The Sloan Master's Program core courses are designed specifically for Sloan Fellows. For more information please visit the Sloan Program website.

Developing Leaders for a Changing Global Environment

The Stanford Sloan Program offers a rare opportunity to thoroughly prepare for higher levels of leadership by learning from a brilliant mix of accomplished peers, faculty, and business leaders, all in the unrivaled setting of Stanford University.

ACCT 219. Sloan: Accounting

A characteristic of business is the extensive use of accounting data. The financial accounting course has the general objective of developing students' understanding of the nature, scope, and limitations of accounting information. To achieve this objective the course attempts to: (1) develop students' understanding of the conceptual accounting framework, including the objectives of financial reporting, and (2) develop students' ability to understand and critically evaluate the financial disclosures made by corporations. An issue of particular interest will be the managerial incentive aspects of accounting information and disclosures.

FINANCE 229. Sloan: Finance

This course covers the foundations of corporate finance including the management of liquidity, capital structure, financial forecasting, dividend policy, financial distress, cost of capital and capital budgetinig. It discusses the major financial decisions made by corporate managers and the impact of those decisions on investors and the value of the firm. Topics include criteria for understand the valuation of financial assets and liabilities, relationships between risk and return, market efficiency, and the role of derivative securities including options. The course also provides coverage of the role of financial markets in the operations of the firm.

GSBGEN 259. Sloan: Ethics

With leadership comes responsibility. This course explores the numerous ethical duties faced by managers and organizations. It combines analytical frameworks with the latest findings on human behavior to inform a wide range of ethical decisions and strategies. Readings include case studies, insights from experimental psychology and economics, and excerpts from or about major works of moral philosophy. Through online and in-class exercises, discussions, and personal reflection, you will reveal and assess your ethical intuitions, compare them with more explicit modes of ethical thought, and learn how to use ethics in business settings. A diverse set of ethical viewpoints will be considered with an emphasis on not only their implications for ethical behavior but also on the social and cognitive pitfalls that undermine the ability of business leaders to fulfill their ethical duties.

HRMGMT 289. Sloan: Talent Management Strategy

Everyone manages people; how can it be done better? How can it be done to facilitate your overall strategy, for your company and your career? This class covers the standard topics of people management: recruitment and selection; performance evaluation; incentives and compensation; promotions; job design; training; teamwork; and layoffs and retention. Each topic is covered through case studies and then analytical models for choosing and using best practices. The class content is aimed at managers who recognize that people management is important, but who typically want to spend less time managing people and more time doing what they really enjoy.

MGTECON 209. Sloan: Economics

This course covers microeconomic concepts relevant to managerial decision making. Topics include: demand and supply analysis; consumer demand theory; production theory; price discrimination; perfect competition; partial equilibrium welfare analysis; externalities and public goods; risk aversion and risk sharing; hidden information and signaling; moral hazard and incentives; game theory; oligopoly; and transaction cost economics.

MKTG 249. Sloan: Strategic Marketing Management

The goal of marketing is to provide value to customers and to recapture some of that value for the firm in the form of profits. The objective of this course is to develop an understanding of the opportunities and challenges in creating, managing, and delivering customer value. Besides providing an introduction to the elements of marketing analysis (customer, competitor, and company analysis) and marketing mix (product strategy, pricing, promotion, and distribution), the course will approach high-level strategic issues such as: how to innovate, build, and manage customer experiences; what role do customers play in the creation and delivery of firms value; and how marketing functions integrate with other operational areas to create customer value.

OB 278. Sloan: Organizational Behavior

This course is designed to introduce incoming students to the structures and processes that affect group performance as well as some of the common pitfalls associated with working in teams. Topics include understanding team culture, fostering creativity and coordination, making group decisions, and dealing with a variety of personalities. Students will participate in a number of group exercises designed to illustrate principles of team work and to give students practice diagnosing team problems and taking action to improve team performance.

OB 289. Sloan: Negotiations

This course is designed to improve students' skills in all phases of a negotiation: understanding prescriptive and descriptive negotiation theory as it applies to dyadic and multi-party settings, buyer-seller transactions and the resolution of disputes, to the development of negotiation strategy and the management of integrative and distributive aspects of the negotiation process. This course is based on a series of simulated negotiations in a variety of contexts, including one-on-one, multiparty, and team negotiations. When playing a role in a simulated conflict, you will be free to try out tactics that might feel uncomfortable in a real negotiation. You will get feedback from your classmates about how you come across. In sum, you can use this course to expand your repertoire of conflict management and negotiation skills, to hone those skills, and to become more adept in choosing strategies and tactics that are appropriate for a particular negotiation situation. This course is an intense, more compact version to the elective OB381 and is almost identical to the OB581 immersion course. Thus, students should not take either of these courses as there is considerable overlap among the three. Attendance and participation in the negotiation exercises are mandatory.

OIT 269. Sloan: Operations

This course focuses on basic managerial issues arising in the operations of both manufacturing and service industries. The objectives of the course are to familiarize students with the problems and issues confronting operations managers and to introduce language, conceptual models, and analytical techniques that are broadly applicable in confronting such problems. The spectrum of different process types used to provide goods and services is developed and then examined through methods of process analysis and design.

POLECON 239. Sloan: Strategy Beyond Markets

This course addresses managerial issues in the social, political, legal, and ethical environments of business. Cases and readings emphasize strategies to improve the performance of companies in light of their multiple constituencies, in both international and US environments.

Most core courses focus on firms' interactions with customers, suppliers, and alliance partners in the form of mutually beneficial voluntary exchange transacted in markets. In contrast, this course considers the strategic interactions of firms with comparably important constituents, organizations, and institutions outside of markets. Issues considered include those involving activist and interest groups, the media, legislatures, regulatory and antitrust agencies, and international organizations such as the WTO.

In many of the class sessions, we will draw on theoretical and empirical research in political economy, a field that is particularly relevant for understanding relationships between firms and governments, because (unlike most of economics) political economy focuses on interactions that are neither voluntary nor transacted via money.

STRAMGT 279. Sloan: Global Strategic Management

This course investigates the key strategic and organizational issues that arise in operating internationally in a "semi-globalized" world where borders matter less than in the past but where they are still a major fact of life. The course is case-based and builds on the strategy course in September.