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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.