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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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, students will become familiar with other 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.

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.