Courses

• GSM OM 854: Supply Chain Management
  This course presents tools and modeling frameworks that are relevant to solving today's supply-chain problems. The class will offer a mixture of case discussions, lectures, games, and outside speakers. Case discussions will cover subjects including designing new-product supply chains, optimizing inventory levels, quick response, the role of b2b exchanges, and managing capacity for short life-cycle products. Lectures will provide the theoretical foundation for the course. Although the course does not focus extensively on mathematics, enough detail will be provided so that students can apply the material in practice. Games including the distribution game, the OPT game, and the Beer Game will reinforce the concepts in a constructive way. Finally, outside speakers from a number of companies will present real-world examples of how supply-chain models are being deployed in practice. This course has been designed for students who will be working in consulting or supply-chain management after graduation. Additionally, for students interested in finance or marketing, the course provides solid exposure to an area that is integral to any product-focused company.
• GSM OM 855: Project Management
  Projects are increasingly the way that work gets done in companies of all types and sizes. In this new course you will learn the strategic dimensions of project management, including critical aspects of project selection, definition, planning, execution, and monitoring. Concepts and approaches for dealing with complexity, uncertainty, vague mandates, temporary staff, partners, stakeholders, dynamic risk, and time-critical deadlines are emphasized. Cases and readings cover a wide range of industry and organizational contexts. This course requires that students apply these topics and considerations to a real project of their choice either by analysis of publicly available information or direct field study. Many MBAs are tested on the job through tough assignments in project settings. Your performance there is highly visible. Doing especially well can accelerate your subsequent career opportunities. Prepare now for success in strategic project management by developing the skills and perspectives covered in OM855!
• GSM OM 865: Idea Lab
  This is an experiential course aimed at developing ideas for digital products and services ("web services"), within the context of a multi-stage "innovation tournament." The tournament structure will force the "screening" of certain ideas in the initial stages, and in such cases, some students will get reassigned to the surviving ideas . Participants will learn specific tools, methods, and concepts related to the creation of such services (e.g., opportunity sensing, management of variation, innovation/business analytics, crowd sourcing vs out sourcing decisions, existing versus incremental enabling technologies, idea interdependence and information architecture, task sequencing for enhancing cycle time and service quality) and will be required to develop web based test tools. For the next offering, the class will be divided into two sub-tournaments. The first tournament will focus on "Healthcare," and the second on the "SMART Cities and Energy" sector. Students who wish to start their own digital businesses in these sectors, either full time or part time, are strongly encouraged to take this course. The instructor anticipates that the best performing ideas will have high potential for entrepreneurial development. Thus, this course can serve as a front end to conduct follow on development by working either in the IS, operations, health sector management, energy or entrepreneurship concentration courses, and/or by working with affinity groups in the BU community, such as, ITEC.
• GSM OM 880: Product Design and Development
  This course explores central managerial challenges in the effective design, development, and introduction of new products. Topics covered include reducing the time to market while meeting cost and quality targets; managing cross-functional projects and inherent technological risks while keeping a focus on customer requirements; and integrated problem-solving by industrial designers, engineers, manufactures, and marketing specialists. [Case studies, readings, guest lecturers, field project]
• GSM PL 700: Introduction to Business Law
  This course will survey contemporary issues in selected areas of law and ethics. We will introduce pivotal areas of law, so that students begin to anticipate legal problems, analyze how to avoid them, and realize how legal principles can be employed to add value in their chosen fields. The subjects are torts, contracts, employment law, securities regulation and corporate governance. We expect that this overview of a few disciplines will encourage students to explore other legal topics relevant to their business interests. We will also offer an analytic structure that enables students to identify ethical issues in business, analyze options and make choices consistent with their own values.
• GSM PL 727: Organizations, Markets, and Society
  Understanding and analyzing the core strategic decisions facing businesses in competitive markets. Students will examine how businesses achieve their fundamental goals given the need to produce goods and services efficiently and a market environment reflecting consumer preferences (demand) and the strategies and strengths of competitors. Students will develop analytic skills necessary for understanding core business models and how different models create value for the business as well as the larger society.
• GSM PL 837: Strategic Fundraising and Corporate Philanthropy
  This course is designed for future civic, business and nonprofit leaders who will be in the position of raising funds or giving away funds for charitable purposes at some point in their career. Whether for your child?s school, the local little league or symphony, or a cause you care deeply about, you will want to know the fundamentals of raising or giving away money. This course explores the topic of strategic fundraising and philanthropy in three modules. The first explores the history, trends and current topics in philanthropy using case studies and current events. The second module provides students with specific tools and lessons in strategic fundraising and gives students an opportunity to apply these skills within a nonprofit of their choice. Finally the course examines how corporations can use their philanthropic efforts to further the strategy and goals of the business.
• GSM PL 845: Improving Your Decisions
  The main aim of ?Improving Your Decisions? is to present many of the decision problems managers face and to identify the most effective ways to make sound decisions -- as well as the pitfalls, biases, and mistakes that should be avoided. A key element of the course is to present students with a series of decision challenges: What would you do? In other words, you must come to grips with actual decisions and defend your actions. The assigned readings also convey the most recent research findings in behavioral economics: how individuals and managers actually make decisions. The second half of the course centers on group decision making: how groups with common and not-so-common interests decide. A key topic here is the art and science of negotiation, thereby shifting the focus of attention from individual choices to competitive decisions. Again, students are challenged to test their group decision making skills and strategies in a series of simulations and face-to-face negotiations.
• GSM PL 849: Global Sustainability
  Global Sustainability explores the underpinnings of today?s global sustainability challenges and how entrepreneurial thinking can be applied to government, NGOs, multinational corporations, small startups and the capital markets to address these challenges. Though lecture, case discussion, computer simulation and a unique guest speaker program, students will gain deeper understanding of both root cause, the interconnected and interdependencies across sectors such as energy, the environment and the global food and water supplies along with entrepreneurial thinking, methods, models and practices being employed by innovative individuals and organizations at the forefront in the search for solutions.
• GSM PL 850: Social Entrepreneurship
  The Social Entrepreneurship course is designed to: (1) explore the concepts, practices, opportunities, and challenges of social entrepreneurship; (2) provide frameworks and tools that will help students be more effective in this sector; and (3) provide an opportunity for students to create a business plan for an earned income venture of a nonprofit organization or a new social enterprise. In the business plan project, student teams will partner with external organizations. Students will identify and analyze opportunities, resources, and risks and apply skills from marketing, accounting, organizational behavior, strategy and other disciplines. Special emphasis will be placed on aspects of business planning and organizational strategy that are particularly challenging or distinctive in the social sector, including mission definition, leadership, organizational structure, raising capital, and measuring results.
• GSM PL 853: Improving Business Decisions with Statistical and Optimization Modeling
  This course will improve students' ability to formulate and analyze a wide range of models that can aid in managerial decision-making. Students will use regression models to analyze data and interpret statistical information about the relationships between variables. The course will illustrate how regression analysis can be used for a variety of business applications including asset pricing, predictive analytics, forecasting, and demand estimation. It will then cover unconstrained and constrained optimization, illustrating how these types of models are used for applications including price setting, operations management and portfolio optimization. The class will be highly participatory and hands-on, alternating lecture with collaborative data analysis and problem-solving. Students will build upon knowledge acquired in QM716 and modeling will be performed in Microsoft Excel.
• GSM PL 861: Emerging Issues in Business and Law
  You ask your outside lawyer or your company's legal department whether you can undertake some activity without violating the law. You are annoyed when you are told "Well, maybe. It depends". You want a yes-or-no answer, not a game of twenty questions. Why can't your lawyers give you a straight answer? Why do they make everything more complicated? What language are they speaking? Most business people ask these questions. If you do business you cannot avoid dealing with lawyers. You can allow your interactions with lawyers to frustrate you, or you can learn how lawyers think so that you can better manage them. Emerging Issues in Business Law introduces graduate business students to fundamentals of legal analysis by focusing on timely legal problems of particular interest to business. Students develop familiarity with substantive legal principles and leave the course with the ability to recognize legal issues, discuss them intelligently, and understand why the lawyers seem incapable of giving a simple answer. The course uses lectures to provide a common foundation of knowledge. It is primarily discussion based, using a question and answer format to engage students in the process of legal analysis.
• GSM PL 862: Applied Ethics
  The goal of this course is to help each student develop a methodology for leading an ethical life. Each of the cases focuses on an individual faced with an issue that challenges his/her principles. Students will also explore the kinds of situations that are likely to lead to unethical decisions.
• GSM PL 864: Managing Political, Economic, Social, and Technology and Country Risk
  This case-based course introduces students to conceptual tools and frameworks that allow them to think systematically about environmental changes that restructure companies, industries, and countries, preparing them to deal with those changes. The course explores political, economic, technological, and social change, as well as natural disasters and political risk. Students will map the flow of events and experiences that shape political or business leaders' attitudes and will be introduced to the analyses of countries, systems, trends, stakeholders, scenario developments, cross-impact, and payoff assessments. They will assess probable shifts in stakeholder power within the industry or country and suggest potentially successful leadership and change strategies.
• GSM PL 870: Government, Society and Sustainable Development
  Government, Society and Sustainable Development is a broad and far-reaching course in scope and topics. After an introduction to the concepts of the limits-to-growth and global sustainability challenges resulting from population growth, resource scarcity, environmental degradation and climate change students dive deep into the cultural, societal and economic development issues of globalization, study the implications of globalization on the current social and economic development of nations/regions/industries and explore new development models (for-profit and non-profit entrepreneurship) for sustainable development at the international, national, and sub-national levels. The Course has three major themes: ? The first major theme of the course is a series of country cases that explore the cultural, social, political and economic context in which business enterprise has historically been conducted. ? The second major theme of the course overlays the international institutions that emerged from Bretton Woods; the UN, GATT/WTO, the World Bank and the IMF, (the emerging World Environmental Organization, WEO) onto the country cases and explores emerging topics of international Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and International Environmental Protection (IEP). ? The third major theme of the course explores the emergence of new models of sustainable development; contrasting bottoms-ups collective action and entrepreneurship against classic aid-based models as a force for change and driver of sustainable development.
• GSM PL 882: Public Policy Analysis
  This course explores the economics of the public sector and the impact government policy and programs have on society and business. The course provides students with tools to systematically examine the financing and measure the impact of government policies and regulations. It explores the rationale for government intervention, appropriate levels of intervention and how to measure the effectiveness of policies and regulations. This course is helpful to those who desire a deeper understanding of the central role government plays in the economy and how government impacts the business and nonprofit sectors.
• GSM QM 716: Business Analytics: Data Analysis and Risk
  The overall goal of this course is to improve student ability to learn from data, specifically to 1) assess the validity of conclusions that have been drawn from statistical analyses; 2) recognize the extent to which variation characterizes products and processes, and understand the implications of variation on organizational decisions when interpreting data; and 3) portray, summarize and analyze data to support operational and strategic decisions associated with the core business models. Students will increase their understanding of the use of probabilities to reflect uncertainty; how to interpret data in light of uncertainty to assess risk; and how to build and interpret regression models, which can be used to inform core business and organizational decisions.
• GSM QM 717: Data Analysis for Managerial Decision-Making
  Managers deal with a large amount of information in quantitative form. Effective managers must understand the conditions under which quantitative techniques may be appropriately applied for decision-making. In this course, students develop skills in using the computer to examine and report data. The focus is on deriving meaning from particular data sets, and the use of statistical estimation, hypothesis testing, and regression/correlation analysis in decision-making.
• GSM QM 880: Business Analytics: Spreadsheet Optimization and Simulation
  The modeling process illustrated throughout the course will significantly improve students? abilities to structure complex problems and derive insights about the value of alternatives. You will develop the skills to formulate and analyze a wide range of models that can aid in managerial decision-making in the functional areas of business. These areas include finance (capital budgeting, cash planning, portfolio optimization, valuing options, hedging investments), marketing (pricing, sales force allocation, planning advertising budgets) and operations (production planning, workforce scheduling, facility location, project management). The course will be taught almost entirely by example, using problems from the main functional areas of business. This course is not for people who want a general introduction to or review of Excel. This course is for students who are already comfortable using Excel and would like to use it to create optimization and simulation models.
• GSM SI 750: Competition, Innovation, and Strategy
  "Competition, Innovation, and Strategy" is an integrative course designed to capitalize on your understanding of Finance, Operations Management, Marketing, and other functional issues. The course draws on a number of academic disciplines, especially economics, organization theory, and sociology, to build a fundamental understanding of how and why some firms achieve and sustain superior performance. We also study why some firms persistently generate returns that are lower than average. The course is analytically focused and requires that you evaluate both the external environment and the internal capabilities of organizations. Corporate diversification and global management are important topics that are also featured.

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