All The New MBA Courses At The Top U.S. B-Schools

Stanford Graduate School of Business

New Course: Neuroscience and the Connection to Sustained Excellence

Instructors: Baba Shiv and Gus Tai, Marketing

Sustained excellence requires not only deep passion and dedication but also the mental resiliency and vibrancy to deal with negative shocks and to discover and exploit potentially upside opportunities. Performing at one’s peak mental resiliency and vibrancy requires an understanding of how instinctual brain and body systems interact to create our mind, and more importantly, how to leverage this understanding to come up with tangible, low-hanging practices to (re)wire our mind and body for success. Adopting the format of a weeks-long retreat, the course offers students neuroscience-based frameworks and emerging technologies to learn and put into practice “biohacking” methods ranging from meditation and heart-rate variability to (thought and feeling) pattern-interrupts, leveraging a core principle in neuroscience, Use it or Lose it, to its corollary, Don’t Use it and Lose It.

New Course: Corporate Dilemmas

Instructor: Paul Brest

The neoliberal orthodoxy that corporate managers’ sole duty is to maximize shareholders’ financial value (“shareholder primacy”) has never been entirely adhered to in practice and has been increasingly challenged in recent decades. While acknowledging the importance of shareholder value, commentators have argued that corporations should purposively benefit other stakeholders, including customers, employees, and the communities they affect (“stakeholderism”). At the same time, there has been an upswing of investments aligned with investors’ social interests, including public equity investments in companies with high environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings and private equity “impact investments” that typically incur greater risks than pure risk-adjusted market rate investments. This course will consider a variety of legal, ethical, and policy issues related to corporations? purposes and responsibilities, including: the meanings and measures of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ESG criteria; disclosure of a company’s environmental and social harms or risks; when is it legally and ethically appropriate for corporate managers or institutional investors to compromise shareholder value in the pursuit of social, environmental and other non-pecuniary goals; constituency statutes and benefit corporations that reflect interests other than profit maximization; the power of investors to influence corporate behavior through affirmative investments, divestments and shareholder activism; the power of various stakeholder groups to influence corporate behavior; proposals for broadening the purpose of corporations; barriers to these various practices and proposals; and whether they can be accommodated within a neoliberal framework or require a new framework.

Harvard Business School

New Course: Entrepreneurship in the Life Sciences

Instructor: Satish Tadikonda

Life Sciences ventures face high levels of scientific, clinical and commercial pathway uncertainty, and these uncertainties present many opportunities for entrepreneurial innovation. This course is primarily designed for students who are interested in exploring entrepreneurial opportunities within the life sciences, including exploring ideation, generating and/or licensing intellectual property, business models, resourcing ventures with the appropriate financial and human resources, and scaling. The course will explore which areas of the life sciences are ripe for innovation and entrepreneurship. Example topics of exploration may include emerging opportunities in pharma & biotech, medical device & diagnostics advances, and related topics such as digital therapeutics, platform technologies, use of real-world evidence, data and computing, decentralized clinical trials, the role of life sciences incubators, contract research organizations etc.

Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management

New Course: Keeping it Real: Strategic Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector

Instructors: Liz Howard; Allison Henry

Nonprofit and Non-Governmental organizations strive to meet the most complex challenges of our time. Today, the sector is being profoundly impacted by the challenges of COVID 19, a global economic recession, as well as growing calls for diversity, equity and inclusion in the US and beyond. Leaders must use all of the management and leadership tools available to them to create strong vision and strategy, partner with volunteer directors, oversee diverse financial streams, and focus on growth and innovation to effectively create social impact in the short term and into the future. Kellogg graduates will find themselves engaged in the social impact sector in a variety of ways — senior professional staff members, board members, volunteers and donors. This course will help students better understand the skills and talents that are necessary to effectively lead nonprofits or NGOs regardless of their role. This course will engage students in case discussion and group dialogue, along with conversations with alumni and seasoned practitioners in the social impact space. Students will be exposed to theory along with practical examples of leadership and strategy all designed to illustrate successful business practices contributing to increased social impact and steps towards solutions of global issues. Designed for students with some level of experience in the nonprofit sector, this experiential course will enable future founders, CEOs/C-suite leaders and board members to better understand and practice the leadership skills necessary to make an impact in the nonprofit/NGO world.

New Course: FinTech and Society

Instructor: Gregor Matvos

Since the Great Recession, financial intermediation has undergone a dramatic change, with disruptive and lightly regulated technology entrants (FinTechs) competing with traditional banks in every aspect of their business, and even launching financial products that had not existed before. This course explores the opportunities and challenges at the intersection of finance, technology, and regulation, and assesses their impact on broader society.

We aim to develop an understanding of the broad landscape of FinTech, including the use of blockchain technology for cryptocurrencies and DeFi, as well as disruptive innovations in the areas of real estate, asset management, payments, and lending to businesses and households. The course aims to develop tools used to evaluate the profitability of FinTech opportunities from the perspective of the financial product markets, competition, regulation, and funding, and the role that technology plays in overcoming challenges faced by incumbents. We will also evaluate the role of FinTech in promoting financial inclusion – access to cheap and efficient financial services to the underbanked population, and its ability to alleviate or exacerbate the problem of discrimination in the financial sector. This approach will allow students to evaluate Fintech opportunities from the perspective of their own value system.

MIT Sloan School of Management

New Course: Creative Industries: Media, Entertainment, and the Arts

Instructor: Ben Shields, senior lecturer of managerial communication

Explores the market structure and dynamics of creative industries, which include but are not limited to music, television, movies, publishing, video games, performing arts, fine arts, and sports. Students will be exposed to both the creative and business sides of these industries. On the creative side, students will learn about the content development process and how managers can enable talent to collaborate and produce breakthrough creative concepts. On the business side, students will learn strategies to distribute content and consider decisions on media platforms, monetization, audience engagement, and measurement. A central theme throughout the course will be the impact of digital technologies on these industries and how audience behavior and business models are changing. Students’ work throughout the semester will come together in the Content Project, which will challenge them to create an original content idea and develop a distribution plan to reach, engage, and monetize an audience. This course is an ideal fit for students interested in pursuing careers in media, entertainment, and the arts. It would also be a good fit for students that will service these industries, such as consulting, finance, and data science. For students focused on other industries and/or functions, studying the development and monetization of creativity in the context of media, entertainment, and the arts can also offer fresh perspective on their work.

New Course: Pursuing Happiness and a Meaningful Life

Instructors: Robert Pozen, senior lecturer of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and Ssrategic management; Susan Neal, entrepreneur-in-residence, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship

This course will have two goals — to teach students about the multiple factors impacting their level of happiness, and to help them enhance their own happiness by changing their behaviors.  The first goal will be met by studying key research findings on what does and does not produce happiness.  The second goal will be met by a combination of self-assessment surveys, introspective weekly exercises, guest speakers on important topics and in-depth discussions of personal issues.  Every session of the course will have breakout groups to facilitate these discussions.

Columbia Business School

New Course: Climate Justice, Real Estate and Vulnerability

Instructor: Marco Tedesco

Climate Justice, Real Estate and Vulnerability provides resources and trains students on the economic impacts of climate change with an emphasis on real estate and social vulnerability. Investors in residential and commercial real estate, and those in infrastructure, are exposed to risks of flooding, droughts and forest fires as a consequence of the reverberations of climate change on environmental factors and weather. Such risks are higher for stakeholders with properties close to the coast or in regions where drought and forest fires are increasing (e.g., the Western U.S.) as well as for financial institutions that finance their purchases and hold their securities. Risks associated with sea level rise, flooding, inundation and other extreme events have generally not been properly assessed nor quantified and it is currently hard for investors to assess the risks that they now face, and will face in the future, from climate change. Since Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy this has been changing and the 2017’s hurricane and forest-fire seasons (with four major hurricanes landing over southeast U.S. and fires in northern California killing more than twenty people)have been catalyzing this change. As mentioned, the course will focus on two major aspects: 1) the impact of climate change real estate (sale prices, rental, market decision, implications for financial investors, affordable housing, and climate, to name a few examples) and 2) Climate and social justice and its relevance, dependency on and applications to the economic and financial sectors. Students will use the SEPHER dataset, developed at Lamont and focusing on socio-vulnerability of people exposed to climate change impacts, with emphasis on racial issues, economic wealth and phenomena such as climate gentrification, housing and real estate market. The students will be exposed to the dataset at the beginning of the course and will be taught how to visualize the data without any computer science knowledge. The dataset (SEPHER 2.0) contains integrated multiple publicly available datasets that include socio-economic, climate risk scores, evictions and housing variables at the census tract level over the United States.