Executive MBA Syllabus

The syllabus for an executive MBA focuses on learning that can propel senior managers to top management positions. Let’s have a look at Wharton’s EMBA curriculum for a reference of what you can expect at a top EMBA program.

Wharton’s EMBA curriculum is intensive and cross-functional in nature covering business fundamentals, tailor-made for senior managers to improve their communication, leadership and analytical skills.

The electives in the second year would help managers develop expertise in one or more areas, allowing them to expand their knowledge. Several options to study globally would help them become a global citizen.

Core Curriculum

The core EMBA curriculum includes 10.0 course units. Having prior academic experience is an added advantage, as it lets you waive some core courses and take more electives.

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Leadership Essentials

Foundations of Leadership and Teamwork

The EMBA course helps develop teamwork and leadership skills and knowledge. It focuses on building efficient teams, flattening hierarchies, and boosting empowerment and facilitation.

Management Communication 

The EMBA course at Wharton enhances persuasion skills and enables participants to gain confidence during public speaking. At the start of the course, you can receive personalized feedback on your performance that allows you to develop effective, business-level communication skills, irrespective of your skillset.

Responsibility in Global Management

With this course, you become familiar with various ethical and legal challenges business leaders face. The program introduces you to frameworks applied while analysing ethical issues, including virtue-based, right-based, and consequentialist-based reasoning. The course helps you learn basic normative and legal regimes at the global workplace and various conflicting interpretations associated with corporate responsibility.

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Analytical Foundations 

Microeconomics for Managers

EMBA enhances the students’ decision-making power and helps them learn to think strategically and understand how a firm operates in an economic environment. The first half of an EMBA program includes the foundations of microeconomics (including supply, demand, cost, production, market price and output, and simple competitive equilibrium). The second half covers the application of microeconomic theory to advanced competitive and pricing strategies.

Regression Analysis for Business

The program gives insights into the fundamentals of statistical analysis and teaches the science behind deriving information from raw data. The course focuses on the basics of exploratory data analysis, statistic inference, and probability theory.

You will learn the importance of regression analysis, the key statistical methodology required in solving business issues, including the market’s response to price changes and predicting future sales. You can get an overview of the models’ validity and know the importance of regression diagnostics and how numerous graphical displays supplement basic numerical summaries.

Business Analytics

The course covers the fundamental business analytics models as well as ideas, offering essential qualitative insights into various managerial problems. You can determine different problems and learn the applications and ways to tackle them quantitively. You can also analyse the particular challenges associated with data collection.

Business Foundations

The EMBA program will teach you the applications of mathematical analysis to real-life challenges at work. At the end of the course, you can offer valuable insights and tactical knowledge, which is beneficial for general managers and other management consultants.

Operations Strategy

The course covers tactical models and various decisions, allowing you to learn qualitative insights required by management consultants and general managers.

Quality and Productivity

The program teaches you how firms can organise their core business operations better and more effectively. You will learn how to align supply with demand for the products and services of a business.

Fundamentals of Financial and Managerial Accounting

The program introduces you to managerial and financial accounting and emphasizes the importance of analysing and evaluating accounting information. It is a part of the core managerial process, starting from planning, decision-making to controlling.

Corporate Finance

The EMBA program covers corporate capital budgeting and valuation, discounted cash flow methods, capital asset pricing, making investment decisions during uncertainty, and market efficiency. Students can also analyse corporate financial policy, such as capital costs, capital structure, dividend policy, other associated issues.

Macroeconomics and the Global Economic Environment

You will know the application of economic theory and realise how financial markets work, along with the impact of government policies. You will be aware of various determinants at the levels of national income, interest rates, employment, investment, inflation, monetary supply, exchange rates, and the formulation and functioning of stabilisation policies.

Managing the Enterprise

You will learn that today’s successful management requires a series of insights derived from economics, political economy, psychology, and sociology.

Marketing Management

The course let you learn the applications of various analytic perspectives, marketing concepts, and decision tools. You will also learn to make effective decisions in aspects including communications programs, product offerings, pricing, and distribution channels.

Marketing Strategy

The program introduces you to theories and concepts associated with marketing decision-making.  While building Marketing Management, learners can measure considerations behind different marketing elements. A computer simulation program can highlight these problems and offer realistic examples for marketing analysis and discussion, thus enriching the classroom experience.

Global Experience

This is covered in the second year of the program, wherein the students attend a weeklong modular course in a specific country facing certain business challenges.

Electives offered in an Executive MBA

Each EMBA class actively participates in selecting a range of electives from over 200 graduate courses provided. Candidates can choose from this subset and even avail the option of switching campuses for a particular term if the desired program is unavailable in the primary location.

EMBA graduates usually make significant progress in career as the program is designed to open doors to leaderships and upper-level management ranks. In the second year, students get the option of developing their knowledge and skills in particular fields.

For instance, you can major in subjects like finance, entrepreneurship, strategic management, and marketing. The course even teaches you to create independent study projects or work in-depth on a particular topic under the guidance of a faculty member.

Sample Elective Courses Selected by Students Recently

Advanced Corporate Finance

You can learn key decision-making areas in managerial finance and other chosen topics in financial theory. The program gives an overview of the theory and the empirical evidence associated with financial and investment policies of the firm. The course develops one’s decision-making skills in such areas.

Further, it covers several financial management areas, including leasing, corporate reorganisations, mergers and acquisitions, working capital management, and financial planning. Other areas already touched upon in the introductory course are covered in-depth in this one, which includes cost of capital, investment decision-making during uncertainty, capital structure, corporate liabilities, pricing of the selected financial instruments, and dividend policy.

Corporate Development: Mergers and Acquisitions

The program explores different corporate development modes for managers, thus driving business growth and change, such as outsourcing, alliances, corporate venturing, and most importantly, mergers and acquisitions. The three main objectives of this course include –

  • To teach the application of different tools that boost the selection of appropriate growth strategies in a particular situation.
  • To provide insights into managing partnerships like outsourcing, alliances, and corporate venturing.
  • To develop an all-inclusive framework to execute M&As, starting from planning to implementation.

The course focuses on the operational and strategic aspects of these transactions, instead of the financial considerations.

Entrepreneurship through Acquisition

The course teaches how to handle the practical and theoretical issues of business acquisition. The topics covered are locating a business, valuation, analysing data, due diligence, structuring the acquisition, raising capital, and integrating the target.

Financial Derivatives

The course offers you the necessary skills to employ and value several options, financial contracts, and futures. It emphasises the fundamentals needed to treat different topics in light of today’s dynamic market. You can explore each topic at a technical level. The things covered are – the valuation of futures contracts on various stocks indices, Treasury instruments, and commodities.

Other topics include empirical evidence, the valuations of options, strategies taken in relation to these assets, as well as dynamic asset location techniques. You will also learn the example portfolio insurances, swaps, and the effective use (or misuse) of derivatives associated with corporate applications.

Formation and Implementation of Entrepreneurial Ventures

This is an advanced entrepreneurship course centering around writing comprehensive business plans and implementing them for a selected venture. The course analyses the ways to launch and exploit different business opportunities (rather than exploring them). You can acquire essential skillsets for crafting a profitable business model for your start-up.

You can develop and write an effective plan for your venture, either in an independent or corporate setting. You venture must have distinguishing qualities from existing organisations via differential innovation, such as through an innovative production process or products/services, building a new business model, or developing a new market altogether.

Global Modular Courses

The full- or half-credit global modular courses provide an innovative global experiential learning experience. You can gain an on-the-field business view in an engaging workshop format. You will get an exclusive combination of course concepts, local immersion, and emerging business problems in areas undergoing radical change.

Examples include marketing in emerging economies like India and China, Brazil’s energy and infrastructure, and China’s global supply chain management. Further, Global Modular Courses are provided in India, Brazil, China, Italy, Israel, Japan, South Africa, Rwanda, and the UK. Also, these courses are open to EMBA applicants based on space availability.

Innovation

This is an intensive project course that allows student teams to develop one or more businesses. Some such businesses, including Smatchy Inc. and Terrapass Inc., have spun out of the course and are now managed by the alumni. You can learn powerful business tools and apply the fundamentals in problem-solving, innovation, and designing tasks.

Some examples include problem definition, generating alternatives, identifying opportunities, selecting among alternatives, managing innovation pipelines, and principles of data graphics.

International Corporate Finance

You can analyse the financial issues that firms face while operating in international situations. The topics covered include corporate strategy, abroad investment decisions, managing exchange risks, international portfolio diversification, forecasting exchange rates, taxation issues, financing sources, financial structure in an MNC, and cost of capital.

Introduction to Real Estate

This class helps to become an informed customer of real estate advice. It contains 4 major sections –

  • Financial risk and return of real estate investments at the property-level. You can interpret, evaluate and understand how real estate property investment works.
  • Legal real estate investment landscape and applying legal structures to monitor risks.
  • The economics behind commercial real estate markets, allowing you to understand the factors to determine the income-producing potentials and value of a real estate investment.
  • Significant real estate issues of today.

Managing Organisational Change

The last decade witnessed the need for firms to adopt the latest technological trends and adapt to demographic, competitive, and other environmental factors to survive and flourish. The class emphasizes specific concepts, tools, and theories to guide an organisation’s executives and leaders.

You will learn several change strategies like managing cultural change, leading change, corporate transformation, managing mergers or acquisitions, managing growth, business process outsourcing, developing a customer-centric organization, and managing radical organisational change.

Marketing Research

The program aims to provide a powerful experience in several marketing research techniques. The class is designed for managers who are responsible for determining the direction and scope of research activities. The topics covered are data collection and evaluation techniques, evaluation of alternative information sources, and presenting the outcomes.

Managers can recognize the significance of systematic information accumulation and analysis, thus smoothening their marketing decision-making processes. The class also includes defining information needs, using test marketing processes, the importance of decision-making models, and analysis forms associated with marketing research information.

Marketing Strategy

The class considers marketing as both an organisational orientation and a management responsibility, allowing students to capture, create, and sustain customer values. The course highlights the business unit and its array of channels, alliances, and customer relationships. It helps develop your knowledge and skillset in the application of concepts, advanced marketing frameworks, and business-level strategic choice-making processes.

Negotiations

The class blends practice sessions and lectures, and uses exercises and cases to enhance your managerial negotiation skills. The cases cover diverse problems and settings, including repeated negotiations, one-shot deals between people, cross-cultural issues, and negotiations over multiple issues and among several parties (either within or between firms). A significant portion of this course’s grade comprises performance in these negotiation’s cases.

New Product Development

The course offers an immersive experience in new product development trends and techniques, right from innovation and sourcing ideas to new product sales forecasting. It focuses on collective learning, and analysing what works and what doesn’t. You will also learn the major issues amongst start-ups, while the primary focus remains on new product development procedures.

Pricing Policy

The class offers a systematic presentation of factors to consider while fixing price, and helps to learn the pricing alternatives development processes. You can develop analytical methods and explore new approaches to solve pricing decisions.

Risk and Crisis Management

The growing financial markets and global economies are producing great risk contagion each day, thus increasing market volatility and risk capital demands. You can determine the factors driving risk contagion and confidence restoration methods across global markets for financial and pure risks.

Strategy and Competitive Advantage

The EMBA program deals with business-unit-level strategy issues and studies how organisations can build and sustain a competitive advantage. You can learn concepts developed around complementarities and fit. Besides, the course teaches how organisations respond to environmental changes, creating competitive advantages via commitments, analysing competitors, increasing returns, modularity, and real options. You need to do a term-length project wherein student groups work on analysing firms requiring the application of various course concepts.

Technology Strategy

Candidates can develop and analyse firm strategies in various industries wherein technological advancements are essential in building and sustaining competitive advantage. The course provides frameworks and concepts to help realise the interconnection between several firm strategies, markets, and technologies. Students become key decision-makers or even advisors, and team up to solve multiple developmental and maintenance issues of a firm’s competitive advantage in a particular market.

Venture Capital and the Finance Behind Innovation

The program highlights the finance of diverse technological innovations and the valuation tools essential in the venture capital industry. Among these tools include comparables analysis, the “venture capital methods”, analysing discounted cash flows, decision trees, Monte Carlo simulation, contingent-claims analysis, and real options. The course is primarily designed for finance majors looking for careers in venture capital companies or R&D-intensive firms in the healthcare of IT sectors.

Majors

You won’t require a Major while applying for the EMBA program, but you can earn some Wharton majors if you are an executive student pursuing an area of your interest.

The following majors have been earned within the EMBA course:

Entrepreneurial Management

This major combines practise with theory, thus offering opportunities to test the models, theories, and strategies learned in the EMBA classroom. You can make real business plans, gain insights from industry leaders, and work on several field projects.

Finance

Finance majors deal with theoretical and analytical tools to master practical financial issues. It primarily emphasises the analytical foundations, procedures and theories, and extensively uses relevant techniques of mathematics, economic analysis, and statistics. The major also focuses on the institutional, descriptive, and historical aspects of the field.

Management

This major enables managers to change the global economy, understand the forces shaping the organisation’s direction, goals, and policies, and have a total overview of the enterprise. The class also allows managers to implement personal leadership skills while managing employees. You can apply the basic research methods and social science disciplines centering around leadership and management issues in both the public and private sectors.

Marketing

Marketing majors explore fundamental approaches to understand competitors, markets, and portfolios of products, and also to operate technologies. Wharton comprises one of the most efficient faculties and helpful marketing courses.

Strategic Management

This major deals with the fundamentals of competitive advantage logic, centered around careful analytical treatment methods associated with distinct positions and qualities of individual firms. The strategic management major also lets you understand broader competitive dynamics.

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