This course explores the myriad social, economic and cultural problems that our society currently faces and asks what business can do about it. Education, climate change, emerging technology, healthcare and more. What is the unique role that business can play and how can individual business leaders fully realize both the uniqueness and full potential of that role?

Sports contexts provide an excellent vehicle by which to study how to use analytics as part of a leader's decision-making toolkit. How, for example, do you evaluate talent analytically, and decide how to construct, motivate, and compensate members of a team? While we can't know with certainty how a professional player (i.e., employee) will perform in the future, models can be built to analyze the past, thus make powerful statistical predictions.

Situations requiring action vary in complexity and scope. The decision settings include a rich variety of dilemmas general managers inevitably face. This course focuses on general managers and the requirement that they take action in situations, which vary in complexity and scope. General Managers are defined as those managers who possess profit and loss responsibility at any level of the organization from first-level product-line managers to chief executive officers. General Managers must also manage the interfaces of the functional departments: marketing, operations, finance, and engineering or R&D. The goal in each class is for students to develop a plan of action and to think through the detailed steps, which would be needed to implement their plans. Students should be prepared to use current management tools, tried and true management philosophies, and all of the multidisciplinary tools they have internalized in their MBA education when deciding how to take action. The course requires students to capitalize on their entire Darden experience and polish their enterprise perspective. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.

This course is open to students who have accepted summer employment in a country other than that of their permanent residence. It allows students to use their summer-employment experience as a way to increase their knowledge of a culture other than their own and address the challenges of working in that culture. Course content will involve preparation at the beginning of the summer when students will plan a program of readings and discussions supervised by a faculty member and make a personal statement of the learning expectations they have for this summer activity, a midsummer report about what they are experiencing. At the end of the summer, students will engage in a class discussion based on each student's in-class report about a significant and surprising aspect of their cultural experience and what was learned from it. Students also will be expected to write a final report reviewing their cultural experience and the extent to which their learning expectations were achieved. The report should also compare and contrast their job experience with what they might have experienced in their country of permanent residence. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.

The purpose of this course is to build leadership skills and ethical analysis skills by reading, discussing, and performing dramatic scenes from great plays. The scenes will be chosen for their relevance to both leadership and ethics. The course is built around the conceptual apparatus in Dunham and Freeman (2000) that the task of the theatre director is akin to the task of the CEO. For example, students will examine how directors draw vision from particulars, emphasize good casting or 'getting the right people on the bus,' get the best out of their team, and approach work collaboratively. The class will examine theater companies as high-performance teams and attempt to construct such teams throughout the course. The course draws on the expertise of the artistic community in Charlottesville by providing several technical workshops on acting and directing. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.

This course analyzes and applies tools and techniques to accounting data in order to derive measurements that aid in corporate valuation. Students will first develop a deeper understanding of accounting data by examining the incentives corporate officers face while making financial reporting choices as well as understanding the conceptual limitations of the financial reporting model.

The goals of this course are to help you think critically about how to build and maintain high quality relationships at work. In organizations, high quality relationships between people enable more effective performance, individual learning, and job commitment. They also pave the way for a more inclusive workplace where individuals feel like they belong and can bring their authentic selves to work.

This course adopts the perspective of a CFO of a publicly held corporation as the strategic partner to the CEO with an emphasis on the role of financial analysis in creating corporate value. It draws heavily from analytical techniques provided in Financial Management and Policies and Valuation in Financial Markets courses and extends the concepts introduced in those courses to examine key policy challenges that confront public corporations.Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.

This course will provide a deeper understanding of options, preferred approaches and best practices in managing conflict, and leveraging consensus. As conflict is an inevitable element in all human relations, students will explore how managers and leaders who effectively deal with both daily and systemic conflict enjoy a distinct competitive advantage in a variety of respects. These include: building and maintaining strategic alliances and networks; furthering team creativity and innovation; fostering collaborative organizational cultures and working relationships; containing financial and human costs; and, ultimately, improving business results. While rooted in negotiation and conflict theory, this course will provide pragmatic and practical general management skills and should therefore be of interest to all students, regardless of their specific career or personal goals. Bargaining and Negotiating is a prerequisite for this course. Principal modes of instruction are cases, readings, extended simulations, and in-class exercises.

The Portfolio Management course is designed for students interested in careers in investment management. Students are required to have taken Valuation in Financial Markets (GBUS 7603) and Investments (GBUS 8444) prior to taking this course. The objective of the course is to help students develop the analytical tools and insight necessary to manage an investment portfolio.