MBA Courses for Fall 15

Are you still working on that perfect Fall 15 schedule?

The MBA courses listed below are two-credit courses that offer an opportunity to expand your horizons and apply key elements of the business school curriculum to a variety of problems and situations. MBA students may include up to three of these courses in their elective options.

Students in the MSA, MS in MIS, MSF, and MSBA programs are encouraged to broaden their curricula with these courses, as their programs allow. Check out the array of offerings available to Liautaud students. If you have any questions regarding course content or registration, please feel free to contact us.

MBA 500 Corporate Strategy – Instructor:  Mark Shanley

Scheduled: Tuesday, 8/24 – 10/16, 6 – 8:30 p.m.

Analysis of major strategic decisions affecting the long-term performance of a firm and its ability to sustain competitive advantage.

MBA 570 Enterprise Strategy – Instructor: Mark Shanley

Scheduled: Tuesday, 10/19 – 12/4, 6 – 8:30 p.m.

A new course for students in the final semester of the MBA program; will become a required course for all students enrolling in Fall 2015. Provides content and framework to integrate prior course work to address business problems from a cross-functional and enterprise perspective. Creates an opportunity for students completing the MBA program concentrating in varied functional areas to apply their program-based knowledge and skills to address real business problems in an integrative and cross-functional context.

MBA 590 Offerings

Leaders Driving Social Impact – Instructor: Anna Lloyd

Scheduled:  Thursday, 8/24–10/16, 6–8:30 p.m.

Social Enterprises are mission-driven organizations, for-profit and not-for-profit, which apply market-based strategies to achieve a social purpose. Our primary aim is to accomplish targets that are social and/or environmental as well as financial, often referred to as “the triple bottom line”. Social enterprises successfully reduce dependence on charitable donations and grants and utilize the business itself to serve as a vehicle for social change. As business leaders, social entrepreneurs want to improve the common good and solve a social problem in a new, more lasting, and effective way than traditional approaches.

Join us this Fall, Semester A, as we utilize Jim Collins’ early research on metrics for the social sector and the national Social Enterprise Alliance’s (SEA) tools in marketing, investment, and creating your entrepreneurial team to launch. 

Managing Enterprise Data & Analytics – Instructor: Kyle Cheek

Scheduled: Tuesday, 10/19–12/4, 6–8:30 p.m.

Enterprises are increasingly turning their attention from the capture and maintenance of business data to a focus on very sophisticated analysis of that data. This shift is motivated by a belief that the vast quantities of data created through the transactional, operational, web, and other sources contain valuable insights into customer behavior, market trends, and new operational efficiencies. This course will provide a survey of the emerging practice of business analytics, covering topics including business data, its sources, its potential, and its challenges; a comparative view of analytic practices and maturity across industries; and critical considerations in the management of analytics within a business.

Applied Consulting – Instructor: Jim Treleaven, Enrollment, by consent of instructor

Scheduled: Wednesday, 10/19–12/4, 6–8:30 p.m.

The Applied Consulting course is an introduction to the client-consultant engagement process typically used by consulting and professional services firms. Students who aspire to go into the consulting industry will particularly benefit from this course, as will those who intend to serve as an internal consultant or operations analyst within any public or private sector organization.  However, since most public and private sector management personnel end up working on projects for their organizations at some time in their careers, this course will be of interest to all MBA students.

The class will be conducted as a guided workshop for students to work in a professional consulting role to address a real-life client problem as a case study. Each student will work in a team with some other students (depending on the number of students enrolled) working as consultants to create, manage and execute a client engagement that addresses their problem. Each week, each team will work on producing some interim deliverable, such as they would to a real client. Each team will then produce a final project report with recommendations, which they will present during the last class.

Project Management – Instructor: John Fyfe, Enrollment, by consent of instructor

Scheduled: Monday, 8/24–10/16, 6–9 p.m.

The project management discipline is a twenty-first-century core business process because it enables profit generation by maintaining tight controls on expenditures with a proactive view of project events, allowing organizations to manage initiatives with predictable outcomes, in terms of costs, time, and other resources.

This course provides an introduction to the project management discipline, and specifically to the concepts inherent in the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification process.  The course focuses on real-world cases to build the foundational skills for students to be able to participate effectively in projects and ultimately manage them.

Web Analytics – Instructor: Doug Lindquist

Scheduled: Wednesday, 8/24–10/16, 6–8:30 p.m.
Modern firms rely heavily on the Internet to promote their products. Their own websites are especially important since visitors can reveal their interests by their browsing behavior. Web analytics gathers and processes this information to learn more about their customers. This analysis allows assessing a website’s effectiveness along with metrics like web traffic and how long customers spend at pages. Web analytics offers a source of competitive advantage for both gaining new customers and keeping existing ones. This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of web analytics. Students will learn to use Google’s online and offline software tools. The course will emphasize how these tools help inform marketing decisions. Course topics include:

·         Key concepts and terms and their usage

·         Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and their importance

·         Visitor behavior analysis

·         Developing and aligning KPIs with strategic objectives

Business Data for Decision Making – Instructor: Murad Gharibeh

Scheduled: Wednesday, 10/19–12/4, 6–8:30 p.m.
The tools of statistics and data analysis are increasingly more important for business managers, and this course is designed to provide those who have not previously studied in these areas with tools that they will need both for their MBA studies and in addressing analytical challenges in their work. The course covers basic tools of statistics: distributions and relationships, probability and sampling distributions, hypothesis testing, regression, etc. in working with data analysis, covers collecting and organizing data, sort the distractions from the truth, find meaningful patterns, draw conclusions and predict the future, and present findings.

Improv & Leadership – Instructor: Michael Popowits

Scheduled: Section 1: Monday, 8/24–10/16, Section 2: Monday, 10/19–12/4, 6–8:30 p.m.

Using improvisational theater techniques taught in the workshop exercises of graduating difficulty, this course creates a safe laboratory for students to experiment with the elements of their own executive presence. This is a “presentations course” where students study how to present themselves in a variety of executive communication modes: networking, interviewing, creative team leadership, and impromptu speaking situations, like client interactions or expert panel discussions.

The course is taught by Michael Popowits, a 20-year faculty member of the UIC College of Business Administration, and an executive communications coach who worked with executives in dozens of industries in the US, Europe, and Asia. Professor Popowits has also studied the art of improvisation for years and currently teaches weekend classes and directs student ensembles at the Second City Theater in Chicago.

Creating Careers That Count – Instructor: Dave Kreischer

Scheduled: Tuesday, 8/24–10/16 and 10/19–12/4, 3:30–6 p.m.
In a highly dynamic, well-educated, and globally competitive marketplace, relevance has replaced loyalty as a basis for relationships—which includes the contract between employee and employer. Since the marketplace dictates what is relevant, you are free to create a career that really counts for you as long as it counts for the marketplace. This eight-week course will explore the three steps to creating a career that counts for you and for the marketplace:

·         Defining your difference-making strategy

·         Discovering your marketplace relevance

·         Demonstrating and delivering your difference-making capability with highly relevant impact.