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Fixed Core | Flexible Core
Fixed Core
All students begin the MBA academic experience with MGMT 6100 – Foundations of Teamwork and Leadership. If you participated in the Core Requirement Evaluation Process, you may have waived out of some fixed core requirements and can instead take other courses of your choosing. You may have also placed into an accelerated version of the core course or qualified to substitute an upper level elective in the subject area to meet the core requirement. Whether you choose to utilize your ability to waive, place, or substitute is up to you.
Students will complete the WHCP requirement through a single, 0.5 CU full-semester course in either Fall or Spring of their first year, which is assigned by cohort. There are two options: Management Communication or Entrepreneurial Communication, the latter of which requires pre-approval.
Fall Fixed Core Courses
MGMT 6100 – Foundations of Teamwork and Leadership (0.5CU)
This course focuses on developing students’ knowledge and skill set for teamwork and leadership. It is an immersive experiential learning course anchored on the Wharton Teamwork and Leadership Simulation. This interactive simulation is custom-designed to challenge students to apply course concepts as they collaborate to run a company. The key goals are for students to practice: 1. Leadership behaviors: how to align people to achieve great things 2. Team dynamics: how to be an effective team member, as well as how to best design work groups 3. Organizational effectiveness: how to adapt to change and build high-performing cultures
MKTG 6110 – Marketing Management (0.5CU)
This course addresses how to design and implement the best combination of marketing e orts to carry out a firm’s strategy in its target markets. Specifically, this course seeks to develop the student’s: 1. Understanding of how the firm can benefit by creating and delivering value to its customers and stakeholders 2. Skills in applying the analytical concepts and tools of marketing to such decisions as segmentation and targeting, branding, pricing, distribution, and promotion.
BEPP 6110– Microeconomics for Managers (0.5CU)
This course establishes the micro-economic foundations for understanding business decision-making. The course will cover consumer theory and market demand under full information, market equilibrium and government intervention, production theory and cost optimization, producing in perfectly competitive and monopoly markets, vertical relations, and game theory, including simultaneous, sequential, and infinitely repeated games. Finally, we will wrap up game theory.
BEPP 6120 – Advanced Microeconomics for Managers (0.5CU)
This course will cover the economic foundations of business strategy and decision-making in market environments with other strategic actors and less than full information, as well as advanced pricing strategies. Topics include oligopoly models of market competition, creation, and protection, as well as sophisticated pricing strategies for consumers with different valuations or consumers who buy multiple units (e.g., price discrimination, bundling, two-part tari s). We also discuss strategies for managing risk and making decisions under uncertainty, asymmetric information and its consequences for markets, moral hazard and principal-agent theory with application to incentive contracts, and, finally, auctions.
STAT 6130 – Regression Analysis for Business (1.0CU)
This course provides the fundamental methods of statistical analysis, the art and science of extracting information from data. The course will begin with a focus on the basic elements of exploratory data analysis, probability theory and statistical inference. With this as a foundation, it will proceed to explore the use of the key statistical methodology known as regression analysis for solving business problems, such as the prediction of future sales and the response of the market to price changes. The use of regression diagnostics and various graphical displays supplement the basic numerical summaries and provides insight into the validity of the models. Specific important topics covered include least squares estimation, residuals and outliers, tests and confidence intervals, correlation and autocorrelation, collinearity, and randomization. The presentation relies upon computer software for most of the needed calculations, and the resulting style focuses on construction of models, interpretation of results, and critical evaluation of assumptions.
STAT 6210 – Accelerated Regression Analysis for Business (0.5CU)
STAT 6210 is intended for students with recent, practical knowledge of the use of regression analysis in the context of business applications. This course covers the material of STAT 6130 but omits the foundations to focus on regression modeling. The course reviews statistical hypothesis testing and confidence intervals for the sake of standardizing terminology and introducing software, and then moves into regression modeling. The pace presumes recent exposure to both the theory and practice of regression and will not be accommodating to students who have not seen or used these methods previously. The interpretation of regression models within the context of applications will be stressed, presuming knowledge of the underlying assumptions and derivations. The scope of regression modeling that is covered includes multiple regression analysis with categorical effects, regression diagnostic procedures, interactions, and time series structure. The presentation of the course relies on computer software that will be introduced in the initial lectures. Recent exposure to the theory and practice of regression modeling is recommended.
WHCP 6160 – Management Communication (0.5CU)
This is one of two options for completing the communication requirement and, of the two, this option will have more available seats. This course focuses on how to clearly and persuasively articulate, advocate for, and defend your views as a presenter and writer in various business contexts and for a diverse range of audiences. You will learn the essentials of persuasion, gain confidence as a presenter, and receive individualized feedback from instructors and second-year TAs (Wharton Communication Fellows). Regardless of your skill level upon entry to the course, you will develop and demonstrate effective, business-oriented communication skills. Students will practice these skills through in-class exercises, discussions, and small-group labs.
WHCP 6180 – Entrepreneurial Communication (0.5CU)
This is the second option for completing the communication requirement. This course requires pre-approval, and seats will be limited. Designed for students who are actively working on a startup idea while at Wharton, this course focuses on the unique challenges entrepreneurs face when communicating their idea, vision, and strategy. Students in this course will learn communication frameworks and best practices for pitching innovative ideas in a way that persuades others to appreciate their value. Through individualized feedback from their instructor, TA, and peers, students will hone their personal communication style and their pitch decks. At the conclusion of the course, students will have the opportunity to pitch their business idea to real investors.
WHCP 6210 – Foundations of Business Writing (0CU)
Students who do not waive the writing requirement will take WHCP 6210: Foundations of Business Writing in the fall of their first year. This discussion-based writing course is designed to help students improve their ability to organize and develop the persuasive arguments they’ll need to lead teams and effect change. For students who are identified as needing additional support in English, the Communication Program will o er ESL (English as a Second Language) sections of WHCP 6210. Please note that the content of ESL and non-ESL sections of WHCP 6210 is fundamentally the same; the ESL sections simply o er more support tailored to the needs of ESL students.
Flexible Core
You should choose your Flexible Core courses based upon your interests, goals, and schedule that best fits your needs for each semester.
If you participated in the Core Requirement Evaluation Process, you may have waived out of some fixed core requirements and can instead take other courses of your choosing. You may have also placed into an accelerated version of the core course or qualified to substitute an upper level elective in the subject area to meet the core requirement. Whether you choose to utilize your ability to waive, place, or substitute is up to you.
Need a refresher on what you need to do to fulfill your Flexible Core requirements?
Go back to Understanding the Core Curriculum.
Fall Flexible Core Courses
ACCT 6110 – Financial Accounting (1.0CU)
The objective of this course is to provide an understanding of financial accounting fundamentals for prospective consumers of corporate financial information, such as managers, stockholders, financial analysts, and creditors. The course focuses on understanding how economic events like corporate investments, financing transactions and operating activities are recorded in the three main financial statements (i.e., the income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows). Along the way, students will develop the technical skills needed to analyze corporate financial statements and disclosures for use in financial analysis, and to interpret how accounting standards and managerial incentives affect the financial reporting process. This course is recommended for students who want a more in-depth overview of the financial accounting required for understanding firm performance and potential future risks through analysis of reported financial information, such as students intending to go into security analysis and investment banking.
ACCT 6130 – Financial and Managerial Accounting (1.0CU)
This course provides an introduction to both financial and managerial accounting, and emphasizes the analysis and evaluation of accounting information as part of the managerial processes of planning, decision-making, and control. A large aspect of the course covers the fundamentals of financial accounting. The objective is to provide a basic overview of financial accounting, including basic accounting concepts and principles, as well as the structure of the income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows. The course also introduces elements of managerial accounting and emphasizes the development and use of accounting information for internal decisions. Topics include cost behavior and analysis, product and service costing, and relevant costs for internal decision-making. This course is recommended for students who will be using accounting information for managing manufacturing and service operations, controlling costs, and making strategic decisions, as well as those going into general consulting or thinking of starting their own businesses.
FNCE 6110 – Corporate Finance (1.0CU)
This course serves as an introduction to business finance (corporate financial management and investments) for both non-majors and majors preparing for upper-level course work. The primary objective is to provide the framework, concepts, and tools for analyzing financial decisions based on fundamental principles of modern financial theory. The approach is rigorous and analytical. Topics covered include discounted cash flow techniques; corporate capital budgeting & valuation; investment decisions under uncertainty; capital asset pricing; options; and market efficiency. The course will also analyze corporate financial policy, including capital structure, cost of capital, dividend policy, and related issues. Additional topics will differ according to individual instructors.
FNCE 6130 – Macroeconomics and the Global Economics Environment (1.0CU)
The purpose of FNCE 6130 is to train the student to think systematically about the current state of the economy and macroeconomic policy, and to be able to evaluate the economic environment within which business and financial decisions are made. The course emphasizes the use of economic theory to understand the workings of financial markets and the operation and impact of government policies. Specifically, the course studies the determinants of the level of national income, employment, investment, interest rates, and the supply of money, inflation, exchange rates, and the formulation and operation of stabilization policies.
FNCE 6230 – Introduction to Macroeconomics (0.5CU)
This half-semester course in Macroeconomics is intended for non-finance majors. The goal of this course is to provide the foundation needed to recognize and understand broad economic and financial movements in the global economy. Key topics include national income accounting, production and economic growth, employment, business cycles, monetary and fiscal policy, and international finance. By the end of this course, students will be able to evaluate and discuss the global economic environment in which business and financial decisions are made.
NOTE: This course will not count towards a Finance or Quantitative Finance Major
LGST 6110 – Responsibility in Global Management (0.5CU)
This course uses the global business context to introduce students to important legal, ethical and cultural challenges they will face as business leaders. Cases and materials will address how business leaders, constrained by law and motivated to act responsibly in a global context, should analyze relevant variables to make wise decisions. Topics will include an introduction to the basic theoretical frameworks used in the analysis of ethical issues, such as right-based, consequentialist-based, and virtue-based reasoning, and conflicting interpretations of corporate responsibility. The course will include materials that introduce students to basic legal (common law vs. civil law) and normative (human rights) regimes at work in the global economy as well as sensitize them to the role of local cultural traditions in global business activity. Topics may also include such issues as comparative forms of corporate governance, bribery and corruption in global markets, human rights issues, diverse legal compliance systems, corporate responses to global poverty, global environmental responsibilities, and challenges arising when companies face conflicting ethical demands between home and local, host country mores. The pedagogy emphasizes globalized cases, exercises, and theoretical materials from the fields of legal studies, business ethics and social responsibility.
LGST 6120 – Responsibility in Business (0.5CU)
This course introduces students to important ethical and legal challenges they will face as leaders in business. The course materials will be useful to students preparing for managerial positions that are likely to place them in advisory and/or agency roles owing duties to employers, clients, suppliers, and customers. Although coverage will vary depending on instructor, the focus of the course will be on developing skills in ethical and legal analyses that can assist managers as they make both individual-level and firm-level decisions about the responsible courses of action when duties, loyalties, rules, norms, and interests are in conflict. For example, the rules of insider trading may form the basis for lessons in some sections. Group assignments, role-plays, and case studies may, at the instructor’s discretion, be used to help illustrate the basic theoretical frameworks. Course materials will highlight industry codes and professional norms, as well as the importance of personal and/or religious values.
LGST 6130 – Business, Social Responsibility, and the Environment (0.5CU)
This half-credit (.5 cu) course presents students with the opportunity to explore an alternative perspective to what some might consider the traditional or standard model of business. A starting point of the course is to ask whether business firms owe a “social responsibility” that includes, but goes beyond, maximizing profits. The course begins with overarching questions including to whom a business firm owes legal and ethical duties, how to balance or trade-oC obligations owed to different stakeholders when they may conflict, and how to consider the distributional and other socially important implications of business decisions. Different sections of this course will examine questions about the responsibility of business toward a number of pressing environmental and social issues, including for example, climate change, fresh water availability, green marketing claims, democratic values, racial and gender diversity, human rights, poverty reduction, and global health issues such as access to medicine. These topics will be treated primarily through the lenses of law and ethics. Please consult individual instructors’ syllabi in the Wharton syllabus repository for further details on what will be covered in each individual section, and please note that topics change over time and in response to student and faculty interests. Finally, students should expect to prepare and present in groups to colleagues in classes on selected issues of business responsibility.
MGMT 6110 – Managing the Established Enterprise (1.0CU)
The management of large, established enterprises creates a range of multi-facet challenges for the general manager. A general manager needs to understand the internal workings of a firm, how to assess and create a strategy, and how to take into account increasing globalization. While these issues are distinct, they are very much intertwined. As a result, this course will provide you with an integrated view of these challenges and show you that effective management of an established enterprise requires a combination of insights drawn from economics, sociology, psychology and political economy.
MGMT 6120 – Managing the Emerging Enterprise (1.0CU)
Emerging enterprises, the focus in this course, are small, new, fast-growing organizations. Their founders and managers face multifaceted challenges: how to assess the competitive position of their business model and develop a strategy; how to develop the internal organizational structure, culture, and policies for selecting and managing employees; and how to pursue global opportunities. We cover these challenges in separate modules on strategy, human and social capital, and global issues. The human and social capital module covers classic management challenges of aligning interests of the individual and the organization; managing individual psychological needs and social influences; and developing employee capabilities that provide competitive advantage. Also covered are unique challenges that young organizations face, i.e. building an effective culture; recruiting, selecting, and retaining talent; building systematic approaches to motivating employees; coping with the stresses of rapid growth; and leveraging the benefits (and avoiding the liabilities) of the founder’s powerful imprint. The strategy module covers fundamental issues central to the competitiveness of the enterprise. Because the strategy field is broad, MGMT 6120 emphasizes topics and frameworks that are most relevant for younger firms, such as innovation, disruption, managing resource constraints, and building capabilities. The global module covers the emerging firm’s decision about when (and whether) to internationalize. This decision must address which foreign markets to enter; the mode of entry; the sequence of moves to develop capabilities; what organizational form to choose; where to establish HQ; and how to adapt to the unique economic and institutional features of different markets.
MKTG 6120 – Dynamic Marketing Strategy (0.5CU)
The goal of this course is to develop skills in formulating and implementing marketing strategies for brands and businesses. The course will focus on issues such as the selection of which businesses and segments to compete in, how to allocate resources across businesses, segments, and elements of the marketing mix, as well as other significant strategic issues facing today’s managers in a dynamic competitive environment. A central theme of the course is that the answer to these strategic problems varies over time depending on the stage of the product life cycle at which marketing decisions are being made. As such, the PLC serves as the central organizing vehicle of the course. We will explore such issues as how to design optimal strategies for the launch of new products and services that arise during the introductory phase, how to maximize the acceleration of revenue during the growth phase, how to sustain and extend profitability during the mature phase, and how to manage a business during the inevitable decline phase.
OIDD6110 – Quality and Productivity (0.5CU)
Matching supply with demand is an enormous challenge for firms: excess supply is too costly, inadequate supply irritates customers. In the course, we will explore how firms can better organize their operations so that they more eCectively align their supply with the demand for their products and services. Throughout the course, we illustrate mathematical analysis applied to real operational challenges – we seek rigor and relevance. Our aim is to provide both tactical knowledge and high-level insights needed by general managers and management consultants. We will demonstrate that companies can use (and have used) the principles from this course to significantly enhance their competitiveness.
OIDD 6120 – Business Analytics (0.5CU)
This is a course on business analytics tools and their application to management problems. Its main topics are optimization, decision making under uncertainty, and simulation. The emphasis is on business analytics tools that are widely used in diverse industries and functional areas, including operations, finance, accounting, and marketing. The course has a twofold purpose. First, it seeks to introduce you to simple models and ideas that provide useful (and often surprising) qualitative insights about a large spectrum of managerial problems. Second, it aims to give you a feeling for the kinds of problems that can be tackled quantitatively, the methods and software available for doing so, and some of the issues involved in gathering the relevant data.
IDD 6130 – Online Business Models and the Information-Based Firm (0.5CU)
This course is devoted to the study of the strategic use of information and the related role of information technology. It is designed for students who want to manage and compete in technology-intensive businesses. Heavy emphasis is placed on applying information economics principles and theoretical rigor to analyze businesses in information-intensive industries using both qualitative and quantitative techniques. We will study information- based industries like digital media, social networks, financial services, and online retail as well as traditional businesses that are being changed by new digital capabilities. There are four broad themes for the course: the economics of information goods and services, information and consumer behavior, markets and market design, and network economics. Each day we will discuss a core topic in one or more of these themes, with an emphasis on bridging theoretical ideas to real world applications. Application topics might include applying artificial intelligence, platform economics, and cryptocurrencies. Technology skills are not required, although a background in information technology management, strategic management, data science, or managerial economics is helpful.
OIDD 6140 – Innovation (0.5CU)
The course is first and foremost an intensive, integrative, project course in which student teams create one or more real businesses. This course has launched some businesses now run by alumni. The project experience is an exciting context in which to learn key tools and fundamentals useful in innovation, problem solving, and design. Examples of these tools and fundamentals are: problem definition, identification of opportunities, generating alternatives, selecting among alternatives, principles of data graphics, and managing innovation pipelines. The course requires a commitment of at least 10 hours of work outside of class and comfort working on unstructured, interdisciplinary problems.
Students with a strong interest in innovation and entrepreneurship are particularly encouraged to enroll.
OIDD 6150 – Operations Strategy (0.5CU)
Operations strategy is about organizing people and resources to gain a competitive advantage in the delivery of products (both goods and services) to customers. This course approaches this challenge primarily from two perspectives: 1) how should a firm design their products so that they can be profitably offered; 2) how can a firm best organize and acquire resources to deliver its portfolio of products to customers. To be able to make intelligent decisions regarding these high-level choices, this course also provides a foundation of analytical methods. These methods give students a conceptual framework for understanding the linkage between how a firm manages its supply and how well that supply matches the firm’s resulting demand. Specific course topics include designing service systems, managing inventory and product variety, capacity planning, approaches to sourcing and supplier management, constructing global supply chains, managing sustainability initiatives, and revenue management. This course emphasizes both quantitative tools and qualitative frameworks.
OIDD 6620 – Enabling Technologies (0.5CU or 1.0CU)
This course is about understanding emerging technology enablers with a goal of stimulating thinking on new applications for commerce. The class is self-contained (mainly lecture-based) and will culminate in a class-driven identification of novel businesses that exploit these enablers. No prerequisite or technical background is assumed. Students with little prior technical background can use the course to become more technologically informed. Those with moderate to advanced technical background may find the course a useful survey of emerging technologies. The course is recommended for students interested in careers in consulting, investment banking and venture capital in the tech sector.