Faculty: Sydnee Caldwell and Francesco Trebbi 

Textbook: Statistics for Business: Decision Making and Analysis, Stine and Foster, (3rd Edition, Pearson, 2018) - ISBN: 9780134497167

Option to Waive: Yes. Waiver exam.

Data and Decisions is not a typical statistics course. We move quickly, during seven weeks, covering everything from statistical tests and confidence intervals all the way through interpretation and inference in multiple regression models. Along the way, we emphasize deep ideas rather than memorizing formulas. Discussing, for example, how smart companies use experiments to make better decisions.

Before beginning the class, students are expected to be familiar with the material in the first 12 chapters of the required textbook. A quiz of these concepts will be given on the first day of class. The course will also require a working knowledge of Microsoft Excel.

To best prepare for this class, students can attend the Data & Decisions Core Prep Workshop as well as the Excel workshops.

Faculty: Steve Tadelis 

Textbook: (coming soon)

Option to Waive: Yes. Waiver exam.

This course teaches students how to make better business decisions using tools from microeconomics. Microeconomics is useful to managers in two general ways. First, the microeconomic tools relating to incremental cost, incremental revenue, and the use of incentives are invaluable for managing an organization's resources. Second, the microeconomic tools relating to supply and demand, entry and exit, and strategic interactions are fundamental to understanding how markets behave and evolve, and how to gain a competitive advantage. As the course title suggests, we will focus relentlessly on how economic analysis can be used to improve business decision-making. In this respect, the course differs substantially from the usual microeconomics classes. This short core course lays the foundation for many other classes at the Haas School that rely on economic analysis.

Faculty: Erick Bell and Omri Even-Tov 

Textbook: (coming soon)

Option to Waive: Yes. Waiver exam or automatic waiver if you've passed the CPA or CFA level II or III exam.

MBA 202 is an introductory financial accounting course. It is designed from a managerial, rather than a bookkeeping perspective. Consequently, we do not emphasize the mechanics of preparing the financial statements in this course. Instead, we focus on teaching students how to interpret and use the primary financial statements: the balance sheet, the income statement, and the statement of cash flows. In doing so, we also highlight the deficiencies of these statements so that students recognize that they cannot take them at face value. We also bring in readings from the popular press, dealing with financial accounting-related issues of current importance to managers.

If you have had no prior coursework or experience with financial accounting, you can but are not required to, work through one of the many programmed texts or pre-MBA packages that are available to introduce accounting.

Faculty: Erica Bailey and Mathijs de Vaan

Textbook: (coming soon)

Option to Waive: No

This course is all about maximizing human potential, both your own and that of the people with whom you work. The dual themes of the course are: how to provide innovative leadership in establishing and managing prosperous firms while simultaneously developing others and creating a thriving career for yourself. The course provides fundamental tools from the behavioral and social sciences that will improve your ability to analyze organizational dynamics, innovate, and lead effectively in a complex and diverse global economy.

Faculty: Veselina Dinova and Timothy McQuade

Textbook: (coming soon)

Option to Waive: Yes. Waiver exam or automatic waiver if you've passed level III of the CFA exam.

The goals of this course are (1) to introduce and familiarize students with the basic principles of finance and (2) to provide students with a set of tools for making financial decisions. We will start by covering present value and future value. As with most concepts, we will first cover the basics and then we will deal with issues that arise in real-world applications. We then discuss the criteria for making investment decisions and how to calculate the appropriate cash flows. We apply these concepts to evaluate new projects or start a new company. Next, we turn to financial markets with the objective of providing an introduction to bonds, stocks, diversification, optimal portfolio choice, and market efficiency. With an understanding of how security prices are determined, we return to corporate finance. We assess the appropriate measures of project risk and use this to calculate investors' required return (i.e., the cost of capital) for a given project. We will also analyze the impact of leverage on the cost of capital.

Faculty: Clayton Critcher

Textbook: (coming soon)

Option to Waive: Yes. Waiver exam.

The difficulty with marketing is that it is deceptively simple. Someone with no training in the principles of physics could never pretend to be a physicist. But someone with no knowledge of the research-backed principles of marketing can (and many do) work in marketing.

Core Marketing is taught with the recognition that it may be the first of many marketing classes students take at Haas, or perhaps the only one. Furthermore, there is a recognition that a new generation of business people is increasingly skeptical (and appropriately so) of marketing as a non-data-driven art.

Students will be exposed to basic marketing frameworks, principles, and metrics. The course will go through the steps of developing a full marketing plan, including questions around segmentation and targeting, positioning, pricing, promotional efforts, and questions around return on investment. A special effort will be made to teach students how to develop qualitatively-rich marketing strategy from quantitative and statistical methods.

Learning will be achieved through a mix of lecture, discussion, mini-cases that illustrate core concepts or strategic lessons, exercises completed both outside and inside of class, a student project, and analysis of student-collected data.

Faculty: Drew Jacoby-Senghor, Sa-kiera T.J. Hudson

Textbook: No textbook

Option to Waive: No.

When harnessed effectively, differences among us can be the catalyst for creative and innovative breakthroughs and can forge a pathway to team and organizational learning and effectiveness. However, when differences are misunderstood, they can challenge employees’ values, performance, workplace relationships, and team effectiveness.

This course is designed to help students navigate diverse settings more effectively and deepen their ability to create, work within, and lead diverse teams and global organizations. It also offers students the opportunity to develop their critical thinking on topics such as identity, relationships across differences, bias, and equality of opportunity in organizations around the world and how they relate to organizational issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

We build competency with core concepts and use the diversity within our classroom to practice navigating interpersonal, intraorganizational, and interorganizational dialogues. Learning will blend lectures, small-group and entire-class discussions, cases, role-playing, and reflection exercises. We hope that by building a psychologically safe environment, students feel empowered to learn and give feedback to their peers.