The MBA curriculum prepares you to be a well-rounded leader who is ready to adapt to and lead through change. It is designed around five themes:
We integrate these themes into each course through practical methods such as case studies, guest lectures, computer simulations, and interactive sessions with faculty.
The online MBA degree features a mix of asynchronous and synchronous coursework: you will log in each week to complete assignments and participate in discussion boards, and you have the option to join live sessions with your instructors and peers.
Online MBA Degree Overview
The total MBA curriculum is 40 units, structured as:
- 10 core courses (20 units)
- A variety of elective courses (16 units)
- An innovation project (2 units)
- A capstone course (2 units)
Course Descriptions
Core Courses (20 units)
Explores effective ways to communicate across different constituencies and organizational levels while recognizing the social contexts and implicit assumptions that influence forms of expression. Students identify traits for communication competency and emotional intelligence and rehearse basic rhetorical skills and communication techniques.
This course prepares you to be an effective analyst in a business setting. You will learn to integrate data, judgment, and managerial knowledge in the form of a high-quality analytical spreadsheet model and to analyze that model to quantify the financial and operational implications of managerial choices. You will learn to make sense of large datasets and to communicate actionable managerial insights.
This course prepares you to contribute effectively to today’s technology-enabled workplace by understanding how to leverage processes, systems, and data to create business value. Students examine business operations in traditional companies, between firms, and in digital businesses. You consider the perspectives and needs of both start-ups and established organizations.
This course examines how to practice moral decision making by assessing personal and organizational ethical climates and their philosophical foundations and cultures. We will recognize the major theoretical systems that shape western ethical thought and conclude with an intensive case study and student-led presentations on current moral dilemmas in the workplace.
This course focuses on the accounting information for decision makers outside the organization, e.g., investors, creditors, regulatory agencies, etc. The key product of this process is a complete set of financial statements and related footnotes.
This course is designed as an overview of financial accounting in order to introduce and expand your understanding of accounting information, its framework (and data limitations), and how this information relates to the business decision-making process.
This course introduces key foundational elements of finance including present value, future value, equilibrium rate of return, overall market interest rates, and risk analysis for financial investments.
You will examine specific applications related to fixed-income securities (bonds), the bond market, equities (stocks), and the stock market. You will also analyze important issues and decision-making techniques for financial management within a typical corporation.
Key topics include the cost of capital, capital budgeting, determining the mix of debt and equity in financing the corporation (the capital structure), and corporate valuation.
This course examines and applies frameworks for understanding the contexts of team operation, management of team development, and the deploying of leadership behaviors that enable high performance in organizations. This course is designed to improve your effectiveness as both a contributor and a leader within organizational team settings.
Learning in this course is accomplished through engagement with assigned readings, reflective writing, case analysis, field research, and in-class activities.
This experiential learning-based course focuses on systems and design thinking in the context of projects that are designed and executed by fast-forming teams, which are typical of the modern tech business enterprise with respect to organizational change, business modeling, and strategy implementation.
Emphasis is placed on real-world business processes; project management and team dynamics studied through the context of open systems theory and design thinking. Topics covered include team formation, goal identification, ideation processes, storyboarding, sketching ideas, system design and client based systems mapping, and project execution.
This course considers the complexities of today’s fast-paced, global environment, as marketing remains at its core about creating exchanges. The key to facilitating exchanges and enhancing financial performance in the long term is customer satisfaction.
Composed of lectures, case discussions, breakout sessions, exercises, and guest speakers, this class provides an in-depth study of the principles and practices that help to facilitate these exchanges; as well as the orientation needed to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction. A focus is placed on techniques for collecting, analyzing and applying information toward marketing-related problems. Further attention is placed on how firms develop and leverage a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
This course uses integrative and multi-disciplinary approaches to discuss cutting edge strategic management knowledge. In the course, you will apply strategic management concepts and principles to real businesses. You will use different tools and frameworks to conduct industry-, corporate-, and business-level strategic analyses.
Since strategy is an integrative discipline, it is by design that some of the topics discussed in this class overlap with the materials you have learned in other classes. Such overlapping helps you integrate different knowledge and to improve your understanding of the subject.
Electives (16 units)
Complete 16 units in your choice of disciplinary coursework, with options in business analytics, entrepreneurship, finance, leadership, management, marketing, and sustainability.
Innovation Project (2 units)
The Innovation Project enables students to apply knowledge acquired and concepts covered in the MBA in order to forge new ideas, systems, structures, and outcomes in real world companies, organizations, and/or communities in the Bay Area and beyond.
Expected outcomes from participation in these projects include the ability of our students to analyze, structure, and present business problems to their clients. They should be able to develop and defend a fact-based set of recommendations rooted in solid analysis. They should also be able to communicate these solutions effectively.
Students will work either individually or in teams of no more than four.
Examples of projects could include:
MBA Magis Capstone (2 units)
Inspired by the Jesuit concept of Magis (discernment, generosity, wise choices, and service to a community), the MBA Magis culminates the MBA experience.
Students compete in a challenging cross-disciplinary business simulation, engage in structured reflection, interact with guest speakers, and jointly identify and perform a community service project.
Students complete and review the management exercises to discern how much they have accomplished and intend to accomplish and articulate what more they can do — in either small or grand ways — to unlock the potential of what already exists.