EMBA Electives

Entrepreneurial Finance

In this course, you will explore the financial and economic foundations of launching a new venture. You will examine financing options, capital and governance structures, and risk management tools at each stage of a venture's lifecycle, from idea to exit. These decisions are complex and path-dependent, meaning early choices carry long-term repercussions for future financial strategy. They also substantially influence how much economic value a start-up creates and captures, and how that value is ultimately distributed among its shareholders.

Global Corporate Restructuring

In this course, you will explore ventures, family businesses, closely held firms, and corporate restructuring transactions in both U.S. and international contexts. You will analyze a range of restructuring strategies, including mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, spin-offs, and leveraged buyouts — through a unified framework that integrates corporate governance, agency dynamics, financial and strategic management, and legal and accounting considerations. Together, these lenses illuminate how to unlock hidden value for all stakeholders involved.

International Finance

In this course, you will explore international financial instruments, markets, and institutions. Topics include the nature of foreign exchange risk, how exchange rates and interest rates are determined, managing foreign exchange risk with forwards and options, exchange rate forecasting, evaluating international investments, currency speculation, the impact of monetary policy on exchange rates, and current developments in the international financial system.

Mergers, Acquisitions and Other Reorganization Methods

In this course, you will develop a deep understanding of the motivations, decision processes, and valuation consequences of financial, business, and organizational restructuring by corporate units. You will build the skills to plan, evaluate, and execute corporate restructuring strategies using financial modeling and quantitative techniques, while also gaining an appreciation for the fundamental issues underlying the structure and functioning of the market for corporate control, all within the framework of finance theory. 

Value Investing from an Economic Perspective

This course covers the foundational theory and philosophy of value investing as it has evolved since Graham. You will explore the styles of influential value investors, including Graham and Buffett, and develop core investing techniques spanning search, valuation, and portfolio construction, applying this framework through the analysis of specific companies.

World Economy

This course examines the most important business regions in the world, including the U.S., Europe, Japan, China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa. You will develop a working knowledge of the economic drivers, challenges, and opportunities present in each region, while also gaining insight into the performance of equity and bond markets across different countries and the economic forces underlying oil and other commodity markets.

Competing in Financial Services: Strategy, Technology, and Regulation

This course explores the opportunities and challenges at the intersection of finance, technology, and regulation, and their impact on business and society. You will develop a broad understanding of the FinTech and banking landscape, including disruptive innovations in machine learning and generative AI, regulatory arbitrage across real estate, asset management, payments, and lending, and the use of blockchain for cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, tokenization, and decentralized finance. You will also build the analytical tools needed to evaluate the profitability of innovation in financial intermediation, considering market dynamics, competition, regulation, and the role technology plays in helping both challengers and incumbents thrive. 

Financial Modeling for Private Equity Transactions

Building on your foundational skills in business analysis and forecasting, this course teaches you how to weave financial projections into coherent, spreadsheet-based pro-forma financials. You will start with conceptual examples that illuminate the linkages between the three core financial statements, income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow, before applying those principles to forecast the financials of real companies. The course culminates in building your own leveraged buyout model in Excel, leaving you equipped to assess any company and determine whether it is a viable LBO candidate. 

Launching and Leading Startups

This course is a broad survey for innovative, entrepreneurially-minded students that examines the biggest and most challenging problems entrepreneurial CEOs must solve to build successful companies. Topics span the full startup journey, from mitigating risk and finding product-market fit, to unit economics, fundraising, scaling, and leadership. Whether or not you plan to launch a business after graduation, this course will give you a real sense of what it means to be the decision-maker, with lessons equally applicable to leading a "startup" within a larger organization.

Phase 0: Designing, Building and Communicating — Compelling New Ventures

This course gives you the tools and confidence to build and launch a new venture from the ground up. You will learn how to identify problems worth solving, test your assumptions about possible solutions, and refine your hypothesis based on experimentation and market feedback, ultimately accelerating the path from inspiration to execution, operations, and growth. A central focus is achieving product-market fit: developing the right offer for the right customer and building the conviction to bring others along on your journey.

Selling Yourself and Your Ideas

We spend more time selling ourselves and our ideas than we realize, and we have more ways to do it than ever before. Being a powerful communicator means developing the agility to adjust your message, content, approach, and style based on the situation, while maintaining a keen understanding of your audience, their expectations, and what success looks like. This course will have an immediate impact on your outcomes, equipping you with critical communication insights, skills, and tools to help you show up as a confident, effective communicator in any setting.

Entrepreneurial Selling

Selling is a life skill, and revenue is a daily pursuit. Whether you manage a multinational company or are venturing out on your own, this course challenges you to embrace the role of owner, no matter your current context. You will walk away with foundational habits and new practices for every client and team interaction, replacing guesswork with approaches that drive objectively positive results.

Building and Scaling Intelligent Products: An Entrepreneurial and GenAI Perspective 

In this course, you will develop the frameworks, tools, and hands-on experience to lead as an effective global product leader. You will gain a foundational understanding of machine learning and AI, explore strategies for scaling intelligent products profitably, and learn how automated agents can transform workflows and reduce operational costs. Through case studies, peer workshops, and mentorship from industry leaders, you will leave equipped to drive data-driven decisions and shape AI strategy across both startups and large established firms.

Unlocking Executive & Enterprise Value with Generative AI 

In this course, you will develop the conceptual and strategic foundation needed to lead AI adoption within your organization. You will explore what generative AI is and how it differs from other forms of artificial intelligence, why it is becoming a critical driver of competitive advantage, and how it can be applied to fuel product innovation, improve customer experience, and increase operational efficiency. You will also examine the ethical and legal considerations executives must navigate when implementing AI solutions, and look ahead to how the landscape is expected to evolve, so you are prepared to lead with confidence in a rapidly changing environment. 

Early Stage Investing and Fundraising 

Early-stage fundraising can be an essential, and often difficult to navigate, ingredient in a startup's growth. This course explores the fundamentals from both sides of the table: the angel investor seeking strong deals and the entrepreneur pitching for funds. You will examine how these two roles are deeply interdependent, each shaping the other as they work toward a common transaction, equity in exchange for capital, with the investor seeking outsized returns. By tackling both perspectives, you will leave with a sharper sense of how to evaluate a deal as an investor and how to position your company compellingly as a founder.

AI Foundations for Executives 

This immersive, hands-on course takes you from AI outsider to AI insider in just a few days. You will gain practical experience building with generative AI, complete a real-world project that demonstrates tangible business value, and develop the vocabulary and conceptual framework to navigate a rapidly evolving landscape. Along the way, you will explore how AI works, engage with the latest AI agents and tools, examine key ethical considerations, and cultivate the curiosity and experimentation mindset needed to stay ahead as the technology continues to evolve. 

AI in Business and Society 

This course equips you with the tools and insights to understand, manage, and implement generative AI effectively at the organizational level. You will explore the history and evolution of AI, ethical considerations and risks, strategy and implementation, productivity benefits, agentic and robotic AI, and what lies ahead, giving you a comprehensive foundation to lead with confidence in an AI-driven world. 

Leading Product Organizations

Products are the lifeblood of growth and innovation, for large enterprises and startups alike. This course prepares senior executives for product leadership by developing the strategic, analytical, and communication skills needed to drive product vision and success. You will learn how to craft product-led strategies, use analytics to fuel growth, foster a customer-centric culture, and lead effectively across the enterprise.

Governing for Generational Growth 

This program, offered through the John L. Ward Center for Family Enterprises, focuses on building the strategies and governance structures that allow family businesses to thrive today and across generations. You will explore how to design effective governance that supports innovation and growth, while also tackling the deeply human dimensions of running a family enterprise:  succession planning, communication, conflict management, and board formation.

Incentives, Organization and Strategy

Companies succeed and fail on the strength of their internal organization. Drawing on both neoclassical and behavioral economics, this course equips you with a toolkit for navigating the incentive, information, and behavioral challenges managers face when designing organizations. You will explore how to attract and retain the right people, foster cooperation and coordination, account for non-rational human behavior, and delegate decisions effectively, all in service of building an organization where people are motivated to do their best work and create lasting company value.

Leading High Impact Teams

In this course, you will examine how to design, manage, and lead effective teams in organizational settings. You will explore the interpersonal dynamics and structural characteristics that drive team performance, the forces that shape relationships within teams, and how knowledge and information flow, and sometimes stall, among team members.

Human and Machine Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is a transformative technology, powerful in proportion to how well you understand and wield it. This course requires no prior technical knowledge and is designed for those who want to lead AI deployment in the real world, manage data science and product teams, or build and invest in AI companies. You will develop an intuition for what AI can and cannot do, how machine learning works, where these tools tend to succeed and fail, and how to navigate the business and ethical implications that come with them. 

Leading Organizational Transformation

This course takes the perspective of chief executives operating at height and scale, overseeing thousands of people and hundreds of millions to billions in revenue. You will develop the knowledge and skills to lead complex organizations through change, with insights applicable whether you are a founder, investor, or senior manager navigating high-stakes decisions in ambitious, fast-moving environments.

Influencing Decisions through Decks and Dashboards

Your value in an organization is largely driven by your ability to turn data and evidence into persuasive ideas and solutions. Drawing on research from cognitive science, data visualization, graphic design, and data journalism, this course equips you with practical, research-backed tools for generating compelling insights and communicating them to any audience in ways that are clear, engaging, and memorable.

Leveraging Collaboration for Innovation

In this course, you will develop a rich set of concepts, frameworks, and tools to build, manage, and capitalize on inter-organizational collaboration. Through real-world cases drawn from a range of industries, you will explore three distinct modes of collaboration and how to apply them to drive innovation and create value.

Winning with Networks

Today's leaders face unprecedented levels of connectivity, complexity, and unpredictability. This course equips you with the tools of computational thinking and network analysis to better anticipate, understand, and respond to these challenges. Through diverse real-world use cases, spanning patenting, innovation adoption, social contagion, crowdsourcing, hot streaks, and prediction markets, you will develop a sharper ability to navigate and leverage the networks that shape modern organizations and markets.

Strategic Brand Management

Building on your foundation in marketing management and strategy, this course deepens your understanding of branding and equips you with the skills to identify and solve brand-related challenges. You will develop actionable strategies for building and managing strong brands, translating theory into practice with a sharp focus on real-world application.

Advanced Marketing Strategy 

Making strategic marketing decisions means working with incomplete information, limited resources, shifting conditions, and competitors who are just as driven as you are, all while building alignment across your team. Understanding core marketing concepts is only the starting point; this course is designed to help you apply them in complex, real-world situations, sharpen your ability to make confident strategic choices, and communicate your recommendations in ways that earn support.

Designing Brand Experiences

In today's hyper-competitive environment, standing out requires more than a strong product - it demands a distinctive brand experience. In this course, you will explore actionable tools and methodologies for meaningfully differentiating your brand, capturing customer attention, and building the kind of mind-share that translates into market share. 

Future Proofing Brands

In this course, you will learn how to build disruptive brands, those that redefine existing markets through novel value propositions, new customer segments, and emerging technologies. You will engage with a range of actionable tools and methodologies that enable you to develop and execute disruptive brand strategies in a systematic and comprehensive way.

Luxury Strategy 

Luxury firms have become some of the world's most valuable companies, not by competing on scale, but by cultivating exclusivity and extraordinarily compelling brands. This course provides a strategic framework for understanding luxury markets, building and sustaining luxury brands, and translating brand capital into financial returns. You will also explore what any firm can learn from the distinctive way luxury companies compete and win. 

International Business with Chinese Opportunities and Challenges

This course equips you with the knowledge and tools to navigate international business in China, with Chinese partners, or in contexts shaped by China's growing global influence. You will explore a focused range of international business topics, from market entry and strategy to broader global business dynamics, developing the open-minded, informed perspective needed to succeed in one of the world's most complex and consequential business environments.

Strategy Beyond Markets

This course equips you with the concepts, analytical tools, and strategic frameworks needed to address non-market challenges, drawing on economics, political analysis, social psychology, and law. You will learn to recognize patterns in non-market environments, anticipate outcomes, and develop strategies that strengthen your organization's position and performance in an complex external landscape.