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 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.

This course is about learning to think and act entrepreneurially in order to create new value in the world through new products, new solutions, new ventures, new business units, new distribution channels, new firms, new business models, new technologies, and business transformation. The emphasis will be on the art and science of 'creating something new from little.' The orientation in the course will be to challenge students to think about how they can create, finance, and build or change a productive business organization with commonly available resources (e.g., intelligence, insight, energy, initiative, and personal relationships). Students will learn to use this orientation wherever new-venture creation may occur, namely, through the actions of an independent entrepreneur or in a large, established firm.

By exploring in more depth the strategies of communication framed in the First-Year Management Communication course, this course offers students the opportunity to obtain the polished presentation skills, particularly oral, so necessary for a successful career.

Through a combination of cases and experiential exercises this course brings to students what expert entrepreneurs have learned the hard way. Expert entrepreneurs are people who have built multiple ventures including successes and failures and taken at least one company public.

Power, status, and influence are topics that make many people somewhat uncomfortable. However, they are fundamental realities in much of organizational life and are the mechanisms by which things get done. Being an effective leader and change agent requires both understanding power and acting on that knowledge. This class is about power: how things get done, how to build and wield influence, and the multiple ways to accomplish these objectives.

In these courses, students are engaged in applying the knowledge and experiences of the MBA Program within their business and job settings. Because participants in the MBA Program for Executives are employed on a full-time basis, they have the unique opportunity to immediately apply part or all of the learning.

In these courses, students are engaged in applying the knowledge and experiences of the MBA Program within their business and job settings. Because participants in the MBA Program for Executives are employed on a full-time basis, they have the unique opportunity to immediately apply part or all of the learning. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden Students.

Leadership Residency 1 challenges students to develop an understanding of and an appreciation for taking an enterprise perspective when making any management decision. Students will learn what an enterprise perspective involves, what it means to manage/lead with an enterprise perspective, and what the implications of that perspective for themselves as leaders are. The course is a mix of traditional academic pedagogy and experiential activities.