EMBA – the Rochester-Bern Executive MBA

In the Financial Accounting course, we discuss the different types of financial information that stock market companies prepare. Financial Accounting creates transparency in financial markets and helps capital providers make good decisions when allocating funds. After the course, you will understand the different financial statements (balance sheets, income statements and cash flow statements) that a company publishes externally. You will also understand how estimates impact the financial information that companies publish externally.

This course provides the conceptual framework necessary to help managers decide what investment decisions make best sense. We start with investment projects, such as replacing machines, launching new products, or building new factories, and end with the exciting topic of computing the value of companies and negotiating agreements about the acquisition and sale of companies.

The perspectives presented here cover both theoretical and practical issues. While the course’s focus is on investments, the principles we develop apply to management decisions in general with a view to helping you make better choices.

The Managerial Accounting course uses case studies to show how managers can apply internal information within companies to make better decisions and create value. One of the key contributions of the finance function in companies is strategic decision-making and strategic performance measurement. After the course, you will understand how reports prepared by financial managers can help other managers make better decisions and how financial managers can measure the strategic process of a company.

This course applies the fundamental tools and concepts of microeconomics – economic behavior, marginal analysis, opportunity cost, supply and demand analysis, and alternative market structures – to managerial decision-making. The course also uses economic analysis and tools to provide insights into internal organizational policies, including decision-right assignment, performance evaluation, and compensation plans. The course aims to help you develop your economic intuition about a broad range of problems related to business and everyday life, so that a business approach becomes second nature.

This course aims to provide the main tools for understanding the macroeconomic environment in which a company operates. It covers the key concepts for addressing a wide range of macroeconomic questions. We emphasize intuition and application of the concepts. Furthermore, we try to give an overview that covers the most important macroeconomic areas and topics such as growth, business cycles, monetary policy, exchange rates, and financial crises.

In the era of data science, managers need to have a good understanding of the foundations of uncertainty modelling and business analytics. In this course, you will first learn about the underlying concepts of uncertainty management. Subsequently, you will study both the opportunities and the limitations of data analysis in business. Finally, you will tackle some challenging business problems using regression analysis, perhaps the most important tool of modern data science.

In this course, you learn how firms interact with capital markets and why that is relevant. At the core of our considerations are three financial policies:

• Financing policy: How should firms finance their business activities?
• Investment policy: Which factors should guide a firm’s investment activities?
• Payout policy: How much and how should firms return capital to their investors?

You learn how financing instruments can be used to bridge disagreements, make deals more valuable, set the right incentives, and even serve as a truth serum. You discover the power of these tools in financing decisions throughout the lifecycle of a firm, including seed financing, venture capital, mergers and acquisitions, and initial public offerings. Finally, we extend this logic to financial risk management and learn how different financial instruments can be used to mitigate risk.

Information technology is transforming firms, markets, products, and processes with remarkable speed. Recent developments in AI have the potential to further accelerate the transformation. This presents managers with new challenges and valuable opportunities. This course dives into the strategic use of IT within a business context, focusing on how IT can enable competitive advantage, enhance business processes, and drive innovation. The course interweaves theory and practice, with students acquiring useful frameworks for analyzing the use of IT in organizations.

This course will focus on contemporary areas to improve marketing strategy decisions. During the course, students will: learn how to use Marketing Analytics; understand the various elements in Marketing Mix; learn Return of Investment analysis for each communication channel, particularly digital advertising; integrate Market Research into marketing strategic decision making, and learn contemporary branding evaluation techniques.

Pricing is one of the most difficult decisions managers make and the one with the most direct and immediate im-pact on the firm’s financial position. Many firms do it poorly, primarily by using inappropriate rules of thumb. Doing it well requires knowledge, analysis, discipline, and creativity. This course will explore the fundamentals of pricing strategy, drawing on business-to-business and business-to-consumer examples and discussions. This course aims to equip participants with proven concepts, techniques, and frameworks for assessing and formulating pricing strate-gies. The course complements strategy, marketing, finance, and consulting disciplines and is one of Simon’s com-parative advantages. The goal of the course is to enhance students’ economic intuition related to pricing strategy.

Operations & Supply Chain Management is at the core of any organization when it comes to designing, producing and delivering products and services that satisfy external and internal customer needs. Throughout the course, you will develop an understanding of the complex and crucial interactions between operations and other functions, particularly marketing and finance. You will identify effective measures to improve operational performance and show how this in turn improves the organization’s financial results.

Data has become an essential asset for companies to be able to operate and compete effectively. In fact, four of the six top companies in market valuation – Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, and Alibaba – base their business models exclusively on the use of data to optimize advertising. Moreover, SMEs are starting to benefit substantially from analyzing data about their operations, finances, clients, and employees. It is therefore essential that business managers understand data as a production factor and know how to extract the value it contains. This course introduces data as a production factor, explaining its unique attributes (what makes this factor of production different from others), and examines how data can transform existing organizations and give rise to new business models. Once students understand data as a production factor, this course shows them how to generate insights and gain value from it by means of various analytical and graphic tools.

This course will help you to understand yourself better through your own assessments and reflections and will encourage you to engage with your peers to self-reflect and exchange feedback. The ultimate aim of the course is for you to build on strengths and compensate for weaknesses so that you can lead your peers, teams, and organizations to your full potential. We will focus on the following:

• Self-awareness
• Personality and leadership skills
• Managing the dynamics of power
• Using power for leadership
• Interpersonal influence
• Difficult conversations
• Feedback giving
• Leading cross culturally
• Leading virtually
• Leading digital transformation

More than ever before, technological innovation and disruption affect the way business is conducted and new wealth is created. How to master technological change and profit from innovation are therefore key questions for business leaders. They are essential for developing a competitive advantage and boosting performance in all company types – new and old, large and small – across all industries. In this course, you will not only be exposed to the latest thinking about entrepreneurship, technological change and innovation but also apply new business tools that allow you to master technological disruption. Furthermore, you will develop an individual strategic innovation project for your company.

This course is designed with the objective of understanding distribution channels and how organizations can leverage them to create value, differentiate themselves in their markets, and gain a competitive advantage. Product proliferation, media fragmentation, intermediary power, e-commerce, omnichannel strategy, among other things, have converged to place a premium on effective channel design and management. The success of Apple, Alibaba, Amazon, Coupang, Mercado Libre, Rakuten, Reliance, Walmart, BlaBlaCar, Uber, Grab, Airbnb, Expedia, etc., indicates that careful attention to distribution can be tremendously rewarding. The course covers channel issues that are internal (salesforce management, account management, sales-marketing-organization interface) and external (retailing, wholesaling, trade relationships, channel conflict, channel coordination) to a firm. The contexts used to explore these issues are a mix of B2B and B2C settings. At the end of the course, you will be able to appreciate the complexity and central role of the sales and distribution functions and the vital part they play in implementing the marketing strategy.

Strategic management takes the perspective of the general manager involved with managing a business unit in its totality. The course focuses on the underlying conditions that permit a firm to develop, sustain, and capture the value of a superior strategic position. At the end of the course, you will have gained an actionable understanding of the strategy concept, enabling you to participate confidently in the strategic dialogue within your organization.

Most industries are currently exposed to the galvanizing forces of globalization. Global operations are no longer confined to mining, petroleum, or manufacturing firms but include also a growing number of small firms, even start-ups including born globals, that are looking for global opportunities. This course is designed to provide theoretical and practical frameworks that enable managers to formulate and implement an effective global strategy, specifically in the context of emerging Asian economies.

We will examine how multinational corporations can create and manage competitive advantages in response to the opportunities and challenges they encounter in global competition. The major objectives of this course can be categorized as follows:

• Understand the fundamental issues in globalization and multinational enterprises
• Understand and analyze recent trends in the international business environment
• Review the main theories and best practices of international business
• Acquire analytical and strategic skills for competing in the global marketplace