in a moment rich with opportunities to improve how we live, how we relate to society, how we interact with government, and how we do business. By leveraging behavioral science tools to explore and experiment, you will learn how to take advantage of the unique opportunity we have to redefine the scope of our priorities and collective actions.
GBUS 8159Healthcare Marketing (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
In this course, students will explore marketing challenges and opportunities in several major areas of healthcare, examine similarities and differences between marketing in healthcare and in other sectors, and learn to apply traditional marketing strategy and tactics in novel ways that embrace the differences that exist between the marketing of health and care and in other sectors.
Course was offered Spring 2024
GBUS 8160Taxation of Mergers and Acquisitions (1.5)
Students who seek careers in investment banking, venture capital, corporate finance, and management consulting will find this course of interest. Although students pursuing these career paths do not need tax expertise, they do need to be able to evaluate critically when to call in the tax experts and what the tax experts are telling them. Therefore this course provides a general understanding of the basic tax consequences of fundamental restructuring strategies and a framework for evaluating the priority that taxes have in these strategies. The course requires students to analyze how tax consequences affect the value of different strategies to the buyer and seller. Understanding the effect of taxes on the value of a deal to the buyer and seller prepares future financial executives and strategic advisors to make better decisions and to be more effective negotiators. Although the course focuses on the tax consequences of restructuring strategies and their valuation implications, it also covers the nontax advantages and disadvantages of these strategies. Most of the course covers U.S. federal income tax issues of restructuring of C corporations, but it also will address pass-through entities. Other topics will be entity formation, taxable asset and stock acquisitions, tax-free asset and stock reorganizations, and divestitures and liquidations. The principal modes of instruction are cases, readings, articles, exercises, and a group project that allows students to investigate a specific deal of personal interest. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8163Strategic Sourcing (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Organizations, whether large or small, invest significant amounts of money in sourcing goods and services from their suppliers. This course explores how sourcing can help organizations to improve their performance on multiple dimensions and differentiate themselves from their competitors, ultimately leading to sustained competitive advantage.
Course was offered Fall 2023
GBUS 8164Experiential Leadership Development Lab (1.5)
Students will help to pilot a series of experiential leadership skill development exercises for the Experiential Leadership Development Lab. Weekly participation in a different leadership simulation that involve difficult, high stress, emotion-laden interpersonal interactions with actors playing various counterparts. Their performance will be audio & videotaped & their physiological reactions will be monitored.
Course was offered Fall 2018
GBUS 8170Managerial Finance (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Managerial Finance reinforces and builds on the material covered in the core finance course, Financial Management and Policies, and is considered a capstone finance course for those seeking careers in fields outside of finance, such as general management, consulting, marketing, operations, or entrepreneurship. The course is designed to solidify core concepts and skills in financial management and maintains a tone that makes it approachable to all.
GBUS 8171International Corporate Finance (1.5)
This course explores the financial decisions of firms facing exchange related risks in global capital and product markets. This course examines capital allocation and raising activities in international settings with particular attention to transaction and economic exposure, financial and operating hedging activities, capital budgeting analytics, and global capital sourcing.
GBUS 8172Financial Crises and Civic Reaction (3)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course is about "financial civics," or how the markets, institutions, and instruments in finance have interacted with the public will ("democracy") and its instrument, the regulatory establishment. Finance and democracy have stimulated each other on a recurring basis over the centuries, and this stimulus provokes a response.
GBUS 8173Global Capital Markets United Kingdom (1.5)
The course will explore several of these issues and markets in detail and students will be gaining insight on how global markets function, what kinds of factors impact them, who the key players are, and what their role is. The course will also seek to explore sector/industry specific learnings in areas such as, for example, real estate, shipping, hedge funds, and private equity.
GBUS 8174Managing International Trade and Investments (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
We live in an increasingly globalized world, yet globalization is under attack in many countries. Has globalization gone too far? There is Brexit, rising economic nationalism in Europe and the United States, and we hear calls for far-reaching protectionism against Mexico and China by the Trump administration. It is time to reconsider the institutions of globalization (WTO, IMF, WB) and the role that international trade, migration, outsourcing
GBUS 8180Hot Topics in Analytics (1.5)
Immense amounts, granularity of data, the pervasiveness and speed of computing power with mobility make analytics a competitive advantage. Through dialog & conversations will take a closer look at organizations seeking enhanced ability to transform data into actionable insights. Topics intended to span data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, digitalization, analytics processes & methods, probabilistic forecasting models, and ops research.
GBUS 8190Taxation and Management Decisions (1.5)
This course is about blending finance, tax law, accounting, and strategy in the analyses of high-value-added business decisions. This course is not about: tax compliance (the correct way to file tax returns), tax complexity (finding loopholes), tax minimization (beating Uncle Sam), or tax evasion (filing illegal returns). Students are provided with a framework for evaluating the priority that taxes, which directly or indirectly pervade most business transactions, have in business decisions. Students will explore how taxes affect a variety of fundamental business issues such as forming a company, compensating employees, attracting investors, and positioning worldwide operations. While the topics deal primarily with U.S. income taxes, the course's conceptual framework applies irrespective of time and jurisdiction. Students seeking careers in entrepreneurship, management consulting, investment banking, venture capital, or industry, especially general management, corporate finance, or accounting, will find this course of interest. No prior knowledge of taxation is required. The principal modes of instruction are cases, articles, and the group project that enables each student to tailor the course to address an area of personal interest.
GBUS 8203Business Ethics through Literature (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
The purpose of this course is to deepen students' understanding of the role of ethics in management. The course builds on the conversations begun in the First Year Business Ethics course and addresses several key themes of interest for contemporary managers.
GBUS 8205Marketing and Society (1.5)
This course explores the influence of marketing on individuals and society more broadly. The course will begin at the individual level by covering the fundamental principles of consumer behavior. The course will conclude by introducing and analyzing pro-social marketing, which involves the application of marketing frameworks and techniques to promote individual and collective well-being.
Course was offered Spring 2024
GBUS 8210Starting New Ventures (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
The primary objective of the course is to allow students to walk a few steps in the shoes of an entrepreneur while learning how expert entrepreneurs build new ventures that endure. Cases, guest lecturers, and students' project work will allow them to explore financial, legal, interpersonal, and personal challenges likely to be encountered by the independent entrepreneur. This course draws from cognitive science-based research on how expert entrepreneurs think, decide, and act while starting new ventures. Key issues addressed will include risk perception and management, formulation of innovative stakeholder relationships, and the creation of new markets through new ventures. As part of the course, students will be required to come up with a venture idea and take the initial steps in actually starting it. The course is recommended for those interested in initiating a personal venture at some point in their lives working with or consulting for an early stage entrepreneurial team or seeking entry into Darden's Progressive Incubator.
GBUS 8220Acquisition of Closely-Held Enterprises (1.5)
This course focuses on the process of acquisition of a business entity. Students will be shown the tools they need and the process to follow to successfully acquire a business of their own. Among the major topics covered will be the search process, assessing and valuing the business, financing consideration, negotiating, and closing the deal. The course may be of interest to those MBA students who are interested in leveraged buyouts, investment banking, venture capital, and other related careers.
GBUS 8230Growing the Smaller Enterprise (1.5)
This course provides students with an opportunity to understand business opportunities and challenges from the hands-on perspective of the owner/general manager of a smaller enterprise. Although many MBA's are deciding that they would rather lead in smaller businesses than follow in large ones, by the end of this course they will see that 'a smaller business is not a little big business' and that managing a smaller enterprise is an art related to, but substantially different from, managing a large corporation. In the course, students will discover that the issues, challenges, and perspectives differ as much as the numbers in the financials as well as what happens after the start-up or acquisition of a firm. Typical issues addressed are finding a job with a smaller enterprise, the characteristics of the smaller enterprise, creating value as a smaller enterprise CEO, management transitions associated with stages of small business growth, challenges of finding, retaining, and losing employees, special issues and considerations in the family-owned business, franchising as a financing and growth mechanism, import-export operations and international dimensions of small business, ethical challenges of everyday life in the small firm, the balancing act of personal, family, and business realities of the smaller firm, and exiting a venture on your terms.
GBUS 8234Innovation Excel-Organizational Team & Individually (1.5)
Innovation will become a strategic necessity for every organization in the Digital/ Smart Machine Age. Innovation excellence requires an Innovation System- the right people in the right environment using the right processes. Innovation is hard both from an organizational and individual perspective. This course focuses on how to create an Innovation System and how to become an excellent innovator and innovation team leader.
GBUS 8235Economics of Strategy (1.5)
Economics of Strategy uses the tools of price theory to examine strategic problems. Forces of supply (costs) and demand (benefits) at the levels of the firm and the market, and equilibrium models that reflect the nature of competitive interactions, provide the conceptual framework. The roles of non-market institutions, including governments and the courts, and their implications for firm strategy, are incorporated into the framework.
Course was offered Spring 2019, Spring 2018
GBUS 8240Reading Seminar in Management I (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
The purpose of these courses is to expose students to a wide range of ideas about the practices of management from various points of view, both ancient and modern. The examples of management behavior and effectiveness studied range from outstanding to mediocre and from highly ethical to scurrilous. Students are responsible for reading one book a week chosen from the areas of management classics, classics of civilization, or current management thought and then preparing a one-page paper detailing their opinions about the book and any lessons contained therein. Seminar members meet in discussion groups to compare their thoughts and impressions. By practicing critical evaluation of and reflection on the works and engaging each other and faculty in intense, small group discussions of the concepts, students will be prepared to draw on a wide base for ideas when they face the complex and volatile work environment after graduation. The seminar participants include students and faculty from the Darden School along with interested University of Virginia alumni.
GBUS 8250Reading Seminar in Management II (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
The purpose of these courses is to expose students to a wide range of ideas about the practices of management from various points of view, both ancient and modern. The examples of management behavior and effectiveness studied range from outstanding to mediocre and from highly ethical to scurrilous. Students are responsible for reading one book a week chosen from the areas of management classics, classics of civilization, or current management thought and then preparing a one-page paper detailing their opinions about the book and any lessons contained therein. Seminar members meet in discussion groups to compare their thoughts and impressions. By practicing critical evaluation of and reflection on the works and engaging each other and faculty in intense, small group discussions of the concepts, students will be prepared to draw on a wide base for ideas when they face the complex and volatile work environment after graduation. The seminar participants include students and faculty from the Darden School along with interested University of Virginia alumni.
GBUS 8260The Practice of General Management (1.5)
This course addresses numerous concepts, tools, and techniques related to business strategy formulation and execution for both the multidivisional corporation and the focused business. The class studies businesses with varying degrees of diversification classified as focused, diversified within an industry, or diversified across industries. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8261The Practice of General Management (1.5)
This course addresses numerous concepts, tools, and techniques related to business strategy formulation and execution for both the multidivisional corporation and the focused business.
GBUS 8265Disruptive Strategy: Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise (1.5)
The focus of the course is to learn to use well-researched theories about strategy, innovation, and management to understand why things happen the way they do in businesses, and to predict which tools, strategies, and methods will and will not be effective in the various circumstances in which students find themselves.
Course was offered Fall 2023
GBUS 8268Leadership and innovation in Education (1.5)
This course is to serve as a capstone for the students in the MBA/MED program. In addition, it will be open to any student who is interested in the education space. The focus of the course will be theories and tools for leadership and innovation in K-12 education, and some applications to higher education. The course will deal with how to lead in a world of multiple and often conflicting stakeholders, and in a world where education of children is high.
GBUS 8270Reading Seminar in Management III: Thomas Jefferson (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This seminar on leadership and management examines the life work of Thomas Jefferson by studying the many roles he played in the founding of our country. The basic scheme of the seminar dictates that the students read a book a week, write a one-page paper each week summarizing their impressions from the readings, and then engage in a discussion about their thoughts on leadership and management as related to the readings. The seminar meets in the Colonnade Club Pavilion on the Lawn at the University of Virginia, a setting that contributes to a means for Darden students to obtain a greater understanding of the culture and traditions of Mr. Jefferson's University. Reading selections are taken from the six-volume biography on Thomas Jefferson written by Dumas Malone, the book Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose, the book Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis, the book John Adams by David McCullough, and the two prize-winning films on Jefferson by Ken Burns. The seminar participants include students and faculty from the Darden School along with interested University of Virginia alumni.
GBUS 8274Leadership When it Really Counts (1.5)
This course is based on a pioneering new approach-using pre-scripting and rehearsal-to prepare business managers/leaders for values-driven decision-making and action. Rather than simply talking about these difficult decisions and conversations, you will have the opportunity to practice them.
GBUS 8278Leading in Uncertainty and Crisis (1.5)
This course will address the various requirements for operating in a crisis & leading in uncertainty. The course will help students frame uncertainty & how to bound the various uncertainties to be able to move forward & make decisions. It will also explore the differences in decision making when in a crisis & how to be better prepared for operating in that environment. Finally, it will address the need to be able to understand & fully manage an array of stakeholders.
Course was offered Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
GBUS 8279Security Analysis & Valuation (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
The objective of the course is to present a disciplined, valuation based process for security analysis. The course will focus on melding theory and practice using examples across industries and geographies. Investing is as much art as it is science, and therefore, particular attention will be paid to both quantitative and qualitative aspects- including financial statement analysis, valuation methodologies, and competitive strategy.
GBUS 8280Introduction to Business Law (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course introduces students to selected areas of business law of particular relevance to general managers and their financial advisers, excluding tax law. The focus is less on the substance of particular legal rules, for which managers rely on their legal advisers, and more on the basic tools of legal analysis. This knowledge adds value in two respects. First, it facilitates communication with lawyers and understanding the advice they provide. Second, it demonstrates a way of analyzing problems that is different from, but complementary to, those taught in core business courses. The course begins with an overview of the foundational topics of the American legal system: the law of contracts, property, and torts. It then moves to substantive areas that managers routinely encounter, such as corporate governance, bankruptcy, intellectual property, and antitrust. The course examines the structure of the court systems and legal profession in the United States and provides some comparative analysis of other legal systems. Students learn to read and understand basic primary legal materials and recognize standard analytical techniques.
GBUS 8285Corporate Strategy (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course builds on First-Year Strategy to focus on multi-business firms and expands beyond the classical strategy concepts (i.e., capabilities analysis or five forces) to understand how firms can best optimize their scope, develop new business models, and leverage existing resources. The course is for anyone interested in managing, investing, financing, or advising a company that operates in multiple markets. As modern firms span many geographies and categories, this course is for anyone interested in developing new strategies and effectively running a business today - big or small.
Course was offered Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
GBUS 8290Venture Capital Leadership (1.5)
Many of our most successful entrepreneurial companies have been founded and significantly influenced by professional venture-capital firms. This course focuses on the professional world of venture capitalists and how venture capitalists work with entrepreneurs to create substantial, enduring ventures. The course addresses three topics: how venture-capital firms are formed, funded, and managed; how firms manage their relationships with the limited partners who provide their investment capital; and how the parties work together to build successful major companies.
GBUS 8296Creating Value in the Metaverse (1.5)
"In this course, we explore how to create value in the emerging metaverse. Class sessions will cover topics such as: the underlying economics, the innovations enabling virtual reality; the technology ""stack"" developed to support these environments; the economic principles informing online markets and economies; as well as the strategic dynamics among the players in the evolving metaverse."
Course was offered Fall 2023, Fall 2022
GBUS 8297GEMstone (1.5)
GEMstone is a second-year capstone course that builds on the monetary and financial electives offered in the GEM area, specifically Economics of Money and Banking (EMB) and Global Financial Markets (GFM). As a capstone, this course is designed to help students consolidate the knowledge they have accumulated over two years at Darden into an unshakable understanding of international finance and monetary economics.
Course was offered Spring 2024, Spring 2023
GBUS 8299Games, Competition, and Cooperation (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This is a business-world-focused course on game theory: the mathematical modeling of strategic interaction among rational (and irrational) actors. Some of the common applications covered in the course include competition between firms, trading in financial markets, auctions, international politics, warfare, and artificial intelligence.
Course was offered Spring 2024, Spring 2023
GBUS 8301Emerging Information Technologies Seminar (1.5)
Knowledge of emerging information technologies will generate new business strategies utilized by students in their careers. This course is based upon an introduction to and discussion of these emerging information technologies and the companies that are bringing them to market. This seminar is being offered to students interested in actively participating in research and discussion about a set of current emerging information technology topics. Students will be organized into six groups for research activities and presentations.
GBUS 8303Emerging Markets Finance (1.5)
This course explores investment and valuation issues that are unique to emerging economies. These economies, with low per capita income, will likely provide substantial growth opportunities for global investors. Students will learn that the risks of investing in these economies are not only substantial but also different from those in developed economies. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden Students
GBUS 8304Consumer Behavior (1.5)
Because business success begins with understanding what consumers want and need and ends with consumer satisfaction, a clear understanding of consumer psychology is essential to successful marketing. This course examines the basic concepts of consumer psychology and the application of those important concepts to marketing decisions. The goal of this course is to introduce students to these important concepts and, unlike the course in consumer marketing, focus on the factors that drive the consumer decision-making processes in order for students to understand how marketing strategies and tactics can affect those processes. Topics covered include the formation of attitudes, the role of self-image in consumer behavior, understanding emotions and how they affect decision making, memory formation, and certain biases that emerge and influence strategies and the mechanisms by which they work. The course is built on a lecture and discussion format.
GBUS 8305East-West Strategy Seminar (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
As economies and businesses become more global, companies worldwide will increasingly need to examine their economic practices and beliefs. The purpose of this seminar is to help participants 1) develop a deep understanding of the strategic concepts and business models underlying foreign (in this case, Chinese) business, based on a thorough knowledge of cultural and institutional differences. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden Students.
GBUS 8306Social Responsibility and Entrepreneurship (1.5)
This course explores the multiple ways that an individual, company, or corporation can participate in ventures that impact social and/or environmental issues while simultaneously focusing on financial goals. Through direct dialogue and interaction with guests, students will query, discuss, and argue answers to questions such as: What is corporate responsibility and should it be discussed? What is the role of leadership in social responsibility? Can you do 'good' in your business and still make money? Are Corporate 500 companies responsible and how, why, and who? How is social responsibility operative in environmental programs, energy development, micro-lending, civil societal issues, and marketing?
GBUS 8307Integrated Marketing Communications (1.5)
This is a course designed for those who intend to work in consumer marketing, advertising, consulting, or retailing. The course has three modules: Positioning and Copy Strategy, Media Strategy and Integrated Marketing, and Competition for Account. The latter is a comprehensive exercise in which teams develop and present broad-based marketing communications strategies. Instruction methods will include cases, readings, lectures, guest speakers, and simulation-based exercises. There is no final examination. Prerequisite: GBUS 8620.
GBUS 8308Leadership Learning Lab (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course is designed to provide a forum for student leaders to talk about the challenges and rewards of leadership at Darden. Enrolling students should have a clear commitment to a practical leadership experience during their second year. Selected readings in the leadership and social psychology literature serve as frameworks for examining one's personal leadership style. Prerequisite: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8309Management of Economic Growth and Society (1.5)
This course explores the relationships among domestic and foreign firms in economic development, particularly in emerging economies. Concerns over the distribution, pace, and consequences of economic growth are a fundamental force driving change in the international business environment. Firms and their managers are heavily influenced by these changes and by government policies that seek to improve economic conditions through increased flows of trade and investment. Investments in developing economies in particular present managers with opportunities to realize substantial financial returns and contribute to economic growth but are fraught with unique challenges and risks. Investments by foreign firms also raise normative concerns regarding the role of business in society and the nature of globalization. The course gives students theories and frameworks for understanding the nature of economic development and growth and the effects of private firms' trade and investment activities on local economies. By applying these frameworks to a broad set of cases, students learn how to analyze the economic, financial, and social relationships influencing investments and operations around the globe. All the materials and experiences in the course speak to the central question: 'How do firms affect globalization and economic development, and how do globalization and economic development affect firms?'
GBUS 8310Competitive Dynamics (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This advanced strategy seminar provides class participants with an integrative framework and specific analytical tools for understanding how firms interact in the marketplace: within an industry, across industries, and beyond national borders. The premise of the course holds that business competition is both dynamic and relative; it is a constant interplay between companies as they juggle market positions by exchanging moves and countermoves, and a firm initiating a competitive move (whether a new product introduction or expansion into a new market, an acquisition bid or a simple price cut) must be prepared to meet counteractions from rivals. Understanding the relative nature of this dynamic process is the key to building and sustaining competitive advantage. The seminar is designed to develop an appreciation for cutting-edge academic research and its application to pertinent competitive issues, which is an essential skill for managers responsible for developing and implementing business strategies and for consultants advising such managers. Participants will be expected to abstract larger strategic issues from financial and operational particulars and to apply the concepts, analytical tools, and research methods learned in class to an intensive project on competition. The course will be especially useful to those interested in strategy consulting, marketing and strategic planning, and industry security analysis, as well as anyone seeking to develop sophisticated competitive thinking. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8315Winning Hearts and Minds (1.5)
This course focuses on connecting with your own heart and mind so you can more intentionally and effectively win the hearts and minds of your audience. Benefits of the course include: greater self-confidence; an expanded set of skills to use in conversations and high-pressure presentations; a deeper understanding how to win hearts and minds when it really matters.
GBUS 8317Leading with Influence (1.5)
Leading with influence is a deep dive into the science and personal application of leadership, with a particular focus on facilitating ongoing leadership development and assessment beyond Darden. Leader development does not begin or end with business school; our behavioral tendencies were shaped before we got here, and our evolution will continue when we leave.
GBUS 8320Leadership Communication During Times of Disruption and Transformation (1.5)
In this course students will be immersed in real time cases of multinational companies that are challenged with communicating the rationale and imperatives behind their strategic renewal, reset, or total organizational transformation.
GBUS 8325Markets, Government, and Society (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course examines the benefits and shortcomings of markets as an institutional arrangement for improving social welfare, and it explores conditions under which government action helps direct better market outcomes. The textbook case for government intervention to correct market failures. It describes an idealized environment in which market outcomes are Pareto optimal.
GBUS 8330Business-Government Relations (1.5)
The purpose of this course is to equip students to be the type of managers who understand government processes, are politically aware, are mindful of the interaction between media, government, and business and appreciate how business can gain strategic advantage by monitoring and working with government at all levels. The course will prepare students to meet these managerial requirements and to participate in complex decisions when changing laws, regulations, and other governmental factors that have major long-term implications. In addition to case situations and readings on current issues, selected speakers from business and government will add their expertise.
GBUS 8334Consumer Insights in a Data-Driven World (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
In today's data-driven business landscape, information about what consumers think, feel, and do is abundant and readily available, but the real challenge for managers and marketers lies in exercising the right judgment to effectively utilize it. This course aims to help Darden students develop these essential skills for data intuition and sense-making, without needing to be an expert on the technical level.
Course was offered Fall 2023
GBUS 8341Women, Gender, & Work: Leadership Stories and Career Narratives (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course aims to answer a single question: how do gender norms influence the trajectory of one's career as well as the pursuit and attainment of leadership positions? This course seeks to unpack the social construction of gender as it shapes work so that all students, regardless of gender identity, will be prepared to lead in a variety of organizational contexts and to advance inclusive workplace policies, procedures, and cultures.
Course was offered Fall 2023, Fall 2022
GBUS 8345Cybersecurity & Privacy (1.5)
Whether or not data is the new oil, it is certainly much easier to steal. The combination of intimate data stored on interconnected devices that are all part of an interdependent infrastructure like the internet makes cybersecurity and privacy -- inevitably intertwined -- two of the top issues facing business and society in the 21st century.
GBUS 8375Leadership Lessons of Eight Transformational US Presidents Part I (1.5)
The course will integrate concepts and theories from History, Politics, and Management as a starting point for studying the development of a Presidential administration in its social, political and cultural contexts. Lessons learned from the past and parallels to the present have great relevance to our future.
Course was offered Fall 2018
GBUS 8376Leadership Lessons of Eight Transformational US Presidents Part II (1.5)
The course will integrate concepts and theories from History, Politics, and Management as a starting point for studying the development of a Presidential administration in its social, political and cultural contexts. Lessons learned from the past and parallels to the present have great relevance to our future.
GBUS 8378Applied Security Analysis (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course seeks to improve the investment decision process through the application of investment frameworks and fundamental analysis. Classes will typically feature "live cases" for which students use real-time data and public filings to make investment decisions. Class discussions will often be co-moderated by guest practitioners who oversee capital allocation decisions for hedge funds, private equity partnerships, or corporations.
Course was offered Fall 2023
GBUS 8390India in the World Economy (1.5)
The objective of the course is to present a disciplined, valuation based process for security analysis. The course will focus on melding theory and practice using examples across industries and geographies. Investing is as much art as it is science, and therefore, particular attention will be paid to both quantitative and qualitative aspects- including financial statement analysis, valuation methodologies, and competitive strategy.
GBUS 8391Strategic Costing (1.5)
Strategic costing is concerned with use of internal cost accounting information to plan and evaluate strategic operations and interactions with stakeholders of the firm. The focus is on planning and strategic decision-making by the organization and on the accounting systems that managers have to assist them in their decisions about resource allocation and performance evaluation. The course is intended as an extension of foundational cost accounting.
GBUS 8392Hot Topics in Real Estate (1.5)
In recent years, private market investing including real estate has risen strongly. Real Estate is linked closely with the fields of finance and business & leads to a specialized career. Curriculum is needed in order to recruit and support success in developing the next generation of responsible leaders in real estate. This course will allow students to interact with leading investment managers and experts in the area.
GBUS 8393Societal Issues in Business (1.5)
This course explores the myriad social, economic and cultural problems that our society currently faces and asks what business can do about it. Education, climate change, emerging technology, healthcare and more. What is the unique role that business can play and how can individual business leaders fully realize both the uniqueness and full potential of that role?
Course was offered Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021
GBUS 8394Technology Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Policy (1.5)
Understand and competently navigate core policy dimensions (e.g., intellectual property, regulatory organizations, standard setting) impacting technology ventures. Understand the range of sources (e.g., government, states, investors) for funding high technology ventures, and the differing expectations of these sources. Historical grounding in how the "Tech" industry arrived at where it is today, toward a better understanding of the industry.
Course was offered Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021
GBUS 8395Sustainability Measurement and Disclosure (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course develops expertise in stewarding responsible public disclosure to external stakeholders through an analysis of the managerial decisions that drive both financial and non-financial communications. The focus of the course is on the roles of a company's accounting system, management and board in creating an environment where managerial decisions lead to high quality stewardship of public disclosure.
Course was offered Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020
GBUS 8399Data Analytics and Leadership Judgment in Sports Contexts (1.5)
Sports contexts provide an excellent vehicle by which to study how to use analytics as part of a leader's decision-making toolkit. How, for example, do you evaluate talent analytically, and decide how to construct, motivate, and compensate members of a team? While we can't know with certainty how a professional player (i.e., employee) will perform in the future, models can be built to analyze the past, thus make powerful statistical predictions.
GBUS 8400General Managers Taking Action (1.5)
Situations requiring action vary in complexity and scope. The decision settings include a rich variety of dilemmas general managers inevitably face. This course focuses on general managers and the requirement that they take action in situations, which vary in complexity and scope. General Managers are defined as those managers who possess profit and loss responsibility at any level of the organization from first-level product-line managers to chief executive officers. General Managers must also manage the interfaces of the functional departments: marketing, operations, finance, and engineering or R&D. The goal in each class is for students to develop a plan of action and to think through the detailed steps, which would be needed to implement their plans. Students should be prepared to use current management tools, tried and true management philosophies, and all of the multidisciplinary tools they have internalized in their MBA education when deciding how to take action. The course requires students to capitalize on their entire Darden experience and polish their enterprise perspective. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8401Cross-Cultural Internship (1)
This course is open to students who have accepted summer employment in a country other than that of their permanent residence. It allows students to use their summer-employment experience as a way to increase their knowledge of a culture other than their own and address the challenges of working in that culture. Course content will involve preparation at the beginning of the summer when students will plan a program of readings and discussions supervised by a faculty member and make a personal statement of the learning expectations they have for this summer activity, a midsummer report about what they are experiencing. At the end of the summer, students will engage in a class discussion based on each student's in-class report about a significant and surprising aspect of their cultural experience and what was learned from it. Students also will be expected to write a final report reviewing their cultural experience and the extent to which their learning expectations were achieved. The report should also compare and contrast their job experience with what they might have experienced in their country of permanent residence. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8402Survey of the Health Care Sector (1.5)
This course is designed to bring together health care leaders in a multidisciplinary effort to address critical issues and challenges facing health care. Students will explore how the economic, financial, and ethical issues cannot be treated separately in analyzing health care markets as the various sectors of the health care industry are interrelated. The course will develop a framework for understanding and evaluating the trade-offs that are inherent in the health care industry, and how these trade-offs affect strategic thinking. Topics will include health care financing, delivery, and strategy; current trends in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology; medical devices; health care technology; and issues in public health policy. Students will examine these topics from a global as well as a United States perspective. Successful entrepreneurs and seasoned executives will participate in the class sessions to share their experience, opportunities, and advice.
GBUS 8403Leadership and Theatre: Ethics, Innovation and Creativity (1.5)
The purpose of this course is to build leadership skills and ethical analysis skills by reading, discussing, and performing dramatic scenes from great plays. The scenes will be chosen for their relevance to both leadership and ethics. The course is built around the conceptual apparatus in Dunham and Freeman (2000) that the task of the theatre director is akin to the task of the CEO. For example, students will examine how directors draw vision from particulars, emphasize good casting or 'getting the right people on the bus,' get the best out of their team, and approach work collaboratively. The class will examine theater companies as high-performance teams and attempt to construct such teams throughout the course. The course draws on the expertise of the artistic community in Charlottesville by providing several technical workshops on acting and directing. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8404Innovating and Integrating in Services - The "New" Economy (1.5)
This course builds on the innovative trend toward service-related economies in the United States and other developed countries. In a participative seminar-like format, it uses student experiences and personal observation techniques along with cross-discipline outside speakers, cases, articles, and book selections. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8405Crisis Leadership (1.5)
This course will help students prepare for the complexities of leadership and increase their general management skills during times of crisis. Students will analyze a variety of crises situations that affect businesses and other organizations and develop a set of crisis-leadership competencies. Both theoretical and applied/practical perspectives of crisis management will be addressed. Students will be exposed to multiple frameworks for managing crises and the tools and techniques for making sound leadership decisions before, during, and after crises hit. We will also examine crises as sources of organizational innovation and change. The course uses a variety of teaching methods, including case studies, current events, simulations, and guest speakers to illustrate key points and will draw on material from multiple functional areas including organizational behavior, strategy, marketing, and management communications. The course is particularly relevant to students preparing for the responsibilities of management and senior leadership.
GBUS 8406Advanced Topics in Business Ethics (1.5)
The purpose of this course is to explore issues and theoretical ideas in business ethics that were raised in the first-year course and to examine these issues and ideas in new contexts. There will be readings, cases, and books that are relevant to the topic at hand. Examples include Business Science and Ethics and Background Theories of Business Ethics, both of which explore the underlying philosophical theories behind much of the first-year course, and Topics in Ethics and Accounting and Finance, which explore issues around corporate governance. The content of the course will change based on student interest, external events that students would like to explore, and topics of interest to faculty and students.
GBUS 8410Financial Statement Analysis (1.5)
This course analyzes and applies tools and techniques to accounting data in order to derive measurements that aid in corporate valuation. Students will first develop a deeper understanding of accounting data by examining the incentives corporate officers face while making financial reporting choices as well as understanding the conceptual limitations of the financial reporting model.
GBUS 8411What Do You Want? A Transition Guide to the Real World (1.5)
Graduating MBAs will spend the next 35 years of their lives working very hard. What is it they will be working for? To maximize their wealth? Fame? Happiness? Power? Peace of mind? Energy? Salvation or spiritual peace? To be loved? Friendship? A family? How do these all fit together in their definition of success and in what proportion? How do they avoid losing one for the sake of the other? This course will explore the pros and cons and the ins and outs of various answers to these and the fundamental question: 'What do you want?' and guide students on how not to become professional anecdotes for books such as Career Success, Personal Failure, and Must Success Cost So Much? The readings, films, film clips, and cases will be focused on related questions that examine the meaning of life, career, and the nature of success. Students can use this course to put their business educations in the context of managing their careers over their lifetimes before reentering the working world and actually experiencing the consequences of their decisions.
GBUS 8412People, Purpose, & the Power of Relationships (1.5)
The goals of this course are to help you think critically about how to build and maintain high quality relationships at work. In organizations, high quality relationships between people enable more effective performance, individual learning, and job commitment. They also pave the way for a more inclusive workplace where individuals feel like they belong and can bring their authentic selves to work.
Course was offered Spring 2024, Spring 2023
GBUS 8414Advanced Managerial Communication (1.5)
This course is designed to assist students in their transition from the academic to the corporate environment. It will provide an opportunity for students to explore in more depth the strategies of communication framed in First Year Management Communication. It will offer students more practice in written and oral presentation work that will include frequent, individual meetings with the instructor for personal assessment and evaluation. The course will ask students to examine their personal communication styles including both their nonverbal behavior as well as how they express themselves in writing and in public presentations to both large and small groups. Areas examined in the course will be communication networks and organization channels, common barriers that lead to communication disruptions, the challenges of dealing with troubled and troubling constituencies, and specific communication frameworks that contribute to a vibrant corporate culture. More topics covered will be message structure strategies, the presentation development process, proposals, reports and business plans, customer and client meetings, communication audits and needs assessments, and communicating change and strategies for dealing with conflict and creating consensus.
GBUS 8418Global Macroeconomics and Financial Markets (1.5)
The course is intended to deepen students' understanding of links between global macroeconomic forces and their impact on financial markets. The cases cover major economic developments that have shaped the world financial system such as energy shocks, financial crises, and regime shifts in monetary, fiscal, and exchange rate policies. Historical lessons from the evolution of the global financial system will be offered and comparisons will be made with the current global environment for which extensive contemporary readings will be assigned and some outside speakers invited. The course is designed to provide students with the most up-to-date view on the forces that currently are shaping financial markets in developed and emerging economies. It will also provide a framework for students to make investment decisions in bond, equity, and currency markets that build upon the tools developed in First Year Global Economics and Markets.
GBUS 8419International Deal Making: Legal & Business Aspects (1.5)
This course is focused on the application of legal and business knowledge to real world transactions in the international context. It is a practical course for students who are interested in applying their knowledge to deal structuring, identifying and resolving legal and business concerns, negotiations, documentation, and deal closing. This course is offered by the University of Virginia School of Law and the Darden School and will be taught as a seminar with a combination of students from both schools. The short-form cases or caselets often place students inside the negotiating room and challenge them to negotiate with foreign ministers, senior military officials, provincial governors, and other counterparties. Each case involves one significant cross-border transaction either successful or unsuccessful and will deal with specific issues such as deal structuring, negotiating, and documenting that arose during the course of that deal. Past cases have included situations in the countries of China's banking, Burma & Thailand's energy, Philippines's industry privatization, Indonesia's real estate, and China's IPO.
GBUS 8420Entry Strategies in the Asia Pacific (1.5)
This course is specifically focused on formulating and applying practical strategies for entering the markets of Asia Pacific, the highest growth region in the world. All of the case studies are based on the Asia Pacific region and many recount trail-blazing deals that offer innovative and useful lessons for students. Among the principal topics examined in the course are: Entry Strategies; Negotiating Strategies; Pricing Strategies; and Strategies for dealing with Governments and State-Owned Enterprises. The course is taught from the perspective of management strategy and decision making, but it is intended also to sharpen students' capabilities in deal structuring, financing, negotiating, and solving regulatory issues. In several cases, students will be placed at the negotiating table and have the opportunity to test their strategy against the local counterparty. Actual transaction outcomes and subsequent events are always presented. Past cases have included situations in the countries of China's automotive and chemicals, Pan-Asia's the Internet, Thailand's aircraft, Taiwan's consumer goods, and Hong Kong's managing feng shui.
GBUS 8421Comparative Studies in New Product Development (1.5)
This course is intended for students interested in gaining insight into the issues and challenges of managing the development of new products and services in the corporate environment. A key feature of the course is its team-based field study of new product development in one of three industry settings: consumer products, defense/aerospace, or an industry of choice such as software development, medical/pharmaceutical, computers/electronics, or industrial components. Together with the field-study component that engages students in field-based research and discussions with senior industry executives leading new product creation, the course covers new product development practices via lectures, cases, and readings. Industry differences will be examined along dimensions including integration of customer understanding and input into product concept creation, leading innovation, R&D and engineering design practices, product portfolio management, effective use of the supply base, project personnel and leadership selection, performance management and incentives, integration between functional areas and development projects, and managing product roll-out in global markets. The course content will emphasize the management issues and trade-offs that are required to ensure that the product development process and decision-making values support the corporate strategy and functions within the corporation's constraints on both financial and human resources. The role of managers and leaders in support of product development are explored for those directly and indirectly involved in the new product development process.
GBUS 8423Corporate Financial Strategies (1.5)
This course adopts the perspective of a CFO of a publicly held corporation as the strategic partner to the CEO with an emphasis on the role of financial analysis in creating corporate value. It draws heavily from analytical techniques provided in Financial Management and Policies and Valuation in Financial Markets courses and extends the concepts introduced in those courses to examine key policy challenges that confront public corporations.Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8424Games and Auctions (1.5)
This course aims to sharpen the participants' strategic thinking. It examines competitive situations from a diverse range of corporate activities in which performance depends on the interactions between a multiplicity of decision makers, including customers, suppliers, competitors, employees, managers, investors, and regulators. Students will develop a tool set for perceiving, analyzing, and shaping these interactions. Most of the tools have first been developed in economic game theory. Many key insights from game theory are intuitively compelling and fit literally on the back of an envelope. The course therefore emphasizes concepts and qualitative reasoning, rather than quantitative techniques. Case studies from different functional areas serve to provide students with a store of strategic insights and, under the guidance of analytical tools, to condition sound intuitive thinking that will carry over to new, unfamiliar problems. Computer simulations enable hands-on decision making and provide feedback on the effectiveness of personal rules of thumb for competitive interactions.
GBUS 8426Derivative Securities: Options and Futures (1.5)
The Derivatives course is designed for students interested in a career in investment banking or corporate finance. The primary purpose of the course is to teach students how to interpret and value the wide variety of derivatives products available. As such, the course examines a broad array of derivative products that range from basic futures contracts to the more specialized products developed for interest-rate markets. The valuation tools considered begin with basic arbitrage relationships and from there students will develop the Black-Scholes model. The course will also introduce the binomial approach and will use it as the primary valuation framework throughout the course. Students will also, through the use of assignments and problem sets, develop an intuitive understanding of why these products are used and the fundamental relationships that underlay all derivative products.
GBUS 8427Entrepreneur as Change Agent (1.5)
This course examines the entrepreneur as change agent within the evolving economy. Building on the premise that entrepreneurship presents the best contemporary outlet for agents of revolutionary change, students will examine how enterprising individuals create value for themselves and others, across regional, industrial, and social boundaries. This is a course for those whose long-term goals extend beyond creating personal economic gain and involve creating broad-scale value for multiple stakeholders. Although this course does not guarantee that every student will become a change agent or provide a step-by-step path for executing such change, our belief is that the Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia corridor as an intersection of technology, capital providers, government agencies and officials, small and large firms, and universities provides a fertile environment for study. Therefore, the course will be delivered in-residence in the Washington metropolitan area.
GBUS 8428Securities Markets in Action (1.5)
Investment decision makers often experience a tension between the decision rules commonly found in practice and those proscribed in theory. The resolution of this tension creates a dilemma for investment professionals. Some may choose to blindly accept theory and ignore the real-world realities of the market place. Others may choose to casually dismiss financial theory as unrealistic and irrelevant. Because either of these responses is likely to be perilous, this course seeks to fill the need for a more balanced response. Students may begin the course understanding that traditional finance theory relies on a set of fundamental assumptions about the behavior of buyers and sellers of financial securities and conditions of the market in which they trade. This course surveys areas of common departure from the traditional assumptions of investor behavior and market conditions with a view to evaluating their impact on investment decision rules.
GBUS 8429Managing Conflict and Leveraging Consensus (1.5)
This course will provide a deeper understanding of options, preferred approaches and best practices in managing conflict, and leveraging consensus. As conflict is an inevitable element in all human relations, students will explore how managers and leaders who effectively deal with both daily and systemic conflict enjoy a distinct competitive advantage in a variety of respects. These include: building and maintaining strategic alliances and networks; furthering team creativity and innovation; fostering collaborative organizational cultures and working relationships; containing financial and human costs; and, ultimately, improving business results. While rooted in negotiation and conflict theory, this course will provide pragmatic and practical general management skills and should therefore be of interest to all students, regardless of their specific career or personal goals. Bargaining and Negotiating is a prerequisite for this course. Principal modes of instruction are cases, readings, extended simulations, and in-class exercises.
GBUS 8430Systems Thinking and Design (1.5)
Students who are interested in adding a dimension to their critical thinking and business design skills will be interested in this course during which they will examine fundamental skill sets that can accelerate their ability to diagnose and manage complex business issues. General managers and strategy consultants use system-thinking skills to examine the interconnectedness of business processes and policy structures and to judge how a change in any one area might affect the performance of an entire system over time. Students will learn a new approach to communicating with others and benefit from learning to utilize a system-design approach for facilitating discussions aimed at developing new mental models of complex business systems. During the course, students will utilize business simulations to design new managerial policies aimed at improving performance and testing alternative business scenarios. The course is highly participatory, relying on workshops, simulations, and interaction with classmates and guest speakers to complement readings, cases, and exercises. Throughout the course, special emphasis is placed on the ability to communicate with others to build a shared understanding of business processes, decisions, and business performance insights. Systems Design and Business Dynamics I may be elected without continuing on to Systems Design and Business Dynamics II, but part I is a prerequisite for part II.
GBUS 8431Systems Design and Business Dynamics II (1.5)
Systems Design and Business Dynamics I is a prerequisite for this course as part II is designed to allow students to apply the fundamental skills learned in part I to significantly more intricate business issues. Students will assess, quantify, and model the behavior of a complete system to determine effective points of leverage for achieving the business performance they select. More advanced system-analysis tools, design frameworks, and business simulations are offered to students who seek a differential capability in unraveling and addressing business-performance dynamics. Increasingly complex business situations are explored that are of particular interest to the strategic consultant, general manager, operations consultant, or market analyst. The course is highly experiential and participatory, relying on workshops, simulations, and interaction with classmates and guest speakers to complement the readings and cases. In addition to developing additional capability in analyzing business performance patterns, students will utilize mapping and modeling software to explore differences in strategic decision policies. Throughout the course, special emphasis is placed on the ability to communicate with others using system-analysis tools to build a shared understanding of business processes and insights. Part I is focused on individual work and exploration while this second part of the course engages students in more team-oriented work, and the class essentially becomes a set of small consulting firms whose purpose is to address intricate business issues.
GBUS 8433Media, Entertainment and Sports Management (1.5)
This course introduces students to the specific challenges of managing within the media, sports, and entertainment industries. The course also explores the management of businesses with a creative component, including topics such as how to deal effectively with advertising, public relations, or a talent agency, and better understanding those within an organization who create intellectual property (e.g., engineers designing cars and scientists researching breakthroughs in biotechnology). Students will discuss the challenges of communicating across boundaries to bridge the gap between the perceived 'creative' and 'business' functions. Cases studies will be utilized as well as projects designed either by the students themselves in a way that is helpful to their career or by guests involved in the course. The course will also stage creative encounters in which guests involved in media, entertainment, and sports engage students in the problems they face in their professional lives, encounters for which students will aim to find innovative solutions.
GBUS 8434International Corporate Finance (1.5)
This course explores the financial decisions of firms facing exchange risks in a global capital market. Building on students' existing understanding of exchange rate determinants, the course examines transaction and economic exposure, hedging activities, capital budgeting, global capital sourcing, and financial strategy. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8435Emerging Medical Technologies Seminar (1.5)
This course focuses on understanding what it means to advise, do business with, or be involved in the development of` a heavily regulated industry. It is aimed at attracting a group of interested students who believe they will be likely to have banking or consulting clients in the Life Sciences industry or who aspire to take a role in the creation of new enterprises in this sector. In this industry, whether Biotech or Devices, the consumer of products, the patient, does not choose the product, pay for it, or have any say about what products are available. This is a unique environment in which anyone involved needs to have a working knowledge of the philosophy, terminology, and processes their clients, companies, or products will have to follow. The course is not designed to make students regulatory experts but to show them ways to navigate the regulatory pathways and related issues, which impact every phase of the creation and growth of a Life Sciences company. For the most part, students will not examine the issues surrounding the growth of provider or service businesses such as hospitals but instead explore the issues related to businesses built around proprietary technology. Topic samples: the history and evolution of regulation in this country and why it has evolved differently in other countries; cosmetics, cosmeceuticals, and food and how these areas are coming under increasing scrutiny by regulators; how to finance a drug versus a device company; and emerging technologies' issues. Course content will include cases, class discussions, background reading, guest lectures, and individual and student team projects. Students will have an opportunity to follow an actual company's evolving strategy.
GBUS 8438The Experience Economy (1.5)
This course provides an in-depth look at the emergence of experiences as a distinct form of economic commerce, using the book, The Experience Economy. Students will examine the ways marketing experiences are altering the methods with which companies create demand, the role of mass customization in shifting from goods and services to experiences, and how the staging of experiences requires fundamentally different human performance technologies. Students also will participate in a comprehensive review of nine analytical models. Each model is designed to foster robust thinking about experiential innovation and will be accompanied by a handful of typical examples, followed by open discussion and an interactive exercise aimed at making application to specific businesses and industries. At the conclusion of this review, teams will be formed with each team tasked with developing a case study or research report that utilizes a particular model to provide further exploration about creating value through new or enhanced experiences.
GBUS 8439Leadership and Cultures of Trust & Innovation (1.5)
This course uses business cases to explore leadership that is highly effective at building cultures of innovation. It focuses on how leaders can construct environments that encourage employees to search for innovative ways to improve the competitiveness of the enterprise, on a daily basis without external direction and instruction, and how these environments (cultures) can guide both strategic and executive decisions to optimize enterprise performance. It also demonstrates why innovation is increasingly important, not only to technology companies but also to companies across a broad spectrum of industries. Through business cases and filmed interviews, students will examine companies and leaders that have been successful at building cultures of innovation. The course is intended for students who seek to lead a business organization. It may also be useful for students wishing to pursue an investment career, as identifying leadership that creates cultures of innovation is believed by many to be a key ingredient in successful investing. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8440Patents & Corporate Value: Exploration of Public Policy, Business Strategy, & Financial Rptg Issues (1.5)
This course explores the current state of affairs and aims to present a set of principles to guide the practicing manager and investor with respect to the effect of the intellectual property on strategic decisions. Changes in domestic and international policies toward granting patents have triggered massive shifts in managerial and investor behavior. Many companies now actively manage their patent portfolios as an extension of competitive strategy by engaging in risky, litigious, or otherwise aggressive actions. Still many others have yet to realize the importance of the changing patent environment and make suboptimal strategic decisions. Investors, striving to estimate the intrinsic value of firms, often face limited information and thus struggle with evaluating the importance of intellectual property to the overall strategic objectives of the company. In consequence, both corporate and investor decisions can vary dramatically from the optimum. The course will be conducted as a one-week course at Darden and in Washington D.C. and surrounding suburbs. It will entail speakers from and/or visits to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. Senate, venture capital firms, and IP-intensive firms in Maryland and Northern Virginia. This course will be relevant to students anticipating careers in technology management, business strategy, consulting, venture capital, business development, financial reporting, and securities analysis.
GBUS 8442Advanced Financial Reporting and Analysis (1.5)
This course is intended for students who want to extend their knowledge and comprehensive understanding at both the conceptual and practical level of our accounting and financial reporting system beyond the topics covered in the prerequisite elective course, Financial Reporting and Analysis. It will provide students with new opportunities to take an in-depth look at challenging contemporary financial accounting and reporting issues and practices pertaining to inventory valuations, sales-type and operating leases, accounting changes, corporate restructurings, financial contingencies, mergers and acquisitions, and market valuations. Other topics covered will include earnings management, earnings per share, earnings quality, and corporate governance. The course also examines the impact that the recent accounting and related business scandals have had on investor confidence and the capital markets, and it includes a number of examples of fraudulent financial reporting that has occurred. Although the primary focus of this course is on accounting and reporting practices in the United States, it also addresses the significant progress made in establishing international financial reporting standards.
GBUS 8443Second-Year Coaching and Career Development (0)
This course gives second-year students an opportunity to learn the theory of effective mentoring and career coaching in the workplace and to apply it to real-life, professional-level discussions with first-year students in the MBA Career Development process. The course will prepare students to successfully meet the challenges of providing career counseling and direction to others for achieving superior performance in the workplace. Second-year coaches will study, practice, and reflect upon all aspects of coaching, mentoring, and counseling that fall within the scope of managerial responsibilities common to MBAs at various leadership levels. The course, which runs from August through March, will begin in a classroom setting where the theoretical aspects of coaching will be introduced and explored. Subsequent training sessions will be interspersed with hands-on application of the concepts with assigned first-year students. Throughout the course, direction and oversight will be provided by Career Development Center consultants both individually and in small groups with other coaches.
GBUS 8444Investments (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course will provide students with an understanding of the theory and practice of investment decision making. The course is divided into three modules: asset allocation, manager selection, and market frictions. The first module examines the decision of how to allocate a portfolio across different asset classes (e.g., stocks, bonds, real estate).
GBUS 8445Quantitative Portfolio Management (1.5)
The Portfolio Management course is designed for students interested in careers in investment management. Students are required to have taken Valuation in Financial Markets (GBUS 7603) and Investments (GBUS 8444) prior to taking this course. The objective of the course is to help students develop the analytical tools and insight necessary to manage an investment portfolio.
GBUS 8446Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Clean Commerce (1.5)
Whereas the prerequisite course GBUS 8060 is an introduction for those with little or no experience with innovation and sustainability, this new course provides students with the opportunity to go into significantly more depth regarding strategy design and implementation. It offers the opportunity for students with experience in sustainability and innovation topics to add greater depth to their practical understanding at the advanced level.
GBUS 8447Innovation and Product Development (1.5)
This course will expose students to the managerial challenges that arise throughout the product and service innovation process, including needs identification, concept development via iterative design, and market launch. Using product development as a platform from which to launch a broader discussion on innovation, the course will investigate the key ingredients to successful innovations in any setting.
GBUS 8448Ultimate Questions Responsible Mgmt & Value in Business (1.5)
This course is designed to explore what it means to be a person of faith and how that relates to how one should live, particularly in business. Students will look at this core question from the standpoint of three different religious traditions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. As we look at each faith tradition, we will be asking a series of questions connected to core themes of the course.
GBUS 8449Women Leaders in Corporate America (1.5)
At the heart of this course is the phenomenon of the growing importance of women in leadership positions in corporate America and, to a lesser extent, in global corporations.
GBUS 8450Hot Topics in Finance (1.5)
The course gives students the opportunity to hear financial market experts discuss the most current financial issues in the headlines. Topics will span issues of concern to Wall Street as well as corporate America. Each class will feature a new speaker who will either introduce a new issue to the class or will bring a different perspective on the issue of a previous speaker.
GBUS 8451Managing International Trade and Investments (1.5)
This course is intended for students whose careers will likely be affected by trends in international trade and investment. It offers a conceptual framework to analyze the opportunities and constraints of the global economy, while at the same time provides concrete examples of successful (or failed) business strategies. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8452Financial Management (1.5)
This course is intended for those planning careers in areas not requiring a sophisticated knowledge of finance but who wish further exposure to operating finance from the general manager's perspective. The course will therefore touch briefly on topics of importance to those planning to work in marketing, operations, general management, smaller enterprises, and new ventures. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8453Entrepreneurial Finance and Private Equity (1.5)
This course explores a comprehensive set of financial situations that arise in high-growth and high-risk enterprises. It focuses primarily on the investment phase of the private equity cycle and examines the investment strategy, valuation, and structure of ventures in their formative stages prior to becoming public companies. A range of enterprises are examined from early stage (venture capital) to late stage (mezzanine financing and buyouts) to provide perspective on how the maturity of an organization influences the nature and structure of financing and valuation. Issues related to the measurement of returns in private equity funds, valuing enterprises at different stages of development, and structuring deals using various forms of financing are covered as well as the analytical methods to better measure performance and value enterprises. Students will examine how each party's view of the value of the enterprise forms a basis for negotiation upon which the percentage of equity participation and the terms of the contract are determined as well as how the pricing and terms depend not only the deal itself but also upon prevailing market conditions. As private equity firms are either rapidly growing or changing organizations, students will learn that there must be sufficient flexibility and appropriate incentives built into the current round of capital raising and the contract terms to carry the firm through its next stage of development.
GBUS 8454Small Enterprise Finance (1.5)
This course provides participants with experience in the analysis and resolution of financial issues in the context of the smaller enterprise that has no or, at best, limited access to the public capital markets. The course material seldom will deal with high-tech enterprises that are purchased with the intent of rapid resale. On the contrary, it deals with companies operating in the mundane, real world of the typical small-enterprise owner who needs sales to meet the payroll, wisely uses limited capital resources, carefully raises new funds, and must plan for the ultimate transfer of the business to new owners. The latter problem is unique to the small, privately held business. In addition to considering typical issues of asset management, including acquisitions and dispositions, the course will cover topics such as working-capital management, selecting funding sources and structuring loans, project finance, creating liquidity, and transferring the business to the next generation or selling it. The tools required for this course were introduced in First Year Financial Management and Policies; emphasis will be on applying those tools in the small-enterprise context.
GBUS 8455Leading Organic Growth: Discovering and Executing New Opportunities-MBAE (1.5)
This course is designed to help students develop an understanding and competency set for optimizing organic revenue growth across the life cycle of an organization. It explores practical steps and actions for revenue expansion from internal sources.
GBUS 8456Unleashing Organizational Potential: Methods & Skills for Positive Interven (1.5)
This course introduces intervention methods and skills to unleash the potential of whole organizational systems by transforming an organization's culture. An organization's potential is unleashed when its cultural assumptions organize its activities in ways that excite and empower its members and its constituents to create extraordinary and meaningful results.
GBUS 8457Marketing Metrics (1.5)
The purpose of this course is to ensure that students master the definition, construction, applications, and weaknesses of common marketing metrics. The course aims to help students understand how metrics are used in assessing the long-term health of brands and customer relationships.
GBUS 8458Strategy Execution (1.5)
This course covers the management processes by which general managers manage businesses, addressing both public and private businesses. The course begins by introducing the concept of management levels, corporate, business, functional and operating. It covers the roles and responsibilities of managers at each level, with emphasis on the general management responsibility to coordinate activities between organizational levels. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8459Innovation and Design Experience (3)
The course examines how design thinking and innovation principles can be used to enhance the value and accelerate the development of business opportunities that deliver organic growth. Students will apply design methodologies and innovation tools in a live, corporate project, working closely with a client company with a real problem to solve.
GBUS 8460Portfolio (1.5)
This course will provide students with a strong conceptual and applied understanding of the theory and practice of portfolio management. Students will first examine classical modern portfolio theory that will form the foundation for an exploration of the practice of portfolio management through case discussions and with guest lecturers. Topics will include modern portfolio theory, investment policy, portfolio strategy, asset allocation, market efficiency, and performance evaluation. Students will be challenged to evaluate the validity of theory and conventional practice as guidance for managing portfolios. The course will feature a combination of cases, guest lecturers from industry, and readings. Although most relevant to students planning careers in investment management and research, the course also should be valuable to students interested in managing their own investments. Valuation in Financial Markets is a prerequisite for this course.
GBUS 8461The Enterprise Perspective (1.5)
The Enterprise Perspective
GBUS 8462Professional Selling (1.5)
This course will expose students to the leading frameworks and best practices of professional selling, specifically addressing the complex purchasing processes and sophisticated buyers that define today's business-to-business relationships. In addition, students will gain practical experience with the most current selling strategies, processes, skills, and tools that are appropriate for their careers. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8463Business and Sustainability (1.5)
This course is intended to provide students with a comprehensive conceptual and applied understanding of the sustainability challenges and opportunities facing corporations on a global scale with primary emphasis on environmental sustainability. Students will be exposed to a variety of pressing sustainability issues and to new techniques and approaches for successfully dealing with them. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8464Hot Topics in Marketing (1.5)
The course gives students the opportunity to hear marketing experts discuss the most current marketing issues facing companies today. Each class will feature a speaker who will either introduce a new issue to the class or bring a different perspective on an issue already introduced by a previous speaker. The content of the course will vary according to what topics are in the news as well as the availability of speakers. Prerequisites: Restricted toDarden students.
GBUS 8465Mgmt Planning & Control Sys (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course is intended to provide students with an understanding of the design and use of planning and control systems to facilitate the implementation of an organization's strategy. Many organizations have discovered that having a great strategy is not enough if the right structures and processes are not in place to implement that strategy.
GBUS 8466Emerging Topics In Technology & Operations Management (1.5)
The course offers a means for students to gain direct exposure to the world of practical affairs by engaging Darden alumni with expertise in technology and operations management. It will expose students to a range of emerging issues and topics in technology management and operations management and will be organized around four topic areas to enable in-depth discussions over multiple class sessions. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8467The Enterprise Perspective - Part II (0)
The Enterprise Perspective (EP) course is designed to build on the theme introduced in Leadership Residency 1 course, 'Leading with an Enterprise Perspective.' The EP course will consist of sessions during which students are encouraged to perceive situations and diagnose problems and then make essential tradeoffs or reconcile management decisions based on a multifunctional point of view.
GBUS 8468Organic Growth: The Innovation Challenge for Public Companies (1.5)
This course focuses on how operating managers identify growth opportunities, create focused growth strategies, and execute them successfully. Organic growth is primarily nonacquisitive growth resulting from geographic, product, service, concept, and customer expansion or from increased operating efficiencies and productivity. Growth will be studied from the strategic, process, and general management perspectives. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8469Entrepreneurs Taking Action (1.5)
This course focuses on the challenges entrepreneurs face in building ventures. Its purpose is to present students with a series of diverse management situations faced by entrepreneurs with companies at different stages of development. In each class, students will hear from and interact with experienced entrepreneurs and learn both from their successes and their failures. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8470Corporate Financing (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
The course focuses on capital raising in the United States and international markets and has as its ultimate goal a greater understanding of the capital acquisition process while it emphasizes capital raising in public markets. The course covers the institutional process of security issuance, the formal rules and regulations as well as the informal norms and practices of the marketplace. Issuance in public security markets entails strict adherence to these rules and regulations that govern the marketplace. While these rules place more limitations on managers' actions than private placements, the United States and the developed world's capital markets offer firms the broadest array of possible funding sources at the lowest cost. Students will survey a number of commonly used financing arrangements, such as follow-on equity issues, initial public offerings, ADRs, and several forms of straight and convertible debt. The course targets students with professional interests in corporate finance, commercial and investment banking, financial services, and management consulting.
GBUS 8471ESG Investing (1.5)
Investors are increasingly interested in making investments that are consistent with their individual environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals. This course explores how public capital markets are designed and regulated so that these investor goals can be achieved with some assurance that firms will take desirable action.
Course was offered Spring 2024
GBUS 8472Technology Accelerator Course (0)
In this course, students can master the process of adapting technology to the needs of the market and developing an actionable strategy. Students will learn the integrative skills necessary to do a startup even if they are not prepared to commit to the Incubator. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8473Mastering Global Leadership: Managing Your Career & Life in the Global Ec (1.5)
Based on the premise that global leaders are made, not born, this course is designed to help students explore the battery of perspectives and skills on which great global leaders rely. The course provides an opportunity for students to begin the personal transition toward mastery of global leadership capabilities. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8474Strategic Leadership (1.5)
This course explores the challenges of leading those with whom we do not have direct contact and is a companion course to GBUS 8703 Tactical Leadership. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8475Second-Year Coaching and Career Development (3)
This course gives second-year students an opportunity to learn the theory of effective mentoring and career coaching in the workplace and to apply it to real-life, professional-level discussions with first-year students in the MBA Career Development process. The course will prepare students to successfully meet the challenges of providing career counseling and direction to others for achieving superior performance in the workplace. Second-year coaches will study, practice, and reflect upon all aspects of coaching, mentoring, and counseling that fall within the scope of managerial responsibilities common to MBAs at various leadership levels. The course, which runs from August through March, will begin in a classroom setting where the theoretical aspects of coaching will be introduced and explored. Subsequent training sessions will be interspersed with hands-on application of the concepts with assigned first-year students. Throughout the course, direction and oversight will be provided by Career Development Center consultants both individually and in small groups with other coaches. Enrollment is restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8476Collaboration Lab (1.5)
To hone their skills for working with others successfully in business, students in this course will use recent research on cognition as well as experiential activities in group decision making to help students develop strategies to avoid mistakes and improve collaboration and thrive in ambiguous situations.
GBUS 8477Interactive Seminar in Supply Chain Management (1.5)
The focus of this course is on the design decisions and effective execution of supply chain management in complex, global-spanning settings. The goal of the course is to let students manage a supply chain in a competitive environment and experience the possible impact of their decisions on the market as well as their own performance.
Course was offered Spring 2012, Spring 2011
GBUS 8478Markets in Human Hope (0)
This course explores audacious innovations in business and markets as viable tools in promoting human development and transforming societies. The challenge that students will take on is to create products, services, business methods, financial instruments, and/or market-based systems that address the socioeconomic and structural challenges faced by the underserved and disadvantaged. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden Students.
GBUS 8479The Business of Film at the Cannes Film Festival (1.5)
The course, built around participation in activities at the Cannes Film Festival, will develop a strong, working understanding of the international film business. The course will focus on the marketing and distribution of films. Objectives:Provide hands-on exposure to the film industry and develop student ability to generate a feasible plan for the marketing and distribution of a film. Prerequisties: Restricted to Darden Students.
GBUS 8480Developing Organizational Capability (1.5)
This course focuses on the leadership challenges to develop and deploy a workforce that builds capability to create value in the marketplace. But an enterprise leadership perspective implies more than just good people practices. It focuses on aligning people, processes, and systems around core drivers of value creation and competitive advantage.
GBUS 8481Global Industry Economics (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
In this course, students study the tools of microeconomics that shed light on the structural industry characteristics and global and local forces that afford an understanding of economic change at the industry level. These tools are applied to rapidly changing industries characterized by high levels of innovation, network economic effects, important roles of information and information asymmetry, and other complex forces.
GBUS 8482Leadership Strategies (1.5)
This course presents multiple perspectives and approaches to studying, defining, applying, and evaluating the concept (and practice) of leadership. Through a series of personality assessments, case studies, and simulations, students will examine how their own personality traits, leadership style, and philosophy guide their behavior in critical leadership activities
GBUS 8483Strategic Alliances: Bridging Theory & Practice (1.5)
This course is intended for students who plan on working in organizations that rely on other organizations for help achieving their goals. It explores topics that are intended to raise students' level of understanding of alliances, their value as a strategic tool, the pitfalls to avoid, and ultimately to help improve the probability of a successful alliance.
GBUS 8484Creativity & Design Thinking (1.5)
The focus of this course is on design thinking, a particular problem-solving approach that emphasizes customer empathy, invention, optionality, and iteration as its core components. Design thinking is concerned with the creative side of strategic thinking and complements the more analytical strategic orientation that emphasizes quantitative methodologies, evaluation frameworks, and the assessment of a single solution to a strategic problem.
GBUS 8485Markets in Human Hope (3)
This course explores audacious innovations in business and markets as viable tools in promoting human development and transforming societies. The challenge that students will take on is to create products, services, business methods, financial instruments, and/or market-based systems that address the socioeconomic and structural challenges faced by the underserved and disadvantaged.
GBUS 8486Technology Accelerator Course (3)
In this course, students can master the process of adapting technology to the needs of the market and developing an actionable strategy. Students will learn the integrative skills necessary to do a startup even if they are not prepared to commit to the Incubator.
GBUS 8487Innovation and Design Experience (3)
The course examines how design thinking and innovation principles can be used to enhance the value and accelerate the development of business opportunities that deliver organic growth. Students will apply design methodologies and innovation tools in a live, corporate project, working closely with a client company with a real problem to solve.
GBUS 8488Global Innovation and Technology Commercialization (1.5)
This course provides an intensive experience in studying successful global innovation practices and concurrently working on advising a company on advancing a specific technological innovation into a viable operation using supply chain strategies and Business-to-Business (B2B) concepts and tools. In this course, students will explore the reasons for the innovation revolution in Israel and its success in developing technologies and ideas
GBUS 8489Philosophy and Business: Business in Society (1.5)
The purpose of this course is to enable the students to develop a comprehensive "theory of business" that will guide their business careers and inform their leadership. Key sections of the course include: (1) A Philosophical Perspective on Business: What is Real and How Do We Know? (2) Capitalism and Business: Historical, Global, and Modern Perspectives; (3) Business and the Institutions of Society: The Role of Government, Media, NGOs.
GBUS 8490Financial Institution and Markets (1.5)
This is a survey course on the institutions and products that make up the capital markets. Major themes in the course include financial innovation and its role in making the financial markets and the economy more efficient. An emphasis is placed on the redistribution of risk among market participants and the reduction in the spread between what borrowers pay and what lenders receive. The course is designed as a broad overview and is not a technical course. It is valuable not only for students interested in finance but also for those with general management aspirations.
GBUS 8491Advanced Global Financial Markets (1.5)
This course is an extension of the content of the prerequisite, first-year elective, Global Financial Markets (GFM).As in GFM, students will discuss real-time forward-looking 'live' cases on the world's currency and the bond, gold, and oil markets as well as have the opportunity to analyze in depth current big issues in international financial markets.
GBUS 8492Admissions Interviewing (3)
The 'Interviewing Experiential Field-Based Elective' course is an opportunity for students to learn effective interviewing, verbal and written communication, and leadership skills. In addition, the course teaches students to interact with a diverse group of people and gain insights in to their potential through active listening.
GBUS 8493AI in Marketing (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course will focus specifically on the AI driven transformation of marketing. This course provides an in-depth exploration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in marketing, combining theoretical frameworks with practical applications. Students will study the history and processes of AI, including machine learning and deep learning, and how these technologies can be leveraged through the AI Marketing Canvas for strategic planning.
GBUS 8494The Enterprise Perspective - Part I (0)
The Enterprise Perspective (EP) course is designed to build on the theme introduced in Leadership Residency 1 course, 'Leading with an Enterprise Perspective.' The EP course will consist of sessions during which students are encouraged to perceive situations and diagnose problems and then make essential tradeoffs or reconcile management decisions based on a multifunctional point of view.
Course was offered Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015, Fall 2014
GBUS 8495Prototyping and Product Development II (1.5)
This action-oriented course will guide students through the process of launching a new product or service. Students will work in teams to develop and implement a go-to-market plan for a new product.
Course was offered Spring 2018, Spring 2017, Spring 2016
GBUS 8496Machine Learning and AI for Business (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
New cases provide opportunities to learn how data science is affecting a variety of domains, from entrepreneurship and marketing to operations and finance. In this course, students will gain exposure to the concepts and tools used by managers to create disruptive business models that leverage big data.
GBUS 8497Impact Investing (1.5)
This course will cover the rapidly-expanding world of impact investing, focusing on the fundamentals underlying investment strategies for funds (and, to a lesser extent, companies) seeking to both create profit and generate social or environmental impact.
GBUS 8498Creating and Advancing Big Ideas (1.5)
As the business climate becomes increasingly competitive, leaders need to know how to be creative and how to harness, control, and maximize the creative potential of the people they lead. In this student-centered course, we will explore the life of ideas in contemporary, knowledge-based organizations--more specifically, where do "big ideas" come from, and how are they identified, managed, and executed successfully.
Course was offered Spring 2024
GBUS 8499Investment Mgmt Exec Student Investment Fund (1.5)
Designed for students to gain experience in managing an investment portfolio which has a specific investment mandate to establish goals, methods to build a portfolio, select investments, track & report on performance, monitor & manage all existing positions.
GBUS 8500Special Topics Seminar (1.5 - 3)
Offered
Fall 2024
Each seminar is a course of study for students with special interests in business administration topics not currently included in the normal course offerings of the MBA Program. The seminar topics should be consistent with the objectives of the Second Year Program.
GBUS 8509Tactical Topics for Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Provides students with exposure to practical matters faced by operators of smaller enterprises. Whether starting or acquiring a small enterprise, entrepreneurs will be better prepared having been introduced to real-world topics such as relationships with key service vendors (banking, legal, accounting), commercial leasing terms, employee benefit programs, state and local public policy, government procurement, commercial insurance, etc.
GBUS 8510Global Business Experience (1.5)
Global Business Experience is a one-week course that focuses on business issues in variety of countries outside of the United States. The courses are offered at midterm break in March. Each section offered under the Global Business Experience heading provides the opportunity for students to visit a different country and experience business practices and cultures other than those of their native countries. Both first-year students and second-year students may participate. Based on a unifying theme and a specific geographic location, each course includes structured classes and practitioner presentations as well as visits to companies, governmental agencies, and important cultural sites. Each Global Business Experience course is intended to give students a better perspective on the countries visited and, through comparison, on their country of origin. While the countries may vary from year to year, in the recent past, programs have been offered in Argentina, Bahrain, China, Czech Republic, India, Mexico, Spain, and Sweden.
GBUS 8514NOLS Experiential Leadership - Patagonia (1.5)
The course is structured around an 8-day NOLS expedition in the beautiful and rugged mountains of Patagonia during Early Q4. Students will spend this time honing practical leadership strategies and technical outdoor skills. On a daily basis, students will be challenged to exercise individual decisiveness while simultaneously facilitating excellent teamwork, skills relevant to both life at Darden and future business success.
Course was offered Spring 2019, Spring 2018
GBUS 8515Economy in Transition-Cuba (1.5)
Deeper understanding of Cuba's history, business context and economy, political and social context, and culture, with the ability to compare this to their own home and other global contexts that they have experienced. Insights into economic and social transition in the case of Cuba and how to think about what this kind of transition looks like in isolated or emerging economies.
GBUS 8516Adapting Products, Services and Business Models Emerging Mkts-Russia (1.5)
Explore how companies adapt their business models to the unique markets. What factors contribute to success, survival, and failure of multinational corporations entering and operating in this market? The Russian economy is an excellent example of an emergent market with local and international companies working in cooperation. We will explore Russian financial and investment processes, production systems and their impact on production capacity.
Course was offered January 2019, January 2018
GBUS 8517Addressing Tough Problems in Business and Society-India (1.5)
We will explore how businesses and government entities are working separately and together to solve complex societal issues such food and water mgmt, health care, urban planning and farming, and issues around gender and minority rights.
GBUS 8518Creativity and Design in Barcelona (1.5)
Exploring the art and architecture of Barcelona -- one of the design capitals of the world -- and in the process learn about the qualities of creative thinking, in any environment. Barcelona's history and culture are rich and informative
Course was offered Spring 2019, Spring 2018
GBUS 8519Entrepreneurship and Innovation-Israel (1.5)
During their time in Israel, students will visit local businesses and incubators and meet with government officials to develop a better understanding of the lessons that can be learned from the innovation revolution in Israel.
Course was offered Spring 2019, Spring 2018
GBUS 8520Darden Capital Management (1.5 - 4.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
In the Darden Capital Management (DCM) course students will test their ability to value a stock and evaluate the appropriateness of an investment thesis for inclusion in a portfolio. The course prepares students in equity research, stock selection, and portfolio management in a real-world environment in which students manage funds from the Darden Endowment.
GBUS 8522Luxury and Exports - Italy (1.5)
This course students will be exposed to Italy as a global hub for successful luxury export products across a range of sections (fashion, automotive, food, etc) and explore how and why Italian firms and brands compete globally. Understand the history and culture underlying the Italian business context and unique aspects of Italy as a country and Southern Europe as a region for business today and in the future.
Course was offered Spring 2019
GBUS 8526Global Competitiveness: A New Zealand Perspective (1.5)
This course offers a unique global experience to observe how history has offered New Zealand the opportunity to develop and inspire responsible leaders, build a clean-green industrial base, and advance knowledge in a way that creates value for all citizens.
Course was offered Spring 2019
GBUS 8529Lessons from South Africa on Public-Private Sector Coop to Grow an Economy (1.5)
We will experience many of the wonderful aspects of this beautiful country by visiting Johannesburg, Cape Town, and a few other locations, and should be sensitive, not afraid of, integrating its history into our understanding of the country today. Students should look to be open, honest, challenging and respectful of one another. To help us more fully engage with each other when we are in South Africa, we will work in teams.
Course was offered Spring 2019, Spring 2018
GBUS 8530Global Immersion (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This Darden Worldwide Course aims to develop a deeper understanding of a particular global business environment, what it takes to successfully enter and understand new business contexts, and how to develop a mindset as a leader across different cultures and institutions. The course accomplishes this by immersing students on-site in a new context to study these issues through engagement with local executives, global and local companies and organizations, meeting with government and community leaders, exploring activities of cultural and historical significance, and meeting with peers.
GBUS 8535Growth and Business in Emerging Markets (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course explores the relationship between institutions, economic growth and business environments in fast growing economies. It adopts the view that market development and institutional reform are the fundamental forces driving long-run growth and near-term change in the global business environment. Provides a global view to students who want to work in substantially global industries and management positions.
GBUS 8601Darden Prisoner Reentry Education Program (PREP) (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
The purpose of this course is to develop a deeper understanding of the capabilities required to integrate team management, leadership through pedagogy and engagement with social challenges. This course expands students¿ foundational business knowledge as they take on the role of instructor and teach business cases through the Socratic method.
GBUS 8602Darden Returning Citizens Reentry Program (1.5)
This Darden PREP course, in partnership with Resilience Education, engages MBA students in transforming the way the business community understands incarceration and its societal impact. Students will work in teams to address reentry and employment challenges of our students or work on a project that builds on the work of the Darden Prisoner Reentry Education Program (PREP) and Resilience Education (RE) more broad.
GBUS 8610Business to Business Marketing (1.5)
This course is designed primarily for students seeking a marketing career in organizations that market products and services to other organizations. While the course is aimed at those interested in business-to-business marketing, it is also appropriate for those seeking careers in consulting, manufacturing, and nonmarketing functional areas of business-to-business firms. The course emphasizes the tactical aspects of business marketing as well as conceptual and strategic elements of the marketing-planning process. The course begins by examining how to organize the marketing function and then moves to the topics of buyer-seller relationships, sales force management, complexities and problems inherent in forging longer term partnerships, and developing and managing complex distribution systems along with some exposure to product development and launch. Cases have been chosen from a variety of settings, ranging from high tech to 'metal bending' and from the emerging to the more mature businesses. As opportunities arise, the course will incorporate a 'live' case. Working with a company to address critical marketing problems, student teams will be assigned to work on these problems. These projects comprise the final project for the course and take the class work from the written-case analysis to the real-time case analysis. Topics for study are chosen based on the importance to the firm and on the relevance of the topic to the content of the course.
GBUS 8611Strategic Management of Financial Service Organizations (1.5)
The course is intended primarily for those who are considering careers with financial service organizations that serve as competitive financial intermediaries, such as commercial banks, investment banks, money managers, and insurance companies. The name of the course accurately describes its contents: strategic management of organizations that create and deliver financial products. There are several reasons for studying the strategic management challenges of financial service organizations. First, this aspect of financial service organizations management has been the make-or-break decision for financial service organizations in recent years. Some segments of the financial service industry end up with capital needs, and others find themselves with surplus but expensive capital. Either problem can be fatal. Once the strategy has been selected, however, the implementation decisions, although not necessarily the implementation itself, are comparatively straightforward. Second, the strategic perspective permits the course much broader scope than would the alternative of concentrating in depth on a narrower set of institutions in order to cover all aspects of management. Broad perspective is also important for the course to make the maximum contribution to the career decisions of students considering jobs with financial service organizations, institutions that are not as closely examined in the corporate-finance focus of the first-year curriculum.
GBUS 8612Managing Innovation and Product Development (1.5)
This course will expose students to the challenges managing the product and service development process in a corporate environment. Specifically, students will address issues such as creativity and problem solving, technology evaluation and management, global R&D management, innovation portfolio management, stage-gate versus agile processes, modular design/product architecture, and crowd sourcing
GBUS 8615The Business of Media and Entertainment (1.5)
This course is an exploration of Media and Entertainment Businesses including film, broadcasting, music, and game. Students will explore field of media and entertainment from many different perspectives in marketing and finance as well as decision making.
Course was offered Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2022
GBUS 8617Managing Turnarounds and Workouts (1.5)
This course is intended for those desiring a deeper understanding of the problems of effecting turnarounds (restructurings) and workouts (resuscitations) than is available in other courses that briefly treat these matters. The course is structured to be relevant to those planning to work in marketing, operations, general management, smaller enterprises, and new ventures as well as those seeking a career as a workout specialist. It will not qualify participants as experts in legal and tax niceties and is not designed to help identify undervalued turnaround opportunities. It is not a course in vulture finance. The course focuses more on the causes and warning signs of trouble, on what can be done to protect and restore a company's health, and on dealing with the aggrieved financial sources that are inevitably but unwillingly involved. The complexity of major turnarounds and workouts requires that the course material deal primarily with smaller companies and exclusively with U.S. companies.
GBUS 8618Technology Entrepreneurship (1.5)
This course deals with important aspects of starting, developing, and growing a technology enterprise. We start by defining and providing perspective on high technology entrepreneurship, emphasizing the creation of highly scalable ventures. We then move to a discussion of the recognition and evaluation of technology opportunity, exploring how to determine what types of opportunities are worth economically pursuing.
GBUS 8619Leading Teams (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course examines how interpersonal processes, organizational contexts, and structural characteristics of teams influence their performance and productivity. The goal of the course is to provide students with a knowledge base and understanding of the mechanisms that set teams up for success, as well as the chance to practice designing, participating, and leading collaborative work. T
GBUS 8620Marketing Strategy (1.5)
This course targets those students who intend to work in consumer marketing, advertising, consulting, or retailing. There are four modules in the course: Marketing Mix and Budgeting Decisions, Branding, Price Strategy and Tactics, and Product Line Policy. This 15-session course focuses on the use of marketing discipline to create and capture value and emphasizes the need for accountability in the marketing function. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8621Project Management (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
The complete course in project management will include Monte Carlo simulation for project risk analysis within project planning, scoping, and network analysis. The critical path method will be employed. Topics of resource allocation, project monitoring, and real options thinking will be included.
GBUS 8622Data Science in Business (1.5)
New cases will provide opportunities to forecast quantities in a variety of domains from operations to marketing to finance. In this course, students will examine big data analytics and tools that have been written about in the public press (web scrapers, SQL, Tableau, R).
GBUS 8623Financial Trading (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course examines the nature and influence of trading in financial markets. Trading is a repeated-play game that usually entails making numerous decisions under conditions of uncertainty. In the course, particular attention is directed to the role of noise in financial markets; cognitive illusions and pitfalls in decision making by market participants; the identification of potentially profitable trades; the development of sound money management skills, arbitrage and quasi-arbitrage transactions; positive feedback trading, back office processing of trades; the management of the trading function; and the development of various expert trading systems. Two mock pit-trading sessions will give students firsthand experience in simulated pit-trading environments and illustrate necessary trading skills. A simulated trading game runs for most of the course. Guest lectures in class from top traders as well as the interviews of top traders in the texts provide diverse perspectives on trading by successful traders.
GBUS 8624Management of Service Operations (1.5)
The strategic and tactical problems of managing the operations function in the service environment are examined in this course. Topics include capacity management, Lean thinking, the role of operations in defining and delivering a competitive advantage in services and service-design thinking.
GBUS 8625Mergers and Acquisitions (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course is designed to provide students with a practical understanding of the merger and acquisition marketplace, addressing such topics as why companies grow through acquisitions, how acquisition or merger candidates are analyzed strategically and valued financially, and ultimately, whether and how mergers and acquisitions create value for stakeholders. Takeovers and mergers are a daily fact of life, have evolved into a critical part of every CEO or manager's strategic toolbox, and will most likely affect every person who enters the corporate world at some point in their career. Whether a student chooses to be a senior corporate manager, an M&A practitioner, or merely an informed armchair observer, the course is intended to provide the analytical framework to evaluate an acquisition from a strategic, financial, structural, tactical, legal, and ethical perspective. Students will apply learned content to real business situations, including the opportunity to develop, create, and present an acquisition proposal to an actual corporate client during the class.
GBUS 8626Global Economics of Water (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Recent droughts and the soaring food prices they trigger underscore that freshwater scarcity will be a major challenge in the 21st century. In spite of reports about imminent water crises, the world is not running out of water. It is especially the very uneven distribution of water, across and within countries, that is a concern. There is a need for improved water management.
GBUS 8627Changing the World: Understanding Nonprofits (1.5)
This course is based on the assumption that nonprofit organizations benefit individuals and society in numerous ways. It is designed to introduce students to the scope and the diversity of nonprofit organizations, to the unique governance, communications, and financing structures inherent in them, and to the innovative and creative opportunities available in them for well-trained and flexible management professionals.
GBUS 8629Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course provides students with an introduction to the process of searching for a company, valuing a small business, structuring a deal, negotiating with a seller, completing due diligence, obtaining debt and equity financing, and closing the transaction to become the CEO of their own business.
Course was offered Fall 2023
GBUS 8630Marketing Analytics (1.5)
This course is designed to expose students to advanced quantitative techniques in marketing research. The course deals with how marketers can extract useful information from marketing data for designing marketing strategies. The emphasis in the course is on advanced data analysis relevant for marketing decisions. Topics will include techniques relevant for new product pretests, product line pricing, demand forecasting, market and customer segmentation, allocating resources for advertising and promotion, customer valuation, and evaluating marketing campaign performance. Course content will feature a combination of cases, exercises, lectures, and a group project. The course will use a very hands-on approach and a majority of the topics covered in this course will have direct applicability to those students concentrating in marketing in their future jobs. Students are advised to take the Marketing Intelligence course prior to this course.
GBUS 8631Optimization (1.5)
Most of the quantitative models students have encountered thus far at Darden have been evaluative in nature, so their purpose has been to analyze or evaluate a particular alternative. The task of selecting the optimal alternative has been left for them to complete outside the model (i.e., the model helps us analyze and compare individual alternatives but does not actually identify the optimal solution for us).
GBUS 8632Software Design (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course will provide foundational skills for managers involved in developing software applications. These skills would be relevant to the future entrepreneur as well as to the future manager within an established company. The applications might be finished products for the end user (e.g., an iPhone app) or they might be internal systems built on vendor platforms (e.g., Salesforce or Oracle deployment).
GBUS 8633Coding with GPT (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
For the Darden student who wants to increase their creative confidence on software related projects, Software Development is an experiential SY elective that delivers hands-on coding experience for the non-engineer. Unlike online only options like codeacademy, SID offers a Darden compatible format with the hands-on assistance that students need to acquire the necessary skills in a single quarter.
GBUS 8634Interviewing Experiential Field-Based Elective (Part 1) (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course is an opportunity for students to learn effective interviewing, talent evaluation, verbal and written communication, marketing skills, and leadership skills. In addition, the course teaches students to interact with a diverse group of people and gain insights into their potential through active listening.
GBUS 8635Interviewing Experiential Field-Based Elective (Part 2) (1.5)
This course is a continuation of the Q2 course and provides an opportunity for students to further master interviewing, talent evaluation, verbal and written communication, marketing skills, and leadership skills. In addition, the course allows the students to deliver a meaningful and relevant recommendation to aid in the work of the Admissions Office.
GBUS 8636Digital Product Management (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course will introduce you to the modern practice of product management in digital. You'll learn how product managers create product/market fit for new products and enhance it for existing projects. Learn how generalist product managers establish successful interfaces with key functions like design, development/engineering, data science, sales/marketing and support/operations.
GBUS 8637Minds and Machines: Flourishing in the Age of AI (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course delves into the fascinating intersection of human psychology and artificial intelligence (AI). The focus of the course will be to help develop business leaders who can harness the transformative power of AI to create a positive impact on individuals, organizations, and society. The course will critically examine the challenges and risks associated with AI and advocate for the responsible use of AI by prioritizing human well-being.
GBUS 8638Artificial Intelligence and the Future of work (1.5)
This course analyzes the implications in the medium-run and studies how the different sectors of the economy will be impacted by AI. It will provide you with guidance on how to acquire skills that will likely remain relevant over the coming two decades.
GBUS 8639Corporate Financial Restructuring (1.5)
This course will introduce students to capital structures of businesses with a focus on in-court and out of court restructurings. The course will discuss valuation, credit and leverage structures, the responsibilities and rights of each constituent in the capital structure, the methods and tools of restructuring and distressed investing.
GBUS 8640Digital Capstone (1.5)
Opportunity for structured practice on integrating three key capabilities for any digital program: product design, application development, and analytics. The focus of the student experience is on directed practice for deepening and integrating their foundation of understanding of product design, application development, and analytics.
GBUS 8641Venture Velocity (3)
Offered
Fall 2024
"Creating a venture can be a lonely undertaking, leaving the Entrepreneur asking, "What to do Next?" We're going to turn venturing into a team sport and support each other as each student team builds their ventures towards viability as a side gig or a full time work. We will use the class to further develop entrepreneurial fundamentals like partnering, customer sales, and managing your affordable loss."
Course was offered Spring 2024, Fall 2023
GBUS 8645Honor the Trad of Past While Confront the Chall of the Future-Dubai/Bahrain (1.5)
The course will explore the issues facing leaders in the region through engagements in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and the Kingdom of Bahrain. These two countries have adopted different approaches to economic development and their vision for the future while considering their long tradition and history. We will explore the current and future plans for economic development, the role of business leaders in shaping these changes and their roles.
GBUS 8648Venturing Lab (1.5)
Creating a venture is ideally pursued with others. This course, designed for executive format students, turns venturing into a team activity, where founders support each other as they build their startups towards viability as a side gig or full time work. We will use the class to further develop entrepreneurial fundamentals around the principles of effectuation: bird-in-hand, affordable loss, lemonade, crazy quilt, and pilot-in-the-plane.
Course was offered Spring 2024
GBUS 8649The Analects: Timeless Wisdom Confucian Thoughts Becoming Global Strategist (1.5)
Confucianism is a system of beliefs and tradition deriving from ancient Chinese philosophical thought that seeks to guide personal virtues pertaining to ethics, leadership, and way of life. Students will attain a deep comprehension of Confucian values and apply them to business contexts centered on personal ethics in leadership roles, cross-cultural negotiations, environmentally sustainable development, and hierarchy in the corporate world.
GBUS 8650Cases in Global Strategy Seminar (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
In a world in which global businesses and economies are increasingly interconnected, tomorrow's leaders must develop the skills to succeed in dynamic cross-national contexts, leveraging nuanced understandings of global culture, strategy and execution to strategic advantage.
GBUS 8659Global Consulting Project-Part I (1.5)
Global Consulting Projects are electives that allow Second Year Darden students to solve pressing global business issues in small teams through a consulting engagement with a specific client.
GBUS 8660Global Consulting Project-Part II (1.5)
Global Consulting Projects are electives that allow Second Year Darden students to solve pressing global business issues in small teams through a consulting engagement with a specific client.
GBUS 8666Financial Crisis: Lessons for Democracy & Capitalism (1.5)
Financial crises are recurring and inseparable elements of capitalist economies. These crises hold tremendous destructive potential, impacting firms of all sizes in all sectors. In a world of densely integrated supply chains, global consumer bases, and transnational financing networks, this course prepares Darden students to understand how capitalist structures and political systems respond to and influence financial and economic shocks.
Course was offered Summer 2024
GBUS 8669Building Experimentation Skills (1.5)
Skills in the design and execution of experiments are one of the fundamental and critical competencies for success in an increasingly uncertain world, and a core component in many new innovation approaches employed in business today. Knowledge of how to build a compelling evidence base to test new ideas for products, services, and strategies, prior to implementation, is a driving force for managing the risks of innovation.
Course was offered Summer 2024
GBUS 8670DEF Management Team (Darden Executive MBA Fund) (1.5)
Students will be required to participate in student-led Darden Executive Fund management and related activities and learning to include creating and evaluating stock pitches, participate as part of a team in managing a fund, and provide regular updates on fund activities, goals, etc. to the Board of Trustees and other stakeholders.
Course was offered Spring 2024
GBUS 8672Venture Capital Finance (1.5)
The course applies financial methods and practices to the evaluation of early-stage companies. The goal of the class is to help managers make better investment and financing decisions in an entrepreneurial setting. The course covers the stages of a venture's life from raising startup financing to arranging an exit and provides an overview of the private equity industry and the institutional structure for raising venture capital financing.
GBUS 8673Managing Economic Uncertainty (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
In today's rapidly evolving world, business leaders face unprecedented levels of uncertainty. From geopolitical tensions and supply chain interruptions to climate change and fluctuating policy landscapes, navigating uncertainty requires agility, Bayesian thinking, and effective strategies. This course will equip students with the analytical tools and strategic frameworks necessary to transform uncertainty into a competitive edge.
GBUS 8685Community Based Conservation: Stakeholder Mgmt & Social Bus - South Africa (1.5)
Engage students with novel business models aimed at addressing societal and social challenges -- in this case through community-based conservation efforts -- in an emerging economy context by spending time in Johannesburg and on the Phinda private game reserve. Through an intensive on-site engagement in South Africa, explore the nature of the business model established to preserve and protect endangered species and ecosystems through collaboration.
GBUS 8690Direct Marketing (1.5)
This course examines the concepts involved in interactive marketing. Interactive marketing is characterized by activities that address customers directly (usually through some form of response advertising) for the purposes of initiating an exchange as well as developing, managing, and exploiting a customer relationship. Interactive marketing encompasses aspects of direct mail, customer relationship management, and Internet marketing. The ability to communicate with individual customers often allows the marketer to measure and manage each customer relationship separately. The results of response advertising campaigns are also measurable, testable, and data-base driven, thus converting the abstract aspect of marketing into the universal language of numbers. The course includes exercises in which students have the opportunity to apply and test the principles of interactive marketing in simulated business environments.
GBUS 8695Ethics and Social Impact (1.5)
This course will introduce students to alternate paradigms of thought regarding the nature and meaning of economics, work, and organizing. Adopting a feminist lens on the study of business will encourage students to consider how gender, race, class, and other categories of social difference work to structure power and privilege in economic contexts, as well as to imagine alternative possibilities.
Course was offered Spring 2024, Spring 2023
GBUS 8697Global Client Projects I (1)
Offered
Fall 2024
Provide an opportunity for students to describe a specific business problem clearly, succinctly, and in a manner that fosters reflection, discussion, and learning. Challenge students to analyze and resolve an unstructured managerial problem and offer them an opportunity to work closely with a faculty member. Produce a case study of quality, focus suitable for inclusion in the MBA curriculum, together with a written analysis.
Course was offered Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020
GBUS 8698Global Client Projects II (1)
Provide an opportunity for students to describe a specific business problem clearly, succinctly, and in a manner that fosters reflection, discussion, and learning. Challenge students to analyze and resolve an unstructured managerial problem and offer them an opportunity to work closely with a faculty member. Produce a case study of quality, focus suitable for inclusion in the MBA curriculum, together with a written analysis.
GBUS 8699Global Client Projects III (1)
Provide an opportunity for students to describe a specific business problem clearly, succinctly, and in a manner that fosters reflection, discussion, and learning. Challenge students to analyze and resolve an unstructured managerial problem and offer them an opportunity to work closely with a faculty member. Produce a case study of quality, focus suitable for inclusion in the MBA curriculum, together with a written analysis.
GBUS 8700Darden Venturing Project (1.5 - 3)
This course is intended to provide students with an opportunity to work closely with a faculty adviser to produce a case study of a real business situation. Students may already have a case setting in mind or may call upon their faculty supervisor for an introduction to the setting for a case.
GBUS 8701Leading Strategic Change (1.5)
This course focuses on the leadership qualities that are necessary to successfully design and implement strategic change and how being involved in the active leadership process requires individuals to be willing to define and declare themselves in strategic ways. The course is an elective and follows the format of the Leading Strategic Change course. It puts its emphasis on the need for students to think on personal, professional, and enterprise levels and to apply this thinking to the critical issues of leading and managing individual and organizational change. It is essential that students studying for an MBA develop a rich appreciation for the implications of personal and organizational change. Leadership is a personal declaration and as such is the essence of change. The principal modes of instruction are cases, lectures, and readings.
GBUS 8703Tactical Leadership (1.5)
Tactical Leadership (TL) focuses on interpersonal influence and persuasion (as opposed to self-leadership that focuses on self-management or strategic leadership that focuses on organizational decision making and non-face-to-face influence). Students will decide what buy-in means and what their best chances for generating it is when they have the chance to look someone in the eye. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8704Leadership, Values, and Ethics (1.5)
The premise of this course is that students can learn a great deal about leadership by studying the leadership of others. Values and ethics as essential elements of leadership are the central focus. The course will provide students with examples and models of ways in which leaders have incorporated ethics and values into many definitions of leadership. Students will have the opportunity to reflect on their own values and ethics as well as examine and build upon their own definition of leadership. Each session will be devoted to a different leader, focusing on their background, context, and type of leadership they displayed. Insights from these leaders and an array of readings on leadership will be used to foster reflection on what makes a great leader. The majority of leaders chosen for study, although familiar, are not business entrepreneurs or leaders of large corporations. The idea is to think more broadly about what makes great leadership by looking at a series of figures who offer a range of approaches to leadership and the value systems that can underlie it. Some leaders covered in past courses were Sir Ernest Shackleton, George Patton, Chairman Mao, Oscar Schindler, Mahatma Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mustafa Ataturk, Al Groh, Cynthia Cooper, Ann Fudge, and Muhammad Yunus. Our focus will be on these leaders, their stories, and how they connect values and leadership, but at the end of each study students will connect the discussions back to the present and their challenges as future leaders.
GBUS 8705Leadership and Diversity through Literature (1.5)
This course integrates diversity and leadership themes while simultaneously broadening the literary exposure of students. While condensed readings from the classics of literature are used, the selection of excerpts has culturally diverse protagonists such as Mahatma Gandhi and Virginia Woolf, who confronted leadership challenges much like those encountered today. These writings continue to influence our thinking and assumptions about how to manage people. The readings are from the Hartwick Classic Leadership casebank and range from 14 to 40 pages in length.
GBUS 8706Leadership, Diversity and Leveraging Difference (1.5)
The course consists of a case and text-based learning experience that focuses on the leadership challenges involved in leveraging diversity. Students will learn how leaders must have the basic skills and the ability and willingness to recognize diversity and then leverage it through invitation, inclusion, and inspiration.
GBUS 8707Leadership Coaching (1.5)
Today's leaders not only experience change, but are called upon to change themselves and the organizations in which they work. Leading through individual and organizational change can be challenging, but leaders do not have to face these challenges alone. In this course, you are invited to engage with a leadership coach in a creative and thought-provoking process that inspires you to reach your full potential.
GBUS 8708The Business of Medicine in a Changing Health Care Environment (1.5)
This course will examine the business of medicine in the current health policy/health politics landscape, drawing on participant experiences and using a case method. Students will prepare presentations on current health business and health policy topics.
Course was offered Fall 2017, Fall 2016
GBUS 8718Private Equity (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
The course will cover a wide range of financial situations that arise during private equity transactions. The core objective of the class is to understand how risk, stage of development, and nature of the financed company affect the terms and forms of financing. We will focus on the investment phase of the private equity cycle and examine the investment strategy, management, valuation, and structure of investees.
GBUS 8721Australia-Local Culture and International Business Expansion (1.5)
This course will travel to Sydney and Melbourne and is designed to help you: get up-close and first-hand exposure to Australian culture and business climate, through the lens of 3 specific business industries: travel, sport, and wine. To witness the dynamic nature of Australia's business innovation and change in four specific businesses across the 3 industries: Qantas, Cricket Australia, Australian Football League, and Giant Step Wine.
GBUS 8723Shareholder Activism (1.5)
This course covers a growing force in corporate governance - shareholder activism. Institutions activism to improve ESG; Hedge funds activism to intervene in corporate strategy and shareholder proposals for governance changes. This class will analyze academic literature, practical legal documents, and cases to investigate the several dimensions of shareholder activism and their effects on firm performance, strategy, and policies.
GBUS 8730Managing Teams (3)
This course is an opportunity for students to get real-time experience in a guided setting about the way they form work relationships, observe interactions, think through difficult situations, and learn from the choices made. In this full-semester course, students prepare for the challenges posed by the increased use of teams in the workplace while working directly with first-year learning teams as the teams evolve throughout the first semester. The relationship formed with a student's first-year team and documented through weekly required observations becomes a live and continuing case throughout the term. The first part of the course focuses on the learning team's evolution, supplemented by ongoing delivery of relevant group theory. The second part of the course broadens the focus to include the contemporary issues and challenges of workplace teams, such as leading your group at work, managing coordinating teams in strategic alliances, and teaching others to be better team members. The course is most successful when students commit the time and energy needed to maintain weekly contact with their team and remain open to learning about themselves and others in the process.
GBUS 8750Managerial Psychology (3)
This course will focus on the major psychological issues that underlie and contribute to the effective and, at times, ineffective performance of people in managerial roles. It begins with the development of a model of personality. The initial development model is necessary for setting the stage for the remaining sessions of the course that build on and add to this framework. During the course, topics such as gender, race, meanings, habits of excellence, relationships, creativity, and life-long growth will be examined. Students also will consider those issues that, although not visible at first glance, prove to be at the heart of why things are the way they are and not what they initially seem. Interactive conversations around reading materials provide much of the activity of this course.
GBUS 8751Healthcare Finance (1.5)
The healthcare sector accounts for more than 20% of the US economy and demands substantial high skill management. Despite the enormous opportunities for MBA graduates, the healthcare sector is still an overlooked path for generalist top MBAs. This course aims to bridge the gap by mapping advanced finance topics into the healthcare space, preparing students for a successful career in healthcare management.
Course was offered Spring 2024
GBUS 8755Technology & Ethics (1.5)
This course aims to helps students interested in technology build a better understanding of the complex ethical issues at the intersection of business and technology. The course will take a perspective based in psychology and the humanities to help students identify and manage ethical issues in their roles. Additionally, the course will feature alumni and speakers who work in organizations and roles where they aim to use tech for good.
Course was offered Spring 2024, Spring 2023
GBUS 8757Pricing Analytics (1.5)
This course focuses on pricing as a very powerful lever for profitability. Pricing is also amount the least understood areas of strategic and tactical execution: pricing decisions are made less thoughtfully and systematically than one would expect. Pricing Analytics concentrates on how a firm should set and update pricing and sales decisions across its various channels to maximize its profitability.
GBUS 8758Strategy in the Digital Age (1.5)
We will explore the economic foundations of the digital economy. We will discuss how they impact the structure of industries and the nature of competition. This course will hone students' ability to evaluate, design, and execute a firm's strategy in the digital age. The primary objective of the course is to further develop your strategic thinking skills.
GBUS 8759Economics of Money and Banking (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
Central banks have significant influence on the environment in which managers operate. They guide the economy via monetary policy, are closely watched by financial markets, and have become increasingly involved in the supervision of financial institutions. The course takes a deep dive into the theoretical and practical considerations that shape the policies of central banks around the world.
GBUS 8760Creating Value through Relationships (1.5)
This course will increase students' awareness of the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and provide practical experiences that give them the opportunity to improve their interpersonal effectiveness. Students will learn that one of the most basic and profound contributions to managers' success is the ability to create high-quality relationships with colleagues and to link these relationships together to form a network that sustains its members and facilitates the organization's work. Because nearly every contribution made to an organization will be influenced by the quality of relationships sustained with others, effective leadership is, essentially, effective relationship management. Primary learning in the course comes from participation in face-to-face laboratory experiences while readings and cases serve as supplements. Topics include communication, feedback and performance appraisal, active listening, working with diversity, and confronting problems in working relationships. With emphasis on future management contexts, students will discover how others perceive them and what behaviors enhance or detract from their interpersonal effectiveness.
GBUS 8761Reading Seminar Global Competition (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
The course is designed to connect a broad set of forces of change in the global economy and to consider very specific alternatives for developing real options for competing in such an environment. Very current, cutting edge books and articles will be offered.
GBUS 8762Getting in the Room Where It Happens (1.5)
This course is focused on the sociopolitical factors that enable success, and the practical insights that early career professionals need to navigate workplace politics. This is especially important when your identity can likely marginalize you. Frederick Herzberg asserts that the most powerful motivator isn't money; it's the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute and be recognized.
GBUS 8763Gales of Creative Destruction (1.5)
Technological innovation is the defining characteristic of our digital age. Remarkable advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, the internet of things, automation, and blockchain (to name but a few) are rapidly transforming fundamental aspects of every human endeavor: finance, medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, communication, education. Looking to the past, we may see that our present moment is not so unusual.
Course was offered Spring 2021
GBUS 8800Operations Strategy (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course explores the major issues and managerial concepts relating to strategic management of the operations function in today's global economy. The course targets prospective general managers. It is organized into three main topical groups, including an introduction to operations strategy concepts, an examination of operations strategy process tools, and the discussion of specific management decision areas within the operations strategy framework. Competitive cost analysis is emphasized and issues related to e-business operations strategy are included in the discussion of the topical issues. Business cases studied include a mix from both the manufacturing and service industries. Classes may feature visiting company executives, and there is a strong global emphasis throughout the course.
GBUS 8830Supply Chain Management (1.5)
The increasing globalization of business and heightened outsourcing in many industries has led to increased interest in supply chain management issues by the senior management of most companies. This course is designed to provide an understanding of the functional and strategic role of supply chains in both manufacturing and service industries, with emphasis on global supply chains originating or ending in North America. The course is oriented towards prospective general managers who desire to become more familiar with supply chain design and coordination as well as some of the major issues and managerial concepts relating to supply-chain management that are important sources of competitive advantage. The course is taught using textbook and article readings, cases, lectures, and guest speakers.
GBUS 8840Leading Innovation (1.5)
Innovation plays an essential role in the development and achievement of long-term competitive advantage. This is a course in strategy and entrepreneurship with three main themes: Creating and Realizing Value, Prioritizing Opportunities, and Managing the Innovation Process. Within these themes, students will explore why innovation is invention that creates value and why some inventions do not create value; why projects involving the innovation process are notoriously difficult to value: how to set priorities when choosing among innovation opportunities; how to guide early stage research efforts toward potentially distant products; why managing the process requires thinking about the unfolding and often nonlinear stages; how multiple dimensions cumulate in success or failure; how to think about the many uncertainties and manage the risks such as running out of cash; how to deal with the changes of course, challenges of competition, setbacks, and forward leaps in managing big, long-term innovation efforts; and, most importantly, how the outcomes of this process depend on the people involved. This course deals with both small and large corporations and usually encompasses a range of technologies.
GBUS 8850Networked Business Seminar (1.5)
The pace of Internet business evolution has proven to be as rapid during the extinction phase as it was in the evolutionary phase for new companies and their business models. The course will examine the business models and strategies of both pure-play survivors and established firms to understand the keys to successfully exploiting the Internet and related technologies. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 8860Sustainability and Business Law (1.5)
Businesses are increasingly under pressure to show progress on environmental, social, & corporate governance issues in the name of sustainability. Understanding how judges & regulators think about these issues is key to understanding how firms behave. Will provide an overview of how corporate law and regulators like the SEC shape business' approach to sustainability & introduction to the key debates that will shape future laws & regulation.
Course was offered Spring 2023, Spring 2022
GBUS 8870Strategy Seminar (1.5)
This course helps students become conversant with contemporary issues in the field of strategic management both in theory and practice. It covers selected strategy topics in depth that are chosen from three areas: First Year Strategy, current practice and issues, and current research in strategy and related fields of economics and organizational sociology. Four streams of literature will be discussed: organizational economics, resource-based/dynamic-capabilities view of the firm, business psychology, and business sociology. The course will allow students to become more conversant with relevant current issues in strategic thinking and the practice of strategy and to treat ideas in greater depth and rigor than possible in a traditional case course. Through this dialogue, students will sharpen their strategic thinking abilities and instincts. The course content will consist of a variety of readings from books, management and academic journals, and working papers. Class meets once a week, and the reading load is extensive. Grading will be based on class participation, weekly one-page papers, and a final essay.
GBUS 8900Management Decision Models (1.5)
This course will be treated as a workshop in decision consulting and modeling. It will develop additional methodology and more advanced applications for students who were comfortable in First Year Decision Analysis and wish to pick up where that course left off without significant overlap. Applications receiving special attention in this course are financial modeling, such as the random walk, hedging, and modeling of real options; strategy analysis and modeling, including structuring models, hybrid strategies, and contingent strategy under uncertainty; and marketing models, such as brand-switching dynamics. One class day will be treated as a real-time modeling studio, where the class works together on a task provided in a one-page case at the beginning of class. New methodology will treat risk preference, risk management, correlated variables and scenarios, risk exposure, dynamic uncertainty models, Optquest for optimization within simulation models, and the decision quality process used in decision consulting. Students will use Excel and a number of add-in software products.
GBUS 8910Managerial Quantitative Analysis (1.5)
This course will review, reinforce, and extend the basic concepts gained from the required Decision Analysis course, such as spreadsheet construction, simulation, regression, decision trees, and optimization. The two primary objectives of the course are to improve students' basic analytical skills and to strengthen their ability to integrate quantitative analysis into their general decision-making process. This course and Management Decision Models are intended for students interested in further core Decision Analysis instruction and is designed for those students who were comfortable with Decision Analysis and wish to pick up where it left off without significant overlap. Students who feel the need for significant review and reinforcement of the Decision Analysis content with modest extensions will benefit from this course. Thus, those students who made an A or B+ in Decision Analysis probably will find that this course does not meet your educational objectives and should consider a course that is more appropriate. Please contact the instructor if you have questions in this regard.
GBUS 8920Global Collaboration in an Uncertain World: The Role of Wash DC Institutions (1.5)
A learning experience about the collaboration and competition among a diverse set of global institutions that interact in Washington, DC in the pursuit of economic prosperity and social well-being. Students will learn from leaders of a subset of multilateral institutions (World Bank, IMF, OAS), government agencies/ministries (both foreign and US), multinational corporations, think tanks, non-government organizations and other leaders.
GBUS 8925What Would I Have Done Differently? (1.5)
The course offers a means for students to gain direct exposure to the world of practical affairs by engaging with senior executives leading organizations during uncertainty. The course will expose students to a range of emerging issues and topics and enterprises ranging from start-ups, funding providers, multinational companies and NGOs. The course will draw from the Dean's DC Fellows program for speakers.
GBUS 8926Business and Climate Change (1.5)
Global emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHG's) will need to be rapidly reduced to halt anthropogenic climate change. Investment and innovation by business will be essential if that goal is to be achieved. This course will examine efforts by businesses to reduce their own emissions and develop transformational products, business models and financial innovations that are catalyzing economy-wide decarbonization efforts.
Course was offered Spring 2022, Spring 2021
GBUS 8930Negotiations (1.5)
Offered
Fall 2024
This course focuses on two-party negotiations in a wide variety of settings ranging from simple buyer-seller bargains to complex, multi-issue strategic relationships. Most class sessions revolve around the results of negotiations between class members that are conducted prior to class, as preparation for the session. The results of these negotiations are displayed each day and provide an opportunity for explicit feedback on each student's negotiating performance. Class discussion reviews the wide variety of experiences in the specific negotiation and develops and tests hypotheses regarding effective behaviors, tactics, and strategies. The resulting ideas are reinforced and further developed through a series of weekly readings. Finally, the course offers several frameworks for codifying each student's negotiation toolkit and for describing each student's negotiation behavior.
GBUS 8970Investigations into the Nature of Strategy (1.5)
This course is intended for the student whose interest in strategy is intense and who would like to understand and practice strategy as an art. It is based on the logic to be established in class that developing strategy cannot be a deterministic, linear process. Students will discover that the reasons why strategy cannot be a 'positive doctrine' form the pillars for its proper understanding. The course relies heavily on reading material from fields that at first may not seem directly related such as biology, military strategy, history, game theory, and games. The course is conducted in the manner of a seminar.
GBUS 8989Critical and Creative Thinking in Business (1.5)
This course is to give the students a set of tools that will enable them to think both critically and creatively. In the FY core there are many courses that encourage critical and creative thinking, but there is a whole field of study that can enhance what the students have learned to do via the Socratic Method in the core. The course will draw on both business and non-business disciplines for its concepts and ideas.
GBUS 8995Research Elective (1.5 - 3)
Each research elective is a course of faculty supervised study for students with particular interest in contributing to the knowledge base of a specific area of business administration. The research elective should be consistent with the objectives of the SY Program and not overlap with courses offered in the MBA Program.
GBUS 8999Darden Independent Study (1.5 - 3)
Offered
Fall 2024
A Darden Independent Study elective includes either case development or a research project to be conducted by an individual student under the direction of a faculty member. Students should secure the agreement of a resident faculty member to supervise their independent study and assign the final grade that is to be based to a significant degree on written evidence of the individual student's accomplishment.
GBUS 9020Foundations of Business Ethics (3)
This course provides students with a doctoral-level introduction to the normative discourse of business ethics. We will read a variety of texts from classic philosophical works as well as contemporary counterparts who illustrate how these ideas are being used in recent research in business ethics. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 9130Readings:Theories in Organizational Behavior (3)
This is a survey course for PhD students designed to introduce them to research in some of the central literatures & topics in organizational behavior. It is designed to expose them to some of the breadth necessary to be conversant in the field of organizational behavior, to being their preparation for qualifying examinations, & to begin developing their skills in coming up with, writing about, & critiquing research ideas in org. behavior topics. Prerequisites:Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 9330Seminar in Entrepreneurship I (3)
This course will survey the field of entrepreneurship and introduce the students to the classic books and ideas in the literature. The course will use a seminar format and will attempt to understand the meaning and content of the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, its processes and its consequences - for individuals and economies. Requirements include position papers on various topics and authors. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 9340Seminar in Entrepreneurship II (3)
This course will survey the field of entrepreneurship and introduce the students to the classic books and ideas in the literature.
Course was offered Fall 2016, Spring 2015, Fall 2010
GBUS 9350Reading Seminar in Entrepreneurship III (3)
This course will involve students in a systematic analysis and evaluation of new entrepreneurship literature and the review process by which that literature does or does not become published research.
GBUS 9400Philosophy of Science (3)
The purpose of this course is to give the doctoral students an introduction to and survey of modern philosophy of science, so that their research will be informed by philosophical reasoning about science. The class will be managed as a discussion class based on an extensive set of readings.
Course was offered Spring 2024
GBUS 9710Markets in Human Hope (3)
This course will explore the feasibility of con structing financial markets for firms in the social sector as well as in countries currently without capital markets.
GBUS 9740Seminar in Corporate Governance (3)
This is a doctoral seminar focusing on academic research that touches on issues pertaining to corporate governance and business ethics.
GBUS 9852Independent Study: Bounded Rationality (3)
This independent study will coincide with the Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality in psychology and economics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, under the direction of Prof. Gerd Gigerenzer. The Institute intends to provide a view of human rationality that is anchored in the psychological possibilities of actual humans rather than in the fictional construct of Homo economicus. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 9853Reading Seminar in Leadership (3)
The Reading Seminar in Leadership is designed to expose students to a wide range of literature and concepts related to the field of leadership through seminar activities such as reading, critical evaluation, discussion, reflection, and writing. Participation in the seminar will allow a student to develop a framework for the analysis of leadership concepts on a personal, professional, as well as an organizational level. Prerequisite: Restricted to Darden students.
GBUS 9854Foundations of Management: Pragmatism and Stakeholder Theory (3)
Offered
Fall 2024
The purpose of this seminar is to provide a critical introduction to scholarly reading and writing concentrating on one portion of the foundations of management theory; namely, pragmatism and stakeholder theory. While we will address some "classic" texts in management and ethics, you should understand that the syllabus is idiosyncratic to me, rather than systematic.
GBUS 9855Seminar in Macro Organizational Behavior (3)
This seminar is intended for Ph.D. students seeking a broad understanding of macro organizational behavior and theory. We will review classical theoretical perspectives by reading the original literature that helped to shape the field. We will also identify areas in need of additional investigation by reconsidering key assumptions and theoretical positions.
GBUS 9856Strategy Doctoral Seminar (3)
The Strategy Doctoral Seminar is designed to introduce students to the strategy literature and the research approaches that strategy research uses. The course is geared towards first-year PhD students in business, though it is open to doctoral students from any discipline. We wil discuss the nature of scientific thought and inquiry, particularly as it applies to the social sciences.
GBUS 9857Advanced Research Methods (3)
This is an advanced graduate level course in Qualitative Methods.
Course was offered Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2011
GBUS 9858Doctoral Seminar on Leadership (3)
The purpose of the course is to learn and develop areas for future leadership research and scholarship.
Course was offered Fall 2016, Fall 2015, Fall 2010
GBUS 9859Independent Study (3)
An independent study course is a faculty supervised study in which students explore a specific topic in the area of business administration..
GBUS 9860Reading Seminar: Moral Philosophy II (3)
This seminary will explore more contemporary philosophers such as Kar Marx, Adam Smith, and Amartya Sen. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden Students
GBUS 9861Independent Study (3)
Offered
Fall 2024
An independent study course is a faculty supervised study in which students explore a specific topic in the area of business administration.
GBUS 9862Seminar in Strategy (3)
This course will provide an intensive study of the theory and practice of business strategy. It will involve in-depth treatment of ideas and current issues in strategic thinking and practice, with topics to be chosen from the MBA FY strategy course, current practices and issues, and current research.
GBUS 9863Design in Strategy (3)
This is a doctoral reading course focusing on academic research around the topic of design thinking as it applies to organizational strategy.
GBUS 9864Corporate Governance (3)
This is a doctoral reading course focusing on academic research that touches broadly on issues pertaining to corporate governance and business ethics from a variety of research streams.
GBUS 9865Competitive Dynamics Doctoral Seminar (3)
Offered
Fall 2024
The Competitive Dynamics Doctoral Seminar is designed to introduce students to the competitive dynamics (CD) literature and to train them in a programmatic approach to conducting research within this subfield of strategy. The elective is open to all PhD students in business and related disciplines.
GBUS 9867Dynamic Programming (3)
Offered
Fall 2024
Dynamic Programming provides a set of general normative methods for making sequential decisions under uncertainty. While there are no formal prerequisites for the course, some level of exposure to optimization, probability theory, and matrix-vector algebra is highly desirable. The course brings a new dimension to static models studied in optimization by investigating dynamic systems and their optimization over time.
GBUS 9930Pedagogy & Higher Administration (3)
Pedagogy and Higher Administration is a course for doctoral students about teaching technique and leading in institutions of higher education. The course addresses preparation before courses begin (e.g. developing syllabi), techniques and issues while class is in session (e.g. alternative teaching techniques), and things that occur after class (e.g. student grading and counseling).
GBUS 9999Non-Topical Research, Doctoral (1 - 12)
Offered
Fall 2024
For doctoral research taken under the supervision of a dissertation director.