Executive Education

Description
In today's market, if you oversee R&D, product innovation, or technological implementation, you also deal with financial issues. As a technical executive, you must be able to use finance to persuade corporate financial officers to fund your projects, and you must be able to use financial tools to address senior management's concerns about risk. Applying basic principles of finance and accounting to your day-to-day and longer-term management activities will transform your ability to achieve your goals.

Fundamentals of Finance for the Technical Executive is designed to take the mystery out of finance. This interactive, hands-on program will teach you how funding decisions are made and how you can influence those decisions by applying financial principles to project evaluation and resource allocation. You will learn to assess projects for their potential economic value and to do discounted cash flow (DCF) valuations.

Using case studies and analytical exercises, MIT Sloan finance faculty teach this program to provide practical solutions to the financial problems you face every day.

Fundamentals of Finance for the Technical Executive covers three basic challenges:

1. Understanding Basic Concepts of Finance.
   Pivotal information about financial theory and the application of theory to real business decisions.
2. Acquiring New Project Funds.
   How the company raises external funds, the basics of capital structure, and issues facing corporate finance.
3. Evaluating Projects and Allocating Resources: How to Spend Money Effectively.
   Key methods of investment evaluation and the practical implications of cost of capital, cash flow, and net present value.

The Participants
Fundamentals of Finance for the Technical Executive has been especially designed for executives who manage project teams and departments, and technical professionals involved with R&D, product and software design, engineering, and other scientific and technical work. Past participants have included key members of technical management such as CIOs, chief technologists, head scientists, R&D and product development directors, engineering and manufacturing vice presidents, corporate strategists, project managers, and systems information managers. No advanced quantitative skills are required, but participants should bring calculators.

Faculty
Paul Asquith is the Gordon Y Billard Chair in Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he has been on the faculty for fifteen years. He served for two of those years as Senior Associate Dean. He teaches in the Finance and Accounting areas, most recently a second year MBA elective on new security design.

Nittai Bergman is Assistant Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has been teaching MBA Corporate Finance since joining MIT Sloan's faculty in 2003. Professor Bergman's research interests are in the fields of international corporate governance and behavioral corporate finance.

Dirk Jenter is Assistant Professor of Finance at Stanford University. Formerly, he was Assistant Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he taught Corporate Finance in the MBA program. His research focuses primarily on firm capital structure decisions and option and stock compensation for executives and other employees.

Antoinette Schoar, Michael Koerner '49 Career Development Associate Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is an expert in corporate finance, entrepreneurship, and organizational economics. She researches venture capital, entrepreneurial finance, corporate diversification, and governance and capital budgeting decisions in firms.