The Core
Through the powerful, shared experience of the first-semester Core, students build the foundation of their MIT Sloan education. Students gain fundamental skills through required coursework in economics, accounting, leadership communication, business statistics, and organizational processes. Students may also choose one elective from the following list: marketing management, finance, operations management, or competitive strategy. Teamwork is an integral part of the Core experience. Students are assigned to cohorts and work closely within diverse teams of 6-7 classmates.
The MBA Core curriculum consists of the following five required courses:
Economic Analysis for Business Decisions
Introduces students to the principles of microeconomic analysis used in managerial decision making. Topics include demand analysis, cost and production functions, the behavior of competitive and noncompetitive markets, sources and uses of market power, and game theory and competitive strategy, with applications to various business and public policy decisions. Antitrust policy and other government regulations also are discussed.
Data, Models, and Decisions
Introduces students to the basic tools in using data to make informed management decisions. Covers introductory probability, decision analysis, basic statistics, regression, simulation, linear and nonlinear optimization, and discrete optimization. Computer spreadsheet exercises, cases, and examples are drawn from marketing, finance, operations management, and other management functions.
Communication for Leaders
Focuses on the writing and speaking skills necessary for a career in management. Students polish communication strategies and methods through discussion, examples, and practice. Several written and oral assignments, most based on material from other subjects and from career development activities. Schedule and curriculum coordinated with Organizational Processes class.
Leadership and Personal Effectiveness Coaching acts as a lab component to Communication for Leaders, and provides students additional opportunities to hone their communication skills through a variety of in-class exercises. Emphasis is on both individual and team communication.
Organizational Processes
Designed to enhance students’ ability to take effective action in complex organizational settings by providing the analytic tools needed to analyze, manage, and lead the organizations of the future. Emphasis is on the importance of the organizational context in influencing which individual styles and skills are effective. Employs a wide variety of learning tools, from experiential learning to the more conventional discussion of written cases. Subject centers on three complementary perspectives on organizations: the strategic design, political, and cultural “lenses” of organizations. This course culminates in a team project around current topics related to organization studies.
Financial Accounting
An intensive introduction to the preparation and interpretation of financial information. Adopts a decision-maker perspective of accounting by emphasizing the relationship between accounting data and the underlying economic events generating them. Class sessions are a mixture of lectures and case discussion. Assignments include textbook problems, analysis of financial statements, and cases.
Students may also choose one of the following electives:
Finance Theory I (elective)
Core theory of modern financial economics and financial management, concentrating on capital markets and investments. Required prerequisite for most finance electives and for the Financial Management and Financial Engineering tracks. Topics: functions of capital markets and financial intermediaries; fixed income investments; diversification and portfolio selection; valuation theory and equilibrium pricing of risky assets; the theory of efficient markets; and an introduction to derivatives.
Intro to Operations Management (elective)
In depth introduction to the fundamental concepts and techniques related to the design, planning, control, and improvement of manufacturing and service operations. Covers a broad range of applications and industries such as high-tech, financial services, insurance, automotive, health care, fashion, and more. Emphasizes the role of uncertainty in operational decision making, which is a key aspect of almost any management position. Useful to anyone considering job opportunities in operations and related activities. Topics covered include process description, flow diagrams, capacity analysis, capacity ROI, cycle time analysis, inventory management, delayed postponement, production control, work coordination, risk pooling, quality management, process design, and reengineering.
Marketing Management (elective)
A first year MBA Course that introduces students to both the “art” and “science” of marketing. It is targeted to those who want to develop a strong foundation of marketing tools and concepts that will be useful in their career. The focus is on the core themes of how to best satisfy the needs of your customers. We will discuss tactics of the marketing mix (product strategy, pricing, promotion and placement- the four Ps) as well as related topics such as research, targeting, segmentation, and branding.
Competitive Strategy (elective)
This course introduces a wide variety of modern strategy frameworks and methodologies in order to help you develop the skills needed to be a successful manager with responsibility for the performance of a firm or business unit within a firm. We use cases and readings to explore a wide range of strategic problems, focusing particularly on the sources of competitive advantage and the interaction between industry structure and organizational capabilities.
“At MIT Sloan you have a lot of opportunities to explore entrepreneurship. Especially in a place like Kampala where you have a lot of development, entrepreneurship can be very exciting.”
“I came to Sloan because of its high rankings within the sustainability community, specifically the professors. The S-Lab class itself is part of what drew me to Sloan. And the reason I came to business school was to learn the business speak that really is what connects with people."
“I love being in a place that is such a nexus of people and ideas — people coming to learn something new and to define themselves. Being a part of that process is a real honor and a real gift.”
"After we gave our recommendations, the great part was that the very next day the CEO was in the boardroom implementing them with his top vice presidents."
“Because of the diversity of our backgrounds, when we hit the ground in Tanzania it almost was a natural play where different people assume different roles.”
“One of the reasons I came to Sloan was because I wanted to be at a top MBA institution worldwide. But I also wanted access to working with the latest innovations and the highest technology that was coming out of the MIT labs.”
“These companies are really excited to work with MIT students.They reach out to the community to set up these projects and are great to work with. They give us access to all their resources and are very open to us.”
“We’re very interdisciplinary. Among the faculty in the group are an economist, a political scientist, a sociologist, and an industrial relations specialist. We’ve always made a big effort to be open to a variety of perspectives, but also to go beyond being open to them, to want to bring them in, because it makes for a richer environment.”
“I knew about American business, but not enough about what’s really become a global economy. … You can read about it all you want, but there’s no substitute for being there and seeing the context and seeing how completely different these [other countries] are.”
“The concept behind enterprise architecture is that you have all these machines, you have all these business processes, you have all these people doing things, how do you make sure they all come together and achieve business objectives that make you more competitive.”
“The conditions in the neighborhoods we were visiting were different than what we realized before getting there. Beyond that, what was surprising was that there weren’t surprises!”
“Our mission, along with the mission of MIT Sloan, is to both develop leaders who make a difference in the world, and also to make a contribution to thinking about the topic of leadership.”
“The assistant to the CEO was like our host mom while we were there. She arranged our housing for us, she took us out to her friend’s game farm, and we got driven around in 4x4s. She was just wonderful to meet, and we developed a personal as well as professional relationship with her.”
“It was really rewarding that they wanted to know what we thought. We left there being fairly certain that they will do some of the things that we suggested.”
“Technology interests me because it is the mechanism by which we can improve our lives. It also can have unintended consequences, which is why it is important to study its adoption and diffusion through the market.”
