Explores how organizations can use system dynamics to achieve important goals. Student teams work with client managers to tackle the clients' most pressing issues. Students discuss experiences with their clients, and learn modeling and consulting skills they need to be effective. Focus on gaining practical insight from the system dynamics process. Projects are sponsored by diverse organizations from a range of industries and sizes from start-ups to the Fortune 500.

Develops facility with concepts, language, and analytical tools of economics. Covers microeconomics, macroeconomics, and international trade and payments. Emphasizes integration of theory, data, and judgment in the analysis of corporate decisions and public policy, and in the assessment of changing US and international business environments. Restricted to Sloan Fellows. The fact of scarcity forces individuals, firms, and societies to choose among alternative uses -- or allocations -- of its limited resources. Accordingly, the first part of this summer course seeks to understand how economists model the choice process of individual consumers and firms, and how markets work to coordinate these choices. It also examines how well markets perform this function using the economist's criterion of market efficiency. Overall, this course focuses on microeconomics, with some topics from macroeconomics and international trade. It emphasizes the integration of theory, data, and judgment in the analysis of corporate decisions and public policy, and in the assessment of changing U.S. and international business environments.

While no businesses succeed based on their architecture or space design, many fail as a result of inattention to the power of spatial relationships. This course demonstrates through live case studies with managers and architects the value of strategic space planning and decision making in relation to business needs. The course presents conceptual frameworks for thinking about architecture, communication and organizations. This course is offered during the Sloan Innovation Period (SIP), which is a one-week period at the MIT Sloan School of Management that occurs midway through each semester.

Second course in a two-course sequence. Introduces and applies technical skills around beginning and managing a small business, including spreadsheets and the use of charts and graphs. Includes reflection and discussion of the application of concepts to a real-world example. Requires teamwork and collaboration to be exercised in completing a group project. Covers application of financial, legal, and administrative procedures in running a business.
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
Represent business models in spreadsheets including preparation of charts and graphs. Apply key business activities and the primary concepts and terms associated with these activities. Manage a business interacting with the external environment (through a simulation) and describe how this interaction impacts both business and the external environment. Implement the financial, legal, and administrative procedures involved in starting new business ventures. Identify ethical issues facing businesses. Effectively collaborate with team members and communicate professionally.

The key decision-making role of managers in modern organizations. Includes the study of organizations, management styles, and selected administrative problems. An overview of the processes involved in managing a business, including business planning, organizing, controlling, staffing and leading. Covers various theories of management with emphasis on managing a business in the local, national or international marketplace.

This course explores the basics of human resource management including selection and hiring, performance appraisal, compensation, staff planning and job analysis. This course also addresses current HR issues such as job search in a difficult economy, discrimination and harassment, workplace violence and on-the-job drug abuse.

Course Outcomes:
1. Upon completion of the course, students will have working knowledge of the role and human resources in the management of a business organization.
2. Students will understand the basic functions of human resource management and how the HR department interacts with the organization and with the individual employee.

This course focuses on the entrepreneurial phases associated with start-up and management of small business. This course will teach future entrepreneurs and managers to recognize opportunities and to use effective entrepreneurial and small business management practices.

Course Outcomes:
1. List and discuss the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs.
2. Analyze new business opportunities that exist in the marketplace.
3. Evaluate the feasibility of pursuing an opportunity that you’ve recognized.
4. Develop a business plan that includes both conceptual and technical components.
5. Identify and discuss obstacles to entrepreneurial success.
6. Identify the resources and financing necessary to start an entrepreneurial venture.
7. Discuss organizational characteristics and best management practices for start-up companies.

The course helps you identify information-bearing events, assess and improve process efficiency, learn to model and analyze business processes, recognize probabilistic components of business processes, and understand the interactions between human behavior and process design. Hands-on, case-based course work allows you to practice some of the principles addressed. You will demonstrate the ability to utilize business computer applications.
Course Outcomes:

Conceptualize business operations as processes.
1. Model simple business processes in terms of the actors and activity sequences involved, the data flowing through those sequences and the dependencies between data and business activities.
2. Recognize probabilistic components of business processes and assign distributions to these components.
3. Characterize business processes in terms of their key operations characteristics; e.g.,productivity, efficiency, service quality, sustainability, time and costs associated with waiting, material volume and service/product customization.
4. Formulate improvements to observed processes and estimate the effects of these improvements with the help of simulation.
5. Identify the role of information systems in business processes; e.g., recognize and specify where information technology can be applied; recognize the role of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.
6. Recognize the interdependence of business processes within and across organizational boundaries.

An intensive one-week introduction to leadership, teams, and learning communities. Introduction of concepts and use of a variety of experiential exercises to develop individual and team skills and develop supportive relationships within the Fellows class.

Uses a case approach to develop a framework for business analysis. Provides students with tools for business analysis, including strategic, accounting, financial, and prospective analysis. Concepts are then applied to a number of decision-making contexts, such as credit analysis, investor communications, merger analysis, financial policy decisions, and securities analysis. From the Course Description: Course Description The purpose of this class is to advance your understanding of how to use financial information to value and analyze firms. We will apply your economics/accounting/finance skills to problems from today's business news to help us understand what is contained in financial reports, why firms report certain information, and how to be a sophisticated user of this information.

This course provides an introduction to applied concepts in Calculus that are relevant to the managerial, life, and social sciences. Students should have a firm grasp of the concept of functions to succeed in this course. Topics covered include derivatives of basic functions and how they can be used to optimize quantities such as profit and revenues, as well as integrals of basic functions and how they can be used to describe the total change in a quantity over time.

Carrier systems involve the design, operation, and management of transportation networks, assets, personnel, freight, and passengers. A number of different carrier systems are contrasted while models and tools for analyzing, optimizing, planning, managing, and controlling these systems are presented.

How do individuals and families interface with larger systems, and how do therapists intervene collaboratively? How do larger systems structure the lives of individuals and families? Relationally-trained practitioners are attempting to answer these questions through collaborative and interdisciplinary, team-focused projects in mental health, education, the law, and business, among other fields. Similarly, scholars and researchers are developing specific culturally responsive models: outreach family therapy, collaborative health care, multi-systemic school interventions, social-justice-oriented and spiritual approaches, organizational coaching, and consulting, among others. This course explores these developments and aims at developing a clinical and consulting knowledge that contributes to families, organizations, and communities within a collaborative and social-justice-oriented vision.

Introduces students to the basic tools in using data to make informed management decisions. Covers introductory probability, decision analysis, basic statistics, regression, simulation, and linear and nonlinear optimization. Computer spreadsheet exercises and examples drawn from marketing, finance, operations management, and other management functions. Restricted to Sloan Fellows.

Seminar focuses on the communication skills needed for a career in academia. Topics include writing for academic journals, preparing and delivering conference papers and job talks, peer reviewing for journals and conferences, and teaching. Participants are expected to work on a written project and deliver an oral presentation based on their current research. Restricted to doctoral students who have completed their first year. Your success as an academic will depend heavily on your ability to communicate to fellow researchers in your discipline, to colleagues in your department and university, to undergraduate and graduate students, and perhaps even to the public at large. Communicating well in an academic setting depends not only on following the basic rules that govern all good communication (for example, tailoring the message to meet the needs of a specific audience), but also on adhering to the particular norms of academic genres. The purpose of this course, then, is threefold. First, the course will acquaint you with guidelines that will help you create well-crafted academic communication. Second, it will give you the opportunity to practice your communication skills and to receive extensive feedback from your colleagues and from me. You will write and/or revise an article manuscript or conference paper, present a conference paper or job talk, write a manuscript peer review, and engage in various other communication exercises. The article and talk, which are the major assignments of the course, will be based on material from your own doctoral studies. Third, the course will provide an opportunity for you to learn about professional norms for a range of activities that surround the academic enterprise, including, for example, the scholarly publication process and the job search process.

Competition in Telecommunications provides an introduction to the economics, business strategies, and technology of telecommunications markets, including markets for wireless communications, local and long-distance services, and customer equipment. The convergence of computers, cable TV and telecommunications and the competitive emergence of the Internet are covered in depth. A number of speakers from leading companies in the industry will give course lectures.

This course aims to develop negotiation skills by active participation in a variety of negotiation settings, and a series of integrative bargaining cases between two and more than two parties over multiple issues. Ethical dilemmas in negotiation are discussed at various times throughout the course.

Opportunity for group study by graduate students on current topics related to management not otherwise included in curriculum.

The subject of this course is the historical process by which the meaning of "technology" has been constructed. Although the word itself is traceable to the ancient Greek root teckhne (meaning art), it did not enter the English language until the 17th century, and did not acquire its current meaning until after World War I. The aim of the course, then, is to explore various sectors of industrializing 19th and 20th century Western society and culture with a view to explaining and assessing the emergence of technology as a pivotal word (and concept) in contemporary (especially Anglo-American) thought and expression.

Introduces students to a class of methods known as data mining that assists managers in recognizing patterns and making intelligent use of massive amounts of electronic data collected via the internet, e-commerce, electronic banking, point-of-sale devices, bar-code readers, and intelligent machines. Topics covered: subset selection in regression, collaborative filtering, tree-structured classification and regression, cluster analysis, and neural network methods. Examples of successful applications in areas such as credit ratings, fraud detection, database marketing, customer relationship management, and investments and logistics are covered. Hands-on experimentation with data-mining software is used. Data that has relevance for managerial decisions is accumulating at an incredible rate due to a host of technological advances. Electronic data capture has become inexpensive and ubiquitous as a by-product of innovations such as the internet, e-commerce, electronic banking, point-of-sale devices, bar-code readers, and intelligent machines. Such data is often stored in data warehouses and data marts specifically intended for management decision support. Data mining is a rapidly growing field that is concerned with developing techniques to assist managers to make intelligent use of these repositories. A number of successful applications have been reported in areas such as credit rating, fraud detection, database marketing, customer relationship management, and stock market investments. The field of data mining has evolved from the disciplines of statistics and artificial intelligence. This course will examine methods that have emerged from both fields and proven to be of value in recognizing patterns and making predictions from an applications perspective. We will survey applications and provide an opportunity for hands-on experimentation with algorithms for data mining using easy-to- use software and cases.