MBA Essentials
Program Details
About the Program
Discover MBA Essentials, a 4-day, comprehensive program, which delves into vital concepts and skills essential for navigating today’s complex business environment. The course is structured to provide a holistic overview of key functional disciplines, critical to broadening your organizational perspective. Engaging faculty create a dynamic learning environment, enriched by interactive discussions, case studies, and hands-on exercises.
Experience
Learn from and network with peers from diverse functions and industries. Explore the key terms, fundamentals, and challenges throughout an enterprise, which will enable you to better communicate and collaborate with your cross-functional partners. You will return to work with practical and actionable tools and frameworks that you can apply to enhance your impact and decision-making ability.
Learn how you can customize this program for your organization.
Tuition Reimbursement
Attendees who apply for and are accepted into a Carlson MBA program within one year of completing the MBA Essentials course will be eligible to apply up to 50% of the MBA Essentials course fee toward their MBA tuition.
Program Contacts
- Email: [email protected]
- Phone: 612-850-6731
- Email: [email protected]
- Phone: 612-625-5412
- Request Course Catalog
Who Should Take This Course & Why
Enhance your ability to:
Collaborate effectively with cross-functional partners
- Assess the strength of your organization’s strategy
- Successfully build and lead productive teams
- Leverage data-driven experimentation to navigate industry disruption
- Build customer-centric processes
- Read and interpret financial statements
- Develop strategic, comprehensive plans and initiatives
- Identify the enterprise-level impacts from functional actions
Additional Ways to Participate
Attend as a Group
Maximize the return on your organization’s development investment by attending as a group. When you send three of your employees to the same course, a fourth employee may attend the course at no charge. Additional group pricing benefits are also available for larger cohorts through our Talent Development Partnerships.
Customize This Program For Your Organization
We can customize this course's content, format, and delivery to meet your organization’s specific learning objectives. Whether you are looking for a highly effective program that you can deliver quickly or a fully customized program built from the ground up, our team of experts will work with you to deliver the right approach for maximum impact.
PARTICIPANT PERSPECTIVE
In this video, a participant of the MBA Essentials program shares how the course reshaped her understanding of strategy, competition, and innovation.
Schedule
Session Overview
- Business Strategy: Explore strategy as a discipline of selecting which opportunities not to pursue. Discover how to leverage Porter’s Five Forces model to align strategic priorities across every level of your organization.
Session Overview
- Leading & Working with Teams: Learn how to build high-performing teams designed for hybrid and AI-integrated workplaces. Discuss how to foster psychological safety, set productive team norms, and map clear roles and responsibilities.
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- AI & Analytics: Uncover how emerging technologies, platform competition, and continuous analytics disrupt traditional business models. Evaluate strategies for agile, data-driven experimentation as you discuss case studies spanning retail, digital media, service robotics, and blockchain.
Session Overview
- Supply Chain & Operations: Learn how to align supply chain and operations with executive strategy by blending customer experience and psychological benefits into workflow design. Discuss how to optimize end-to-end operational performance using case studies from manufacturing and healthcare.
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- Financial Accounting: Discover the three core financial statements: the balance sheet, the income statement, and the cash flow statement, as well as accrual accounting and cost behavior. Practice evaluating key performance drivers such as profit margins, working capital efficiency, return on assets (ROA), and capital structure.
Session Overview
- Financial Decisions & Capital Markets: Explore the time value of money, risk versus return, and market efficiency. Learn how to evaluate capital budgeting projects using net present value (NPV), analyze debt and equity structures, and apply comparable valuation techniques to inform executive strategy.
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- Marketing Management: Acquire a strategic framework for marketing management, focusing on how to identify unmet customer needs, define target segments, and establish compelling value propositions. Discuss competitive game theory, brand positioning, value-based pricing, promotional ROI, and rapid market research.
Session Overview
- Strategy Execution: Explore how successful strategy execution requires total organizational alignment. Learn how to align structure, compensation, metrics, culture, and staffing choices into a mutually reinforcing system that drives performance and protects against imitation.
Conclusion: Reflect on your learning across every business function and discuss how you plan to apply your broadened perspective to your daily work.
Faculty
Professor, Curtis L. Carlson Chair in Corporate Strategy Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship
Senior Lecturer, Finance
Professor, Mary and Jim Lawrence Fellow, Information & Decision Sciences
Senior Lecturer, Accounting
Associate Professor and Academic Director, MS in SCM Program Supply Chain and Operations
Senior Lecturer, Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship
Professor, Marketing