Business Administration (Overseas)

This course introduces basic legal frameworks for business, and fundamental legal issues involved in conducting business in the complex global environment. Topics include legal systems, forms of business, corporate law, duties to shareholders, shareholders’ rights and liabilities, intellectual property, unfair competition, antitrust law, contract law, and employment law. The course explores how law shapes managerial behavior and demonstrates how to apply ethical principles in business settings while coping with external factors such as laws, regulation, politics, and local customs. The course addresses how ethics and law shape tradeoffs across the triple bottom line (economic, social, and environmental), and applies theories of corporate social responsibility and principles of responsible investment to ensure legal and ethical organizational posture. The course also applies strategic analytical tools for ethical organizational decision-making.

This course provides a foundation in positive psychology and explores the science and practice of authentic happiness theory and well-being theory. Positive psychology is the scientific exploration of human strength and virtue as opposed to human weakness and suffering; it includes an examination of people’s desire for a happy and meaningful life. We will explore what well-being is, what gets in the way of it, and what we can do to increase and nurture it in our own lives and organizational settings. The focus will be on cultivating greater positive emotion, enhancing resilience skills, and examining the strengths and virtues that underpin well-being, such as gratitude, forgiveness, compassion, kindness, social and emotional intelligence, humor, courage, and integrity. The course encourages acquiring knowledge, developing skills, and meaningful changes in students’ personal and professional lives. This course prepares students to understand and manage the relationship between individual well-being to well-being in organizational settings and to apply leadership and management strategies to enhance organizational performance and sustainability, improve motivation and commitment, and combat dysfunctional conflict and stress. Students will learn about emerging applications of positive psychology in organizations, as well as technology and systems that have been shown to increase organizational effectiveness by enhancing employee engagement and well-being.

This course presents theories and models of managerial and organizational processes from a variety of perspectives, including behavioral and transpersonal, along with the necessary tools and methods to put such models into use in organizations. Students develop skills for authentic and conscious leadership, to promote ethical and socially responsible behavior and enhance motivation, job satisfaction, commitment, positive team dynamics, and cross-cultural understanding. Students will gain an understanding of organizational structure and key principles of organizational design, and the management of organizational change. Prerequisite: MBAO4073

The Capstone is the final component of a student’s graduate studies. Capstones will have concentration-specific modules and Learning Outcomes. The methodology for this Capstone Project is a simulation-based case study. The student’s objective is to incorporate concepts learned throughout the MBA program to address a host organization's strategic challenge. Students will be provided with a set of data and documents for an organization (such as quarterly reports, letters to shareholders, strategic plans, and market data) and a description of issues and objectives for the study. Students will produce a final written document and (hypothetical) formal presentation to the organization’s key contact. This final report must show that the student has significantly applied concepts from strategy and finance, demonstrated their ability to collect and analyze primary data from a subject entity, and fully addressed the agreed-upon issues to provide novel recommendations that the entity could implement.

Personality and Motivation (3) This course presents major theories of psychology pertaining to personality, motivation, and growth, to explore how this knowledge allows organizations to contribute to the transformation and well-being of individuals, organizations, and society. Practices of contemplation, meditation, and mindfulness are considered in relation to these theories. Course topics include the seminal work of Abraham Maslow, a founder of humanistic psychology and transpersonal psychology; Carl Jung, a transpersonal pioneer; and Erik Erikson, the founder of modern developmental psychology. The course also examines the principles of transpersonal counseling, therapy, and transpersonal education, as they relate to ethical business and organizational transformation in the global STEM-based business environment.

This course provides an overview of the issues, concepts, and models used in analyzing marketing decisions and managing marketing activities. It presents analytic and data visualization tools and frameworks for making effective marketing decisions to support an organization’s strategic, economic, and social objectives. Topics include market measurement and segmentation, consumer and organizational buying behavior, marketing mix analysis, and management, marketing research, new product development, product management, marketing strategy, as well as public policy and ethical considerations in marketing. The course covers how to investigate consumer behavior, segment and target markets, create customer value through product policy, position brands, design channels of distribution, as well as how to develop communication channels and pricing policies. The course has a strategic focus on the science, technology, engineering, and management domains to ensure real-world viability of marketing decisions and actions.

The course provides a broad overview of operational issues in science, technology, engineering, and business organizations. It presents a variety of quantitative and qualitative techniques for analyzing and optimizing foundational business processes. Topics include time series analysis and forecasting, process analysis, waiting-line models, inventory management, quality management, capacity management, project management, and supply chain management. The course analyzes how operations management decisions impact the firm's value and are fundamentally interconnected with market strategy and the design of products and services. The course also focuses on the proper management of business operations through continual analysis and evaluation of business processes that are adaptable to rapid changes in the complex global business environment.

This course introduces the principles of corporate finance. It focuses on the measurement and creation of corporate value. The course applies key finance principles in decision-making and management to enable sound interpretation and analysis of financial statements. Topics include asset valuation, risk analysis, financial statement analysis, financial planning, capital budgeting, asset management, short-term and long-term financing decisions, capital structure, cost of capital, and dividend policy. Fundamental concepts include free cash flow, time-value of money, risk and return, portfolios, and asset pricing, models. The course includes strategic case studies to exemplify sound financial judgment and decision-making.

This course provides students with tools to manage technology and innovation in both large organizations and new ventures. Students will learn to use metrics to assess the project and product lifecycles. Topics include the difference between science and technology, types and varieties of innovations, trajectories of emerging technologies and innovations, the role of intellectual property, and business models and strategies for bringing innovations to market. Students will learn to assess and address the technical, organizational, market, and regulatory risks.

This course will cover advanced topics, models, and methods in marketing, including analytical tools and decision-making frameworks. Topics include market research, online marketing, consumer behavior, social network marketing, and outbound and inbound marketing techniques. We will also consider marketing in nonprofit settings and the challenges of international marketing. Course content will be flexible to reflect the latest thought and practice. Guest speakers will present special topics. Students will undertake research projects and present results to the class. Prerequisites: MBAO4073, MBAO2080