This seminar on leadership and management examines the life work of Thomas Jefferson by studying the many roles he played in the founding of our country. The basic scheme of the seminar dictates that the students read a book a week, write a one-page paper each week summarizing their impressions from the readings, and then engage in a discussion about their thoughts on leadership and management as related to the readings. The seminar meets in the Colonnade Club Pavilion on the Lawn at the University of Virginia, a setting that contributes to a means for Darden students to obtain a greater understanding of the culture and traditions of Mr. Jefferson's University. Reading selections are taken from the six-volume biography on Thomas Jefferson written by Dumas Malone, the book Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose, the book Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis, the book John Adams by David McCullough, and the two prize-winning films on Jefferson by Ken Burns. The seminar participants include students and faculty from the Darden School along with interested University of Virginia alumni.

This course will address the various requirements for operating in a crisis & leading in uncertainty. The course will help students frame uncertainty & how to bound the various uncertainties to be able to move forward & make decisions. It will also explore the differences in decision making when in a crisis & how to be better prepared for operating in that environment. Finally, it will address the need to be able to understand & fully manage an array of stakeholders.

Many of our most successful entrepreneurial companies have been founded and significantly influenced by professional venture-capital firms. This course focuses on the professional world of venture capitalists and how venture capitalists work with entrepreneurs to create substantial, enduring ventures. The course addresses three topics: how venture-capital firms are formed, funded, and managed; how firms manage their relationships with the limited partners who provide their investment capital; and how the parties work together to build successful major companies.

GEMstone is a second-year capstone course that builds on the monetary and financial electives offered in the GEM area, specifically Economics of Money and Banking (EMB) and Global Financial Markets (GFM). As a capstone, this course is designed to help students consolidate the knowledge they have accumulated over two years at Darden into an unshakable understanding of international finance and monetary economics.

This is a business-world-focused course on game theory: the mathematical modeling of strategic interaction among rational (and irrational) actors. Some of the common applications covered in the course include competition between firms, trading in financial markets, auctions, international politics, warfare, and artificial intelligence.

Leading with influence is a deep dive into the science and personal application of leadership, with a particular focus on facilitating ongoing leadership development and assessment beyond Darden. Leader development does not begin or end with business school; our behavioral tendencies were shaped before we got here, and our evolution will continue when we leave.

In this course students will be immersed in real time cases of multinational companies that are challenged with communicating the rationale and imperatives behind their strategic renewal, reset, or total organizational transformation.

The objective of the course is to present a disciplined, valuation based process for security analysis. The course will focus on melding theory and practice using examples across industries and geographies. Investing is as much art as it is science, and therefore, particular attention will be paid to both quantitative and qualitative aspects- including financial statement analysis, valuation methodologies, and competitive strategy.

Strategic costing is concerned with use of internal cost accounting information to plan and evaluate strategic operations and interactions with stakeholders of the firm. The focus is on planning and strategic decision-making by the organization and on the accounting systems that managers have to assist them in their decisions about resource allocation and performance evaluation. The course is intended as an extension of foundational cost accounting.

In recent years, private market investing including real estate has risen strongly. Real Estate is linked closely with the fields of finance and business & leads to a specialized career. Curriculum is needed in order to recruit and support success in developing the next generation of responsible leaders in real estate. This course will allow students to interact with leading investment managers and experts in the area.