MBA Elective Courses
Accounting and Control
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Corporate Governance
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Corporate governance is the set of control mechanisms to enable achievement of organizational objectives and dissuade potentially self-interested managers from activities detrimental to the welfare of owners and stakeholders. Good corporate governance is therefore a key element of corporations’ desire to create value. Time and again corporate governance has been on the forefront of public and political debate. While many critics argue the ineffectiveness of current corporate governance practices, due to factors such as dispersed ownership, detrimental activism by active investors, management entrenchment and short termism, or narrowly focused corporate objectives; there is also an absence of fundamental frameworks in this discourse to understand effective corporate governance and evidence-based logics that can inform best practices. In this course, we introduce these frameworks and provide evidence-based best practices that can be implemented across all types of organizations, operating in all types of institutional settings.
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Financial Statement Analysis
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The objective of Financial Statement Analysis is to provide you with the ability to use financial statements to evaluate value creation. Creating value is the objective of every business. Financial statements are the primary source of information about business performance. Hence, if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, executive, director, etc., you need to know how to use financial statements to assess business performance and link your assessment to value. This course teaches you how to do that. In particular, we develop a framework that links financial statements to value. This framework has two important features. First, it is intuitive, so it is easy to understand, remember, use and explain to others. Second, it is rigorous; hence, when applied correctly, it leads to good decisions.
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Strategic Cost Management & Control
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This course builds on material covered in the Managerial Accounting course (‘mechanics … and conceptual thinking’) by bringing into focus the practice of management accounting. It looks at the information typically provided by companies and the way it is used by executives. Both are flawed, resulting in ‘unforced errors’. The problem facing MBAs is that companies and executives are unaware of this, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. The course identifies the ‘red flags’ that indicate things are wrong and the questions to ask to get the right information. The elective is not for those who are certain that they would not make such ‘unforced errors’.
Elective Offerings
To see some sample descriptions of elective courses, click on the academic area below.