Executive MBA Courses
Accounting Bootcamp
The financial accounting bootcamp is designed to provide a smooth transition from the summer pre-work for the course to the course content to be covered in MBAE 60161. The bootcamp will reinforce topics such as transaction analysis, the impact of transactions on the financial statements, and the components of the primary financial statements (Income statement, statement of stockholders’ equity, and balance sheet).
Statistical Analysis Bootcamp
This course will introduce participants to the essential building blocks of data analysis, beginning with exploring how to clearly describe variables and distinguish among common data types. The session will then provide a practical, high-level overview of hypothesis testing, focusing on how analysts and professionals use data to evaluate claims and inform decisions. Finally, we will examine conceptual examples of how data analysis is applied in a variety of settings to identify patterns, assess performance, and guide strategy. Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how statistical thinking supports effective, evidence-based decision making.
Executive Formation
This foundational course establishes a framework for integrated leadership grounded in Notre Dame’s Catholic intellectual tradition. Through structured reflection, theological inquiry, and engagement with campus spaces, participants explore the integration of professional excellence with questions of meaning and vocation. This two-day immersive experience helps participants establish an approach to their Executive MBA education that cultivates disciplined sensibilities of mind, heart, and spirit, directed toward the contemplative seeing and moral courage essential for authentic leadership that serves the common good.
Executive Integral Leadership
In this life-changing course, learn to integrate the cognitive, emotional, interpersonal, physical, moral and spiritual components of an effective leader through assessments, simulation, cases and small group activities that enable participants to view themselves as leaders capable of fresh insights and equipped with practical tools.
Leadership Research Workshop I
This workshop is Part 1 of a three-part sequence. The sequence provides an overview of business school research, the research process, and the role that research plays in the mission of the college. It also includes a data collection effort that combines an assessment of program learning objectives with an actual college research project. The data gathered in Part 1 of the sequence assesses learning objectives near the beginning of the program, serving as the “pretest” portion of the assessment.
Principles of Financial Accounting
Address the accounting process, including alternative methods for measuring and reporting; review the construction and interpretation of financial statements and the various ways that managers, investors and regulatory agencies analyze and use them.
Corporate Finance
Gain an overview of the role of the financial manager, analyze types of investing and financing decisions, and use a valuation model to measure the risk-return trade-offs of those decisions.
Introduction to Marketing
GLOBAL IMMERSION IN EUROPE
Designed to help students garner skills and knowledge of how capabilities can be built for a competitive advantage. After students develop an understanding of strategy and the analysis underlying it, they are then exposed to decision-making within the classic 4 P’s of marketing: product, place (distribution), promotion, and price.
Financial Statement Analysis
Analyzes corporate value drivers; measures value-added and other performance metrics; reviews mergers and acquisitions.
Communicating with Data in the Age of AI
In an era dominated by rapid AI advancements and automated metrics, the ability to transform complex datasets into compelling, honest, and actionable visual stories remains a vital capability for driving real business value. This course focuses on the art and science of visual data analytics, taking you from raw data architecture to executive-level presentation. Using Tableau, you will utilize advanced analytical techniques, such as Level of Detail (LOD) expressions and Python integrations, while exploring how AI can augment and streamline your visualization workflows. Beyond technical mechanics, true mastery in data storytelling requires character and responsible stewardship. You will cultivate the core habits of top-tier analysts: practicing data humility by transparently identifying dataset boundaries, pipeline assumptions, and model limitations, alongside exercising data gratitude by recognizing data provenance and the human labor behind raw numbers. Through hands-on projects and collaborative design reviews, you will learn to construct clear, persuasion-backed visual stories that solve business problems with both technical rigor and intellectual honesty.
Operations & Supply Chain Management
Successful firms such as Wal-Mart, Toyota, Amazon, and many others, have demonstrated that operations/supply chain management can be an effective competitive weapon. This course goes beyond cost minimization and introduces the core set of issues that firms must confront and coordinate in their journey towards sustained scalability, growth, and profitability.
Why Business?
What is the role of business in a just and humane society? Many of you are about to dedicate your lives to business, and the rest of you will work, in one way or another, with business. Yet many people believe that business is a morally suspicious activity, a suspicion evident in the common belief that business people need to “give back” to society. Is business an activity for which one must atone? Are people right to be suspicious of business? This course is designed to engage ideas from the Catholic tradition with perspectives drawn from moral philosophy, business, and economics. We will engage issues of faith and normativity both critically and constructively. Students will consider competing positions on faith and normative questions, will reflect on (or discover elements of) their own faith or non-faith, and will describe the extent to which they believe various claims are supported by faith or reason. This course responds to Pope John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus (1991) and Pope Francis’s Laudato Si (2015), which called on Catholic education to “safeguard the moral conditions for an authentic ‘human ecology'” (Centesimus Annus, 38).
Investments
This course is an introduction to investments and is intended to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills within the context of investments. Your primary objective in this course is to learn the basic concepts and principles of financial analysis from a professional investor’s point of view. The course provides an overview of various financial instruments and the marketplaces in which they trade. The course also describes the theory and application of stock, bond, and options investing. After this course, you should have a basic understanding of risk and return, portfolio theory, the capital asset pricing model, bond pricing, options, and market efficiency.
Applied Machine Learning for Business Leaders
This course introduces managers and senior leaders to the practical application of machine learning in business. Students develop a working understanding of the broader artificial intelligence landscape, including machine learning and generative AI, and learn how organizations use approaches such as classification, regression, prediction, clustering, and large language models to support decisions and improve business processes. The course emphasizes managerial understanding rather than technical implementation. Through applied examples, students learn how to match machine learning approaches to different types of business problems and data, understand conceptually how models produce results, evaluate model performance, and interpret outputs for decision-making. The course also helps students assess where AI can create value, recognize its limitations, and make informed decisions about the appropriate use of AI and machine learning within organizations.
Finance Practicum
GLOBAL IMMERSION IN ASIA OR U.S.-BASED IMMERSION
Imparts the framework to understand problems facing financial managers in a global arena; examines international financial instruments and foreign exchange exposure management.
Foundations of Ethical Business Conduct
Explore the ethical dimensions of business; apply normative ethical theories; examine stakeholders’ relevance; simulate moral imagination; and analyze ethical leadership.
Data and AI for Senior Leaders
It is the digital age and organizations are transforming how they generate value by harnessing the power of data through advancements in AI and other emerging technologies. In this class, we survey current trends in data and AI to provide working knowledge for executives, as well as to reflect on the major ethical issues associated with these trends.
Negotiations
Enhances negotiation preparation, strategy, and implementation skills and tactics within an analytical framework and interactive setting – using simulations, role-playing and case studies.
Strategic Cost Management
Presents advances in cost accounting and key inputs in designing cost systems; covers varying decision-making settings; examines activity-based and target costing and customer profitability analysis.
Consumer Behavior
Business strategy often begins with deep and actionable consumer insights. This course draws on key principles from psychology to explain how consumers think, feel, and make choices. Core drivers of consumer behavior — including motivation, attention, perception, social influence, and judgment — are examined to uncover the underlying “why” behind marketplace behavior. The course emphasizes translating these behavioral insights into stronger strategic decisions related to product design, customer experience, communication, branding, and pricing.
Strategic Planning for Growth
Introduces concepts of strategy development, business integration, and problem solving; frameworks to assist in framing threats/opportunities, problem diagnosis, solution development, and recommendation implementation. We will practice using these integrative frameworks to facilitate problem solving in multiple business cases from identification of problem, to recommendation, to implementation plan. Cases emphasize different aspects of problem solving and integration including: microeconomics, game theory, finance, market estimation and competitor assessment, customer segmentation and economics, product pricing, positioning and branding, and operations. Students will bring all the concepts together in the development of a business plan.
Strategic Management in the Age of AI
Strategic management is about positioning a firm to gain and sustain competitive advantage. This course considers how artificial intelligence is changing both the context in which strategies are developed and the ways in which strategy itself can be carried out. We will examine how established strategy concepts (e.g., industry analysis, competitive positioning, resource-based advantage) provide a foundation for understanding these shifts, while also recognizing that AI can be managed as a strategic resource and used to assist with analytical tools that support decision making. Because most strategic decisions are inherently multi-functional, the course is integrative in nature, relying on cases, experiential exercises, and applied demonstrations to connect enduring principles of strategy with the new challenges and opportunities that accompany AI adoption.
Design Thinking & Innovation
GLOBAL IMMERSION IN SOUTH AMERICA OR A U.S.-BASED IMMERSION
Introduces tools and approaches helpful in the facilitation of change and innovation. Developed in conjunction with a national design firm, the course leads students through a project that develops a concise model for seeing an issue, developing knowledge and insights, and using that information to drive innovation.
Corporate Governance
The corporate governance course examines the structural, regulatory, and social factors that influence managerial behavior at large publicly-traded organizations. Among several other topics, this course emphasizes the role of the board of directors, executive compensation, capital market participants (e.g., investors and hedge funds), government regulation, social activism, political forces, and the media (both social and conventional) in managerial discretion and corresponding organizational activities.
Equity Valuation
ELECTIVE
This course provides a detailed understanding of the tools used by market professionals and corporate managers to analyze the value of companies and stocks using discounted cash flow, economic profit, and relative valuation techniques. Students will identify and interpret the key value drivers for a firm or industry, estimate cost of capital and cash flows, and develop quantitative models for firm and equity valuation based on DCF and multiples. Equity Valuation builds upon concepts learned in Financial Statement Analysis.
Applied Consumer Science
ELECTIVE
This course will delve into the ‘art’ and ‘science’ of developing and deploying customer-centric marketing strategies. With an applied approach involving hands-on exercises and real-world case studies, this course will address contemporary marketing challenges, introduce economic and psychological theories that firms can use to solve those challenges, and equip senior leaders with actionable approaches and insights to drive immediate growth and profitability.
Mergers & Acquisitions
ELECTIVE
This course provides a detailed understanding of the merger and acquisition process, both from the sell-side (using auctions or negotiated sale processes) and the buy-side (including a discussion of target approach strategies, due diligence, and valuation). Students will learn key aspects of deal structure, accounting and regulatory issues, as well as take-over defense strategies. The course will also provide an introduction to leveraged buy-outs (LBOs) and asset restructurings.
Business Law
ELECTIVE
The central objective of this course is to provide both entrepreneurs and executives in established businesses a rudimentary working knowledge of certain key areas of business law. Our focus will be on practical legal considerations in launching and sustaining a startup business (though many of the issues considered are generally relevant to established businesses as well). These issues include entity organization, corporate securities, commercial leases, intellectual property, and employment matters. Attention will be given to certain issues in finance that, while not strictly legal in nature, have legal implications and are of more than passing interest to all entrepreneurs.
*Course outline is an example and subject to change.