Chicago Booth's New MBA Courses

Many of this year’s new courses focus on subjects that have emerged as major points of interest over the past year. From learning to Pivot for Success to analyzing Health Economics, these new classes highlight topics businesses are addressing during this challenging year. 

By design, faculty at Booth have a lot of autonomy to set their own coursework. Instead of going through a committee that requires buy-in, a professor can move forward with the approval of a senior faculty member. That sort of “living curriculum” allows faculty to be more nimble and facilitates the ability to offer bold, cutting-edge coursework.

Here is a glimpse of a few of our new courses offered this fall:

Behavioral Science

In business situations, biases and heuristics can influence our decision-making and behavior without us being aware of it. Studies based on psychology theory examine how people combine desires and beliefs in choosing a course of action. Judgment decision making scholars, psychologists, have identified specific ways that decision makers may be biased. Implicit Bias in Business Applications focuses on the behavioral ethics bias known as implicit bias to increase your awareness of biases that may provide blind spots which impact judgment and decision making. 

Finance & Economics

Private Marketing from an Investor’s Perspective provides students with a knowledge edge by helping them understand this rapidly growing and wide-ranging asset class. Students will also learn the techniques and concepts that successful investors use to develop their portfolio strategies; and analyze the characteristics of private equity, private debt, venture capital, and tangible assets (infrastructure, opportunistic real estate) and the strategies for creating and increasing value in these areas, as well as how general partners and venture capitalists make investment decisions.

Health Economics will cover a broad range of topics including the demand for healthcare, the design and financing of health insurance, the behavior of non-profit and for-profit hospitals, the role of competition in the healthcare market, the determinants of healthcare spending, the sources of technological change in the healthcare sector, and the effects of government regulations on the healthcare market. The course will briefly discuss healthcare systems around the world and describe socioeconomic disparities in health outcomes in both the United States and around the world. The course will conclude with applications of all of these concepts to recent health care policy debates in the United States.

General & Strategic Management

Culture should be a regular part of leadership’s considerations and needs to be quantified and aligned with strategy to turn it into a competitive advantage. Culture as a Competitive Advantage examines that critical integration, demonstrating the approach business leaders should take to develop hard metrics that accelerate the impact of culture on the bottom line. Today’s business students need to become proficient in the impact of culture on retention and attraction of top talent, the process of creating or redesigning a culture post-crisis, and the role of leaders in determining the kind of culture needed for their business strategy, among other topics addressed in this course.

In Pivot for Success – Hone the Vision, Shift the Strategy, Make the Right Moves in Today’s Marketplace, students learn how pivoting can generate strategic, cross-functional, and long-term business value. This intensive and highly interactive course will allow students to question, argue, and discuss best practices for large established firms, entrepreneurial ventures, and non-profit organizations.

Scoping a market and assessing the relative positions of players (firms) and opportunities in that market is the topic of Industry Analysis. Students will work in small teams, and alumni voices will illuminate the role of industry analysis in different spaces including investment management, strategy consulting, and product innovation.

In a large number of industries, the mechanism by which consumers are informed, persuaded, and induced to make purchases involves some form of selling. In Selling and Sales Management, we will examine topics related to selling, it’s interplay with consumers, competition, and a company’s own marketing mix, as well as the management of the individuals that provide the selling effort. While the course will focus on marketing issues and use an economic, analytical approach to understanding these issues, when appropriate the class will bring together concepts, frameworks, and theories from other areas including sociology and psychology. The course balances theory and practice with in-depth discussions about the relevance and use of selling in major industries, particularly the service, technology, pharma, and automobile sectors. 

Leadership

In Leadership at the Movies, students will be assigned to work in teams that will choose a movie with leadership themes, create a leadership activity for their classmates, and facilitate a debrief/discussion. This course helps students assess how they want to apply leadership lessons to their own leadership practice.

Technology & Business Analytics

Hacking for Defense is a course sponsored by the Department of Defense and the intelligence agencies, which has student teams work on pressing problems with sponsors from various agencies. This class offers an extraordinary opportunity for students to engage with urgent operational challenges through the lens of entrepreneurship and innovation. Student teams will apply Lean LaunchPad principles toward solving a national security and/or defense problem, develop employable skills critical to our world’s future workforce, and gain hands-on experience in especially complex problem-solving.

Have you ever wondered where the “Big Data” is stored? Every modern company now stores data in a database and many companies are requiring even their business leaders to have an understanding of databases. At the very least, knowing how to set up and interact with databases will improve your ability to get stuff done, strengthen your understanding of how technology works, and make working with developers less of a pain. In Intro to Databases for Business Analytics, we’ll explore basic SQL, the most common database language. At the end of the course, you will have a deeper understanding of how databases work, how they fit into the general technology stack, how to connect to databases, and how to browse and export data from databases.

This is just a small part of Booth’s wide-ranging academic offerings. See our full list of courses and discover how Chicago Booth’s flexible curriculum gives students the skills to tackle complex business challenges in any industry, for the rest of your life. Read more »