Course Descriptions
ACTG 612: FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING
This course is an introduction to accounting, the language of business. An understanding of how financial accounting information is prepared and reported is one of the fundamental building blocks of a business education. This course is designed to assist you in developing an understanding of financial accounting concepts and techniques so you can be an effective and informed user of financial statement information. In this course students will learn to apply accounting rules to reflect underlying economic transactions; understand how differences in measurement rules affect financial statements; understand how manager judgment influences financial statements, and analyze financial statements to make business decisions.
BA 610: OREGON ADVANCED STRATEGY
Pooling collective knowledge and capitalizing on each other’s insights, students will “bolt their ideas and class-discussed concepts to the ground,” effectively operationalizing Advanced Strategy concepts within an organization. This hands-on process will culminate in students’ final projects, which will demonstrate a firm understanding of the systems approach required to embed the advanced strategy macro values into a firm’s DNA and result in inimitable strategies designed to create long-term shareholder value while emphasizing authenticity, accountability and transparency
BA 625: BUSINESS LAW AND ETHICS
Effective leadership and ethics are two sides of the same coin, whether in business, politics, or your personal affairs. That's why we made this course the culmination of the required core. Regardless of your chosen specialization, you and all your classmates will come together once more in your last term to take this course.
BE 607: BUSINESS LAW FOUNDATIONS
This course familiarizes students with the U.S. legal system, its procedures, and its basic substantive rules, as well as basic international law. it helps students understand more fully the legal issues they will encounter in business, as private individuals, and members of society.
FIN 510: IMPACT INVESTING
This course will explore the emerging tools and strategies in impact investing. It will ask the student to apply the core principles of finance and the tools learned in earlier coursework to create investment strategies that deliver both returns and solve a social/community and/or environmental challenge.
FIN 612: FUNDAMENTALS OF FINANCE
This MBA core course examines the basic principles of finance theory and applies the principles to important decisions facing a corporate manager. The focus of the course is on valuation and how various types of decisions potentially affect the value of a company. The course covers the fundamentals of evaluating investment opportunities, the relation between risk and required return, and the notion of market efficiency. The ways that markets ascertain value and allocate capital are compared to how a firm allocates capital to projects or initiatives. Key decisions faced by corporate managers that are covered include capital structure and mix, dividend policy, corporate cash management; cost of capital evaluation; project analysis and valuation; internal versus external financing; and evaluating and managing a business’s financial risks. By the end of the course, you should be able to value stocks and bonds using discounted cash flow techniques; identify the relevant incremental cash flows of an investment opportunity; estimate the required rate of return or cost of capital; and evaluate whether an investment opportunity adds value to a business.
FIN 613: MANAGERIAL ECONOMICS
The subject of this course addresses competition between businesses operating in typical U.S. product markets. This course has three objectives: (1) to solidify understanding of fundamental tools of economic analysis so that these tools can be used; (2) to develop the role of industry structure and the impact structure tends to have on competitive strategy and profitability; (3) to begin to build skills in competitive analysis, which entails formation of marketing, production, channel, investment, and pricing strategies based on the way competitive forces appear to work themselves out in the market. The concepts covered, which are relevant to managerial decision making, include demand and supply analysis; optimal decision making using marginal analysis; production theory; decision making under perfect competition, monopoly, and monopolistic competition; externalities and public goods; game theory; and moral hazard.
FIN 671: CORPORATE FINANCE AND VALUATION
Application of financial principles to problems of valuation, capital budgeting, and financial policy.
MGMT 510: BUSINESS OF FOOD
MGMT 607: SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS SEMINAR
This mini-course serves as an anchor and “homeroom” for first year sustainable business practices MBA students, introducing fundamental sustainable business concepts and language, discussing current events and new technologies, exploring the values and purpose students bring to the program. It doubles as the venue for the Center for Sustainable Business Practices speaker series and offers student field trips to sustainable businesses. Pass/Fail only.
MGMT 608: SPECIAL TOPICS - CLEAN ENERGY FINANCE
The world is in the midst of figuring out how to transition to clean energy. While much attention is given to energy technologies, one essential element of a clean energy system is creating business models and financing strategies to implement a system transformation. This course will explore the rapidly changing energy markets, discuss how policy and consumer choice are shaping new markets, and examine emerging financing strategies that are being developed and deployed to accelerate the pace of implementation.
MGMT 608: SPECIAL TOPICS - LIFE CYCLE ANALYSIS
Thinking in terms of full product and service life cycles is a crucial business skill, especially in an age of resource scarcity, new emerging policy objectives, shifting consumer preferences, broadening stakeholder concerns, and quickly changing prices for energy and materials. This course focuses specifically on lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions (hereafter referred to with the shorthand “carbon”), but set in the context of life-cycle analysis and life-cycle thinking more broadly.
MGMT 609: STRATEGIC PLANNING PROJECT
A Strategic Planning Project is part of the experiential learning that characterizes the Oregon MBA. Student teams are paired up with Northwest companies pursuing opportunities for improving their triple bottom line. Under the guidance of faculty advisors, team facilitators, and outside consultants, students apply classroom lessons and learn what can't be taught in the classroom as they research the company, analyze their findings, and present their conclusions to senior management.
MGMT 610: GREENING SPORTS AND EVENTS
MGMT 612: MANAGING INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANIZATIONS
Course content is based upon behavioral science concepts and research findings directed toward the understanding of human behavior in various social contexts. Specific objectives of the course include developing an understanding of the design of organizations and their internal systems for achieving performance; the nature of team dynamics and group decision-making, and their influence on organizational performance; and individual cognitive and leadership styles and their impact on group and organizational processes.
MGMT 614: STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
The purpose of this course is to explore the organization as a whole and its interactions with its environment. Students will gain an understanding of critical contingency issues the organization faces in the environment and how it must manage these contingencies through its structure and strategy to gain competitive advantages. The focus will be on diagnosing and assessing organization situations and to show how large and small firms can be more effective and efficient not only in today's world but in tomorrow's as well.
MGMT 623: NEGOTIATION
Covers negotiation theory, including distributive and integrative bargaining techniques, economic complements, game theory, and alternative dispute resolution. Extensive in-class negotiation simulations are part of the course.
MGMT 635: RECOGNIZING BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES
This course introduces the fundamentals of entrepreneurship, which empowers individuals to confront what others see as insurmountable problems and to seek opportunity through technological and business solutions. This course is designed to be valuable for all MBA students who seek to understand the entrepreneurial process.
MGMT 640: SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
The mandate for corporations to excel not only economically, but also environmentally, remains in place. Yet, many businesses still are not well prepared to take up the cause of environmental stewardship. This is ironic, because in many respects, the environmental movement represents an enormous opportunity for business, both domestically and globally. The purpose of this course is to bring together students from varied backgrounds to appreciate how economic activity impacts the natural environment, to understand the evolution and role of institutions that influence corporate environmental behavior, and to learn how a firm can manage its way to better environmental performance.
MGMT 641: INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY
Industrial ecology represents a systems approach to the design and manufacture of products (and delivery of services) with minimized ecological impact. It breaks from traditional corporate environmental management approaches by looking beyond the boundaries of individual facilities and firms to consider the industrial metabolism within supply chains, industrial clusters, and geographic regions.
MKTG 612: MARKETING MANAGEMENT
This course introduces the concept of marketing, factors that influence marketing management, and the role of marketing in society and business. The class will address the benefits of market analysis, target customer identification, and development of marketing-mix strategies structured to deliver superior customer value and optimize organizational performance. The objective is to develop skills and knowledge in the areas of consumer behavior, market segmentation, targeting, positioning, product, services, price, place, promotion, and strategic marketing with a sustainable, ethical and socially responsible approach.
MKTG 660: MARKETING RESEARCH
Marketing research as a tool for decision-making. Planning research projects; design, measurement, experimental and non-experimental techniques, analysis and interpretation of data; reporting research results.
OBA 533: INFORMATION ANALYSIS FOR MANAGERIAL DECISIONS
Teaches techniques to develop information to manage risk and improve decisions. These techniques include data-driven approaches for discovering business trends and strategic opportunities, including techniques for data mining and analyzing empirical data.
OBA 544: BUSINESS DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS*
Covers techniques for structuring and storing business data, focusing primarily on relational database theory with applied skills for business users, including data warehouses, reporting, and normalization.
OBA 566: PROJECT AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT MODELS*
Frameworks and solutions for managing complex projects and operations; implementing optimal strategies for producing profitable new products and services in the competitive global business environment.
OBA 577: SUPPLY-CHAIN OPERATIONS AND INFORMATION
Strategic and tactical issues pertaining to the distribution and delivery of products and services. Methodologies and systems for designing, tracking, and managing complex global operations.
OBA 612: QUALITATIVE METHODS FOR MANAGERS
This course aims to achieve a level of understanding of statistical inference that enables students to be intelligent consumers of statistical analyses, able to apply some of the more useful analytic techniques including the modeling of relationships among variables and an introduction to classification. Specifically we will cover statistical sampling, estimation, hypothesis testing, and regression (simple, multiple, and logistic).
OBA 613: OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
This course is designed to address the key operations management issues in manufacturing and service organizations that have strategic as well as tactical implications. Students learn to understand the role of operations management in the overall business strategy of the firm; the strategic and tactical linkages between operations function and other functional areas of the firm; and the application of operations management policies and techniques to manufacturing as well as service sector firms. In addition, the course aims to identify and evaluate comparative approaches to operations management in an international context, as well as a range of tools appropriate for analysis of operating systems of the firm.
