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Orientation to Management introduces basic language, concepts, tools, and problem-framing methodologies that will be drawn on broadly throughout the curriculum but are not easily introduced in subsequent courses; develops techniques for interpersonal effectiveness in critical work relationships and teams; and begins the process of focusing career aspirations.

Basics of Economics

This course concentrates on the role of market processes in determining the opportunities facing individuals and business firms, the policy issues facing public officials, and the patterns of resource allocation in the economic system. It is intended to be accessible to students with little or no prior exposure to economics. The mathematical prerequisite is competence in high school algebra and in the interpretation of graphs. The aim is to provide students with analytical tools to help them tackle economic problems, which arise whenever agents must make economic trade-offs or engage in trade. While we cover a range of topics in microeconomics, the emphasis throughout the course is on learning how to approach and tackle economic problems-a skill that will be useful in making managerial decisions. Topics include supply and demand, consumers, production, equilibrium, imperfect competition, competitive strategy.

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Basics of Accounting

The course helps students acquire basic accounting knowledge that is extremely useful in the day-to-day practice of general management. This basic accounting knowledge is indispensable background for the work to follow in the Organizational Perspectives courses as well as for elective courses in accounting, finance, marketing, and strategy. Accounting systems provide important financial information for all types of organizations across the globe. Despite their many differences, all accounting systems are built on a com­mon foundation. Economic concepts, such as assets, liabilities, and income, are used to organize information into a fairly standard set of financial statements. Bookkeeping mechanics compile financial information with the double entry system of debits and credits. Accounting conventions help guide the application of the concepts through the mechanics. This course provides these fundamentals of accounting.

Individual Problem Framing

This course teaches students general management tools for framing and structuring a wide range of problems. The course begins with general heuristics that are useful for new problems of unorganized complexity. These include simplifying a problem, searching for related but simple problems that one knows how to solve, anticipating the form of a solution, changing the problem to an equivalent problem, problem decomposition, and recognizing common structure in different settings. The course continues with more advanced topics for managing in turbulent environments, including scenario methods, prediction markets, and systematic biases and blind spots. Exercises and cases are drawn from private equity, political risk, hi-tech industries, and business intelligence.

Careers

This course focuses on the individual and the idea that he or she is going to have a career over forty or fifty years. We take a long-term focus in order to highlight frameworks, concepts, and theories that detail the ways in which careers unfold over time and the forces that guide career trajectories. Through a combination of course readings, experiential exercises, lectures, and illustrations from others' careers, students gain a deeper understanding of the choices and tradeoffs they may face and how to assess these against the backdrop of the frameworks offered. Specifically, we focus on developmental frameworks, theories of resilience and transition, and the role of different kinds of capital — such as human capital, social capital, and financial capital — that people build in creating their careers.

Data and Decision Analysis

The ability to understand and apply probability concepts and statistical methods is fundamental to management education. The concepts covered in this course include probability, decision analysis, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, and applied regression modeling. This course provides a foundation of basic statistical concepts that are essential for many other courses at SOM. These materials surface routinely in students’ Organizational Perspectives courses and electives and are useful for decision-making applications in financial analysis, marketing, operations management, and other areas.

Managing Groups and Teams

This is a short course on the theory and practice of leading, managing, and functioning in task-performing groups and teams. It has two primary goals: first, to provide students with a conceptual framework for analyzing group dynamics, diagnosing performance problems, and designing appropriate interventions, and second, to help students develop practical skills for building effective groups and teams. Both of these objectives are important to students’ effectiveness in study groups at SOM and in organizational teams they will join or lead after graduation. The design of the course is based on the belief that conceptual understanding of the principles of team effectiveness is of little use without a more direct experiential understanding of group dynamics (or process) and the behavioral skills required to implement this knowledge.

Spreadsheet Modeling

The spreadsheet is the lingua franca of business analysis, and all organizations expect managers to develop spreadsheet models to aid decision making. Students learn how to formulate and solve a variety of management decision problems using the Excel Solver Add-In. These management decision problems, generally known as linear programming problems, re-surface in many other SOM classes. The second half of the course examines Decision Analysis — the science of making decisions under uncertainty, with a focus on using decision trees to analyze problems.