Cornell University Registrar

The goal of this course is to introduce you to the fundamental concepts of financial accounting. Financial accounting information is commonly used by current and potential investors to make investment decisions. Such investors include individual shareholders and bondholders, institutional lenders (e.g., banks), and potential corporate acquirers. Financial accounting information also plays a significant role in managerial performance evaluation and may be used by suppliers and customers. The focus of this course will be on training you to be a knowledgeable consumer of accounting information, rather than a producer of such information. In particular, the emphasis will be on the uses and limitations of financial accounting information. However, due to the technical nature of the material, one cannot become an effective consumer without a firm grasp of the fundamental mechanics.

This course is intended to develop your skills in decision making and communicating under conditions of uncertainty and risk. The topics in the course are organized into seven modules, each with a corresponding set of materials 1) Introduction to Data Analysis , 2) Probability and Discrete Random Variables and Decision Analysis, 3) Continuous Random Variables and Portfolio Analysis, 4) Sampling Theory and Confidence Intervals, 5) Hypothesis Testing, 6) Simple Regression and 7) Multiple Regression.

Regardless of your specific area of work, as a manager, it will be imperative for you to understand the incentives that people face and how they are likely to respond when constraints change. A good understanding of microeconomics will give you a competitive advantage. The purpose of this course is to provide you with a broad range of basic microeconomics models. The models will first be applied to a wide range of general applications, and then the focus will be narrowed to business and management.The first sections of the course will introduce opportunity cost, supply, and demand. Together supply and demand form one of the most powerful models of human behavior. The model of supply and demand will be used to explain a wide range of individual and firm behavior. Additionally, the model will be used to investigate the potential benefits and costs of government intervention in the market. The second section of the course introduces the model of perfect competition. The model of perfect competition will be used to investigate the price and quantity dynamics in both the short and long runs for firms associated with free entry. A strategy will be developed for managers and investors in perfectly competitive industries. Finally, firm short and long run behavior will be investigated in the presence of profits and new entrants to a market.Following perfect competition, the monopoly section will introduce profit maximizing behavior by firms facing a downward sloping demand curve. The monopoly section will include various ways to prevent competitors from entering the market, and various pricing strategies to exploit firm market power.The final section will introduce oligopoly and game theory. Oligopoly describes the situation where an industry is supplied by a small number of relatively large firms. The important point is that each firm can affect all other firms in the industry by behaving appropriately or not. In order to investigate it will be necessary to cover some of the basic concepts in game theory for both cooperative and competitive situations.

The course is designed to introduce you to the fundamental concepts of marketing that are relevant not just to marketers but to all managers. After taking the course, you should be well prepared to formulate and communicate rigorous and practical solutions to commonly faced marketing problems across industries. A summary of the course goals is as follows: 1) To introduce marketing strategy (market segmentation, targeting, and positioning) for both going to market and managing existing customers, as well as the basic quantitative methods that support it. 2) To introduce the elements of the marketing mix (product, pricing, promotion, and channels), and to demonstrate how each is used in a strategic manner. 3) To improve your problem solving and decision-making abilities, as well as your ability to communicate your recommendations and solutions in both oral and written formats. Though the course will introduce you to a number of key marketing theories, our emphasis will be on how to apply these theories to solve real-world marketing problems. The course will use a mix of classic and recent articles from the business press, case discussions, and in-class examples as means to illustrate and apply the principles learned during lectures.

This course will expose you to some of the major ideas and findings in the field of managing and leading in contemporary organizations. There is probably no other topic in management that has been talked and written about as much as leadership. We will spend time examining what it is that managers and leaders actually spend their time doing, and what factors lead to more effective performance. Ultimately, it can be argued that the goal of managers and leaders is to get things done in organizations, and most of that work is accomplished by effectively managing other people. We will focus on three leadership competencies that are crucial for your success: 1) critical thinking and decision making, 2) smart collaborating with an eye toward creativity and change, and 3) the ability to motivate, influence and inspire. Critical thinking involves developing hypotheses about the causes of problems, using all the available evidence to test those hypotheses, and developing solutions that address the causes most effectively and efficiently. Knowing how to assemble the best team, and how to collaborate and work together, is essential for getting to the best solution. But having the right answer is rarely good enough. Very often the right answers have to be sold. Thus, you will work on your ability to motive and influence others to the merits of your analysis and your solution.

Succeeding in any business leadership role requires you to think critically, and make quality decisions with and on behalf of organizational stakeholders, even in the face of challenges such as imperfect/incomplete information, changing and unforeseen circumstances, and, of course, human nature in all of its complexity and unpredictability. In this course we will focus on how to construct a persuasive argument and how to approach business problems systematically and thoroughly, producing a problem solution that is well-reasoned, likely to be well-received by ultimate decision makers, and able to be implemented with success. You will be introduced to, and then practice using, analytical frameworks that you can apply to any leadership challenge or opportunity - regardless of industry, company or job function -- in order to solve problems and communicate your proposed solutions effectively.

The course objective is to understand the basic principles of Finance. Most of the topics in this course are relevant to day to day life as well as for financial managers. Among other things, this course will help you make better decisions on your own financial matters, understand the basic principles of how corporations make financial decisions, familiarize you with how capital markets work, and give you a good foundation for the more advanced courses in finance.

Traditional Operations is about better managing the activities of a firm to improve its performance. In this course, we will learn to use operations concepts to improve performance. In addition, and more importantly, we will also learn to use the operations toolkit to analyze and innovate the business model of a firm.

Using modern, economics-based theories of markets and firms as a foundation, we will study a multitude of real-world strategic situations. Our goals are to learn about a wide variety of industries using both class readings and student experiences, but even more to learn a set of analytic tools that can be applied to many business circumstances and which provide further confidence in day-to-day strategic decision making. We will achieve our goals through a combination of reading, lecture, and most importantly in-class discussion.