This course covers the foundations of corporate finance and uses these foundations to analyze many of the important financial decisions made within firms and other institutions. Some of the topics covered include the valuation of fixed-income securities and stocks, capital budgeting and the choice of investment projects, the optimal capital structure of the firm and how it is affected by taxes, the notion of market efficiency, the valuation of options and other derivative securities and the use of derivative securities in corporate finance.

The course will examine strategies for gaining and sustaining a competitive advantage. Topics covered include analyzing industries and competitors, Identifying firms' resources, capabilities and core competencies, formulating corporate and business level strategies, managing competitive rivalry, entering international markets and exercising strategic leadership.

This course consists of three major themes. First, the course will address issues on design of modern managerial accounting system. Topics covered include product (customer) costing, activity based cost management and budgeting. Special emphasis will be on cost analysis for financial and service industries. Second, the course will address topics on using managerial accounting information for decision-making including topics such as break-even analysis, using cost data for financial modeling and capital investment decisions. Third, the course will address issues on the design of management control system (MCS), human resources management (HRM) and the design of incentive systems for linking to effective performance management.

This course probes into opportunities and challenges presented by rapid increases in global trade and capital flows. It discusses potential as well as possible disputes in major markets; risks and benefits of financial globalization and exchange rate flexibility; and proactive government strategies in improving competitiveness in open economies.

The traditional concept of simply making products and delivering service is obsolete. Has your company developed a sourcing and supply chain management strategy that allows you to deliver and communicate value to your customers? Has your company been able to integrate procurement, operations, and logistics from raw materials to customer satisfaction? This course explores the key issues associated with the design and management of Service Supply Chain. It is designed to create opportunities for revolutionizing your operation through efficiencies in the design and management of your supply chain. Some of the topics covered include the appropriate performance metrics for measuring, monitoring, and controlling the Service Supply Chain; inventory management, and quality control across the Service Supply Chain.

The course takes a value chain approach to discuss various key issues on how to manage cost and information across organizational boundaries to achieve strategic innovations, managerial control and organizational transformation. Collectively, the discussion of these issues permit a clear illustration of how to achieve cost management across company boundaries and to introduce a forward looking system that emphasizes continuous improvement, links a company’s strategy to its core business activities, and enables a comprehensive management of the resources consumed by all supply chain partners. The course will examine the strategic value of information technology and the emerging E-business models. Advances in Information Technology (IT) are having enormous impacts on the very way business is conducted today! Thus, the key focus is on learning how IT has enabled firms to develop innovations in products and processes and changed the structure of industries, the strategies of firms competing in these industries, and the organizational forms and management processes needed to support those creative changes. Finally, the course will examine the critical issues of strategic transformation - a process by which a firm changes all of its critical parts simultaneously to cope with the challenges it faces. These critical parts include a company’s strategic initiatives, business processes, organization systems, measurement systems and information infrastructure. The major objective thus is to challenge students to think about issues in managing the transformation process such that they can learn how to harness the power of information technology and at the same time making the necessary changes to a company’s value system, organizational design and management control systems.

The course is to expose, involve, and challenge participants in the complexities of managing and implementing branding and channel management strategies for firms operating in Mainland China. Indigenous, as well as cutting edge concepts and the necessary tools that facilitate branding and channel management decisions will be introduced and discussed throughout the course. It is designed to help Mainland China and foreign firms operating in China with the cutting edge knowledge to manage their brands and channel operations in the explosive Mainland market.

Services are becoming critical for competitive advantage in companies across the globe and in all industry sectors. For manufacturers like GE and IBM, services represent their primary growth and profitability strategies into the 21st century. Superior service quality drives the competitive advantage of excellent companies like Charles Schwab, Marriott Hotels, Starbucks, and FedEx— traditional service businesses. The course focuses on challenges of managing services and delivering quality service to customers. The attraction, retention, and building of strong customer relationships through quality service (and services) are at the heart of the course content. The course is equally applicable to organizations whose core product is service (e.g., banks, transportation companies, hotels, hospitals, educational institutions, professional services, telecommunication, etc.) and to organizations that depend on services for competitive advantage (e.g., high technology manufacturers, automotive, industrial products, etc.).

In this course you will learn strategies for customer management. A fundamental shift has occurred in marketing from managing and marketing products to understanding and managing customers. This necessitates an understanding of the customer management process and the value of customers to the firm—the firm’s customer equity. In this course, students will gain a solid understanding of customer relationship management, including both strategic and analytic approaches. The course will provide students with tools that are critical in today’s business environment, as leading firms focus their marketing efforts on understanding the value of their customers and developing and growing profitable customer relationships. It teaches skills relating to customer selection and acquisition, customer management, customer retention and customer lifetime value. As firms seek to make their marketing investments financially accountable, it also provides students with an understanding of the link between marketing and finance.

In today’s economic environment, customers are faced with an enormous number and variety of services offered both in physical locations and through other channels, such as the Internet. With this glut of information, customer attention for the service offering has become the scarce resource and service providers must now “battle for the eyeballs.” This course is designed for the student interested in strategic decision-making as opposed solely to tactics and, applied here, who desire to understand and evaluate strategic issues related to service design, delivery, and measurement. You will acquire critical thinking skills useful in diagnosing strategic pitfalls and applying key frameworks, tools, and techniques. This course will be of particular value to those of you who plan to work as managers in service sector, who are in product companies aiming at improving their customers’ experience, who need to be able to understand and evaluate service firms from an external perspective (e.g., consultants and investors), entrepreneurs who plan to start their own business, or who just want to know more about service innovations, such as e-Services.

Firms that could achieve cost and quality advantages in well defined, existing markets dominated previous two decades. Today the advent of information technologies and the Internet has changed the very nature of the marketplace. Firms that build and capture fundamentally new markets with radical products and services define the competitive arena. This course is designed to make decision makers intimately familiar with the front end of the new product design process and provides them with concrete tools for determining strategies for developing new products based on combining input from customers engineers, R&D and all the relevant constituents of a firm. To the extent that the Internet has revolutionized the manner in which firms can interact with their customers, this course also covers Internet based tools for collecting, processing and disseminating customer date. This customer centric approach involves a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches to data collection and analysis and is appropriate for both radical and disruptive technologies as well as for the “new and improved” class of products that represent over 90% of all new product introductions. In summary, this course provides an in-depth understanding of the entire new product development process from idea generation to commercialization.