Curriculum
Our Executive MBA curriculum offers a comprehensive, integrative learning experience, providing you with an understanding of management foundations and the analytical and communication skills critical for strategic decision-making in an executive or leadership role.
You will learn through a combination of teaching methods. Our professors select the best approach based on the course material, including case studies, lectures, guest speakers, class discussions, simulations, teamwork and experiential learning.
Application of theory
You will complete six compulsory consulting projects in a broad range of sectors. These experiential learning projects expand your practical experience by applying your knowledge and skills to actual business challenges on behalf of your client organization.
Team-based learning
The Executive MBA curriculum features a team-based approach to learning. You will be placed into a team for the duration of your program. Our curriculum was deliberately designed for you to rely on the strengths and diverse experience of your peers and learn to build successful teams, while also reflecting and growing personally.
Term 1
Data becomes useful when it is transformed into information and where it is vital for institutions to make sound decisions based on its interpretation. This course will provide you with the procedures for analyzing and presenting data, along with core statistical concepts such as central tendency measures, variability and relative standing measures.
Financial accounting is a primary measure of a corporation’s success used by managers, investors and creditors in decision-making. In this course, you will be introduced to what accounting can mean to you as a decision-maker and how accounting and ethical choices affect decisions.
In this course, you will explore the role of the general manager in the private, government and non-profit sectors, as well as the process of strategic decision-making in these settings. You will analyze the impact of broad macro trends, such as digital transformation and social innovation, on general management, the entrepreneurial process and the future of work.
Examining information systems from the perspective of adding value to your organization, you will gain an understanding of the dynamic effect of information communication technologies on organizational development. You will review best practices for the strategic integration of technology in business operations and explore socio-technical critical success factors underlying effective information systems, strategy formulation and successful digital transformation initiatives.
You will learn about leadership concepts, particularly those related to personal and interpersonal skills for working with and on high-performing teams. This course will provide several personal assessments, personal development readings and team-building exercises to enhance your capabilities for working with and managing teams.
You will experience a broad view of consulting, internal and external to the organization, to solve management problems. You will learn about the five basic phases of the consulting process as well as the tools and processes relevant to each one. You will also address topics essential to the consulting process, including ethics and professional conduct, project planning and management, consulting with various types and sizes of organizations, and working through resistance.
Term 2
You will become familiar with management accounting information from a decision-making perspective, including how this information supports strategic objectives. You will foster an understanding of how management accounting measures can both help and hinder the creation of organizational value. The emphasis is on the interpretive, analytic and judgement skills required to understand how managerial accounting provides valuable information to you as a manager or executive.
You will gain a greater understanding of how organizations work and the interdependent nature and importance of internal governance, organization design and human resources strategy. You will examine contemporary theories and models, best practices and lessons learned in the pursuit of high-performance outcomes.
You will learn a framework with which to analyze corporate investment and financing decisions and understand how these decisions affect a firm’s value. You will cover time-value of money, stock and bond valuation, project evaluation techniques, cost of capital, cash flow estimation, project risk analysis, real options, company valuation, dividend policy and capital structure decisions.
You will explore different concepts related to innovation and innovative processes and discuss models of entrepreneurship and their relationship with innovation. Your team will work on a project that involves a Silicon Valley startup or scaleup. This course includes a one-week trip to Silicon Valley in California, to complete the final stages of your project and attend a series of leading experts’ presentations.
You will explore past, current and future examples of challenges and opportunities in the global environment through the lense of selected analytical frameworks. You will investigate extensively a broad range of factors — economic, political, socio-cultural, environmental, legal, and technological — that support a robust, evidence-based decision when a firm decides to enter an international market.
You will explore the strategic business opportunities of the digital marketing landscape, learn specific digital marketing strategies and tactics, and understand how to manage and provide resources to enable your team to succeed using digital marketing strategies. You will learn the value of using data to inform and recommend different digital marketing strategies to a local not-for-profit organization, as your team undertakes your first business consulting project.
Summer
This is the capstone project of your first year of learning in the program. You will identify a client organization that has a management issue or opportunity it would like you to explore. After researching and analyzing key information relating to the scope of the project, you will deliver your findings in a presentation and report. An advisor is assigned to coach and mentor you with this engagement.
Term 3
By combining modern tools and technologies with knowledge and experience, you will discover how to gain unique insights into past, present and future performance. You will develop an understanding of the procedures — and their capabilities and limitations — for analyzing and presenting data, and the principles of making inferences from sample data. Emphasis is placed on the correct interpretation of statistical results.
You will gain an appreciation for corporate governance, corporate responsibility and ethics. From a broad strategic perspective, you will assess the role of the firm in society, the causes of governance failures and potential remediation, ethical leadership, balancing shareholder and stakeholder interests, implementing a culture of ethics and the psychology of unethical decision-making.
You will examine the role of accounting as a prevention and detection tool by learning concepts such as control procedures and criminal behaviour in the prevention and detection of financial misconduct.
You will analyze how to effectively integrate supply chains to meet rising customer expectations and declining product life cycles at a reasonable cost. This will involve seeing the alignment between your supply chain and organizational strategies, knowing the challenges of complex supply chains, assessing the impact of strategies in different geographical locations, extending your domestic strategy globally and understanding the trade-off between selecting domestic or offshore suppliers.
You will investigate how to assess the performance of a business, what determines performance, how to conduct a strategic audit and how to develop a specific course of action to deal with strategic issues. You will also analyze opportunities to enhance value by aligning strategy with organizational infrastructure and the ability to implement change to enhance competitiveness.
With the increasing pressure on companies to be more sustainable, this course provides you with the understanding of the nature of global supply chains and the role that sustainability plays in competitiveness. In particular, you will examine how environmental and social sustainability perspectives can be incorporated into the design and management of four major supply chain elements: sourcing, operations, logistics and integration.
Through this course, you will gain an understanding of the key steps, critical decisions and challenges involved in the entrepreneurial process. You will deconstruct this process, including identifying opportunity, planning the venture, identifying and acquiring resources, managing the venture, and scaling and planning your exit strategy. This course will emphasize the importance of a “go-to-market” strategy, building a startup team and a financing strategy.
Term 4
This course will provide you with an interpretation and understanding of a broad range of both macro and micro-economic concepts and theories. You will gain a general understanding of concepts and terminology, to appreciate the types of managerial decisions that can be supported through economic theories and related data.
This course will equip you with a solid knowledge of change management frameworks, with application-based skills and tools to undertake the role of a change leader in your organization. You will gain an in-depth understanding of fundamental change management concepts, including defining the change, managing benefits, stakeholder impact analysis, communication and engagement, change readiness assessment and sustainment.
You will develop an aptitude and intuition for and understanding of the strategies essential to successful negotiations in a cross-cultural context. You will thoroughly analyze the nature of negotiation, distributive and integrative bargaining, ethical issues, planning and preparation, intercultural differences, bargaining style and individual differences. You will also consider the role of power, strategy and tactics in negotiation, including communication, persuasion, conflict resolution and complex negotiation.
You will learn about market insight and competitive intelligence relating to international business and the value of these insights in making sound international business decisions. You will demonstrate your learning and insight by developing a collection plan for your client through the ADX 6490 International Business Consulting Project.
In the Executive MBA curriculum, this course is a launchpad for thinking about your leadership role beyond graduation. You will reflect on how your leadership style and understanding of leadership have changed since the beginning of the program. You will continue to grow your leadership skills and gain an appreciation of the process of focusing on creating the conditions for people and organizations to thrive and achieve significant goals. Business leaders from the community will join classroom discussions throughout the course to inspire you with their personal stories about the “why,” “how” and “what” of leading through opportunities and challenging circumstances.
In this program capstone project, you will complete the in-market validation component of the internationalization process. You will examine the opportunities associated with either a market entry strategy, channel development or a strategic alliance by conducting a major consulting project for your client in the international market strategically selected by your cohort in your first year. The project will require you to draw on your previous courses and your learning about international strategy, organization, management, human resources, marketing and similar areas.
