Core Course Requirements – Weekend MBA

The Weekend MBA Program is a structured, cohort-based, 57 credit-hour degree program that meets every other weekend and completes in 24 months. The first year of coursework (May through April of the following year) establishes a basic understanding of the functional responsibilities of an organization. These core courses lead into the Ross MAP (Multidisciplinary Action Project) experience to finish the first year of this program.

The second year focuses your coursework in three modules of topics relevant to today’s business needs. Students will register for one theme each term of the second year. The courses for that term will be structured around a specific theme, allowing students the opportunity to focus their second year of study in a particular area. Students complete the program in April of their second year. The chart below describes the course load of each Weekend MBA term beginning with the Spring/Summer Term.

Students may also substitute up to nine credit hours of their WMBA electives with electives in the full-time or online programs.  For more information on this, please contact the PTMBA Program Office.

Management Communication Competency Requirement: The Management Communication Competency is a graduation requirement.  WMBA Class of 2024 and 2025, during the spring/summer term of your first year, students submit writing and speaking communication samples for evaluation.  WMBA Class of 2026, prior to May Orientation, students submit writing and speaking communication samples for evaluation.  Based on assessment scores, students will either meet the competency requirement OR be required to complete additional competency modules.

  1. Students who meet the first competency review will receive a personalized email that includes assessment scores/profile and an attached list of classes/other opportunities to enhance management communication competency at Ross. After that point, the Management Communication Competency Requirement has been met.
  2. Students who are identified as needing additional work are required to meet with a Ross Communication Consultant, complete a brief quiz and complete additional online learning modules in the areas flagged as needing work. If this is not completed by the indicated deadline the student will be required to register and pass an approved Online MBA or Full-Time MBA BCOM course.

Year One

Spring-Summer Term (9 hrs)
May – Aug.
Fall Term (9 hrs)
Sept. – Dec.
Winter Term (10.50 hrs)
Jan. – Apr.
WMBA 501: Principles of Financial Accounting (2.25 crs)WMBA 505: Corporate Strategy (2.25 crs)WMBA 509: Human Behavior and Organization (2.25 crs)
WMBA 502: Applied Microeconomics (2.25 crs)WMBA 506: Financial Management (2.25 crs)WMBA 510: Multidisciplinary Action Projects (MAP) (6.00 crs)
WMBA 503: Applied Business Statistics (2.25 crs)WMBA 507: Managerial Accounting (2.25 crs)WMBA 512: The World Economy (2.25 crs)
WMBA 504: Marketing Management (2.25 crs)WMBA 508: Operations Management (2.25 crs) 

WMBA Class of 2025 Year Two — Register for one theme each term (i.e. select either the Marketing theme or Strategy/Entrepreneurship theme for the Spring/Summer term)

Spring-Summer Term (9.75 hrs)
May – Aug.
Fall Term (9.75 hrs)
Sept. – Dec.
Winter Term (9 hrs) Jan. – Apr.
WMBA 519: Business Law and Ethics (2.25 crs)WMBA 615: Global Strategy (1.5 crs)WMBA 513: C-Level Thinking (2.25 crs)
WMBA 605: Coaching & Mentoring in Organizations (0.75 crs)WMBA 630: Legal Aspects of Managing Human Capital (1.5 crs)WMBA 604: Leadership Development (2.25 crs)
WMBA 612: Bargaining and Influence Skills (2.25 crs)WMBA 621: New Age of Innovation (2.25 crs)
Theme: Marketing Theme: Operations ManagementTheme: Strategy
WMBA 601: Strategic Marketing Planning (2.25 crs)WMBA 611: Global Supply Chain Management (2.25 crs)WMBA 627: Mergers, Acquisitions & Corporate Development (2.25 crs)
WMBA 633: Strategic Brand Management (2.25 crs)WMBA 617: Project Management (2.25 crs)
WMBA 623: Applied Business Analytics for Decision Making (2.25 crs) 
OROR OR
Theme: Strategy/EntrepreneurshipTheme: Financial Management Theme: Analytics
WMBA 602: Strategies for Growth (2.25 crs)WMBA 603 – Valuation (2.25 crs) WMBA 640: Marketing Engineering & Analytics (2.25 crs)
WMBA 606: Entrepreneurship (2.25 crs)WMBA 613: Strategic Cost Management (2.25 crs) 
WMBA 618: Capital Markets and Investment Strategy (2.25 crs) 

WMBA Class of 2024 Year Two — Register for one theme each term (i.e. select either the Strategic Management theme or Entrepreneurship theme for the Spring/Summer term)

Spring-Summer Term (9.75 hrs)
May – Aug.
Fall Term (9.75 hrs)
Sept. – Dec.
Winter Term (9 hrs) Jan. – Apr.
WMBA 519: Business Law and Ethics (2.25 crs)WMBA 615: Global Strategy (1.5 crs)WMBA 513: C-Level Thinking (2.25 crs)
WMBA 605: Coaching & Mentoring in Organizations (.75 crs)WMBA 630: Legal Aspects of Managing Human Capital (1.5 crs)WMBA 604: Leadership Development (2.25 crs)
WMBA 612: Bargaining & Influencing Skills (2.25 crs)Theme: Operations ManagementWMBA 621: New Age of Innovation (2.25 crs)
Theme: Strategic ManagementWMBA 611: Global Supply Chain Management (2.25 crs)Theme: Track 1
WMBA 602: Strategies for Growth (2.25 crs)WMBA 617: Project Management (2.25 crs)WMBA 627: Mergers, Acquisitions & Corporate Development (2.25 crs)
WMBA 633: Strategic Brand Management (2.25 crs)WMBA 623: Applied Business Analytics for Decision Making (2.25 crs)OR
ORORTheme: Track 2
Theme: EntrepreneurshipTheme: Financial ManagementWMBA 601: Strategic Marketing Planning (2.25 crs)
WMBA 606: Entrepreneurship (2.25 crs)WMBA 603 – Valuation (2.25 crs)
WMBA 608: Venture Capital (2.25 crs)WMBA 613: Strategic Cost Management (2.25 crs)
WMBA 618: Capital Markets and Investment Strategy (2.25 crs)

Course Descriptions

WMBA 501 Principles of Financial Accounting

Term Offered: SS(Y1)

Principles of Financial Accounting — This course introduces the basic concepts and methods used in corporate financial statements for the information of investors and other interested external parties. Readings, problems, and cases are used. Major topics included are: the basic accrual model; analysis of transactions; and balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement construction and analysis. The course also emphasizes analysis of cases and actual financial reports and concerns the applications of the basic concepts and methods of financial accounting to issues such as long-term assets, inventory, sales, receivables, debt securities, corporate ownership, international operations, and analysis of financial statements.

WMBA 502 Applied Microeconomics

Term Offered: SS(Y1)

Applied Microeconomics — This course provides students with the foundations of microeconomic analysis. The primary objective is to develop the abilities of students to apply fundamental microeconomic concepts to a wide range of managerial decisions, as well as public policy issues. Foundation topics include: costs and supply behavior of the firm; consumer behavior and market demand; market forces, price formation, and resource allocation; international trade and trade restrictions; and market power and price-setting behavior. Students will also be introduced to more advanced aspects of microeconomic analysis. Advanced topics include: decision-making with risk and imperfect information; and complex pricing strategies.

WMBA 503 Applied Business Statistics

Term Offered: SS(Y1)

Applied Business Statistics — This course covers probability, sampling distributions, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, correlation, and simple and multiple regression analysis. Business applications are used to illustrate these concepts. The course requires familiarity with the statistical analysis package of MS Excel.

WMBA 504 Marketing Management

Term Offered: SS(Y1)

Marketing Management — This course is concerned with understanding 1) an entity’s own goals and abilities and 2) its potential and existing customers and competitors as bases for setting objectives and making decisions about products, services, pricing, promotion, and distribution. The ability to analyze current situations and objectives, recognize impediments, and generate solutions is the foundation for creating, achieving, and maintaining competitive advantage. This is a management-oriented course designed to give students an integrative framework for analyzing marketing programs and making marketing decisions. Leveraging the Ross School’s action-based learning approach, student teams take an active part in course development by creating cases based on their own areas of interest. The course consists of a mixture of lectures, student case presentations, in-class exercises, and a case-based final examination.

WMBA 505 Corporate Strategy

Term Offered: F(Y1)

Corporate Strategy — This course focuses on the job, perspective, and skills of the general manager in diagnosing what is critical in complex business situations and finding realistic solutions to strategic and organizational problems. The course provides a total business perspective, and thus serves as a foundation on which to build expertise in various functional areas.

WMBA 506 Financial Management

Term Offered: F(Y1)

Financial Management — The course is primarily devoted to the principles of financial valuation. We will first discuss the concept of present value in extensive detail, and then apply the principles of valuation to value (a) real projects (or what is commonly referred to as capital budgeting) and (b) financial securities (stocks and bonds) under certainty. Since financial decision-making virtually always involves risk and uncertainty, we will then introduce the concept of risk, and the relation between risk and return. We will integrate our knowledge of cash flows with our understanding of risk to modify capital budgeting techniques in the presence of risk and uncertainty. The course concludes with an introductory treatment of the effects of financing on capital budgeting decisions. Although the concepts of competitive capital markets and market efficiency will not be covered in a separate session, they will be woven in the fabric of the course.

WMBA 507 Managerial Accounting

Term Offered: F(Y1)

Managerial Accounting — This course introduces the basic concepts of managerial accounting for internal decision-making. Major topics included are product costing, emphasizing costing approaches used in today’s business environments, relevant costs for decision analysis, variance analysis, divisional performance evaluation, and transfer pricing.

WMBA 508 Operations Management

Term Offered: F(Y1)

Operations Management — All value in society is generated by transforming one set of things into other, different things. Without such transformations, there would be no wealth creation and no rationale for business. Operations management is the design and management of those transformation processes. In this course, we will provide a framework for systematically examining and understanding operations management issues. We also will expose you to a few of the most important tools and practices that are useful in managing manufacturing and service production systems.

WMBA 509 Human Behavior and Organization

Term Offered: W(Y1)

Human Behavior and Organization — This is a course in the diagnosis and management of human behavior in organizations. One of the most important keys to your success as a manager is the ability to generate energy and commitment among people within an organization and to channel that energy and commitment toward critical organizational goals. Doing this requires a thorough understanding of the root causes of human attitudes and behavior and how they are influenced by your actions as a manager – and by the surrounding organizational context. Thus, the course seeks an understanding of human behavior in hopes that such an understanding will enhance management practice. It is designed to include both individual level and organizational level concepts to enable students to develop an understanding of both psychological and contextual factors that affect behavior in the workplace.

WMBA 510 MAP

Term Offered: W(Y1)

Multidisciplinary Action Projects (MAP) — MAP is a field study program in which teams of students apply structured problem-solving techniques to analyze multidisciplinary business problems or opportunities and make recommendations for improvements. It is a unique feature of the Ross MBA program – the action learning experience it provides is central to the school’s curriculum. Students learn how businesses apply and integrate multiple functions and gain an appreciation of the value of teamwork through an intense hands-on project at a sponsoring company.

WMBA 512 The World Economy

Term Offered: W(Y1)

The World Economy â€” The march of globalization continues, and international markets are pivotal to the operations of virtually all corporations. As companies intensify their international presence, the need to understand the economic and political challenges associated with the global environment increases. Such challenges are the focus of this course. We will explore the theories and concepts that are crucial to understanding the global location and structure of industries, the politics of trade and investment, and the impact of globalization on firm strategy. Various learning methods are used in the course, including in-class lectures, discussion of current events in the world economy, and case analysis.

WMBA 513  C-Level Thinking

Term Offered: W(Y2)

C-Level Thinking — Executives at the highest levels of an organization face challenges that are qualitatively different than those faced at other levels of an organization. This action-based-learning course challenges students to engage in “C-Level thinking” in teams. C-Level thinking involves: (a) constant monitoring the company?s situation, internally and externally; (b) identifying significant developments, both threats and opportunities; (c) discriminating real from phantom threats and opportunities; (d) determining the true nature of the forces driving real threats and opportunities; (e) developing a course of action to dealing with these threats and opportunities; (f) building an understanding of the best process to achieve (a) to (e). The first two steps outlined above will have been completed by the sponsoring company prior to the beginning of the course. The course entails carrying out steps (c)-(f) in the decision process sketched above, in the context of a real, current development facing that company, and with an appropriate emphasis on creative, synthetic, and critical thinking.

WMBA 519 Business Law and Ethics

Term Offered: SS(Y2)

Business Law and Ethics — This course focuses on the role of law in positive leadership development and organizational success.  The course has two main goals:  (1) to develop legally savvy leaders who are able to achieve career success by understanding the legal and ethical aspects of their business responsibilities and (2) show how organizations can archive competitive advantage by reducing legal risk and using the law to create economic value, while also encouraging responsible conduct.

WMBA 601 Strategic Market Planning

Term Offered: SS(Y2)

Strategic Market Planning — This course is designed to provide an in-depth, “hands-on” learning experience in marketing strategy, planning and analysis. This course outlines key planning concepts and processes using lectures, case studies and a sophisticated competitive marketing simulation game where feedback is provided to management teams regarding the impact of their strategic and tactical decisions. The course integrates marketing decision making within the context of manufacturing and financial dimensions of a business organization. Course participants should expect to use large doses of common business sense and managerial acumen and to rely heavily on sound business and marketing principles in the learning process.

WMBA 602 Strategies for Growth

Term Offered: SS(Y2)

Strategies for Growth—Strategies for Growth— A major challenge facing most companies (and business units) is how to grow the organization. This course will develop a framework for determining the direction of growth: market penetration, globalization, vertical integration, related diversification and unrelated diversification, and the mode of growth: organic growth, alliances, and mergers and acquisitions. The organizational challenges in implementing the growth strategy will also be discussed.

WMBA 603 Valuation

Term Offered: F(Y2)

Valuation — This course focuses on corporate asset management, in particular, on valuation. Topics include financial statement analysis, capital budgeting methods, estimating incremental cash flows, estimating cost of capital, valuation of projects, valuation of companies in takeovers, cross-border valuation, and valuation of strategic options. The course also covers working capital management.

WMBA 604 Leadership Development

Term Offered: W(Y2)

Leadership Development: Self Awareness, Skills and Strategies — This course offers an extensive journey into the nature of leadership in organizations, with an emphasis on self-understanding and learning. It offers both a theoretical and practical understanding of leadership. At the end of this course, students should have a better conceptual sense of leadership, important insights into themselves as leaders, an enhanced ability to understand and map the context in which leadership is to be exerted, and practical ideas about how to work that context in order to lead change. The course will use cases, experimental exercises, role-plays, videos, and self-assessment exercises to stimulate student learning.

WMBA 605 Coaching and Mentoring in Organizations

Term Offered: F(Y2)

Coaching and Mentoring in Organizations — This class has two key objectives (1) to understand two approaches for developing others, mentoring and coaching, and how to integrate these effectively, (2) to practice the art of mentoring and coaching and learn from the experience, in order to become more effective leaders, 3) to gain insight into the purpose of mentoring and coaching in organizations, and understand how to apply this in the business/professional world. Students will be exposed to key ideas regarding developing others and then will choose someone in their personal or professional networks to coach and mentor. This action learning-project will culminate in a written team report on best practices in developing others. Students will also keep a journal on their personal journey through coaching and mentoring.

WMBA 606 Entrepreneurship

Term Offered: SS(Y2)

Entrepreneurship — This course is a practical guide to starting a new business, providing students with exposure to every crucial aspect of the entrepreneurship experience. From the initial phase of evaluating a business idea to the actual business launch, students are introduced to the realities of entrepreneurship and misconceptions about it. Useful models and frameworks, complemented by practical advice and guidelines, together provide students with the solid foundation necessary to launch their own businesses while understanding the various risks their startups may face.

WMBA 607 Strategic Marketing for Entrepreneurs

Term Offered: SS(Y2)

Strategic Marketing for Entrepreneurs — This course is part of the “themed elective” in Entrepreneurship for second year WMBA students. It adapts the concepts developed in the Strategic Marketing Planning course, WMBA 601. The material in WMBA 601 leans toward large multi-national companies and the strategic marketing issues and systems and those types of companies face. The WMBA 607 course develops concepts and practice of strategic marketing more toward de novo, smaller, startup companies. Thus, the cases, textbook, and handout lecture presentations are all modified to deal with these types of companies.

WMBA 608 Venture Capital

Term Offered: SS(Y2)

Venture Capital — This course covers venture capital market structure and institutional arrangements and the application of financial theory and methods in a venture capital finance setting. It presents and applies the fundamentals of venture capital finance, employing “live” case studies to focus on financing startup and early stage, technology-based firms.

WMBA 611 Global Supply Chain Management

Term Offered: F(Y2)

Supply Chain Management — This course aims to develop an understanding of key devices of supply chain performance and their interrelationship with firm strategy. Special emphasis is given to tools and skills necessary to develop solutions for a variety of supply chain design problems and inter-firm and intra-firm coordination issues.

WMBA 612 Bargaining and Influence Skills

Term Offered: F(Y2)

Bargaining and Influence Skills — This course is premised on the fact that while a manager needs analytical skills to discover optimal solutions to business problems, a broad array of negotiation skills is needed to implement these solutions. This experiential course is designed to improve students’ skills in claiming and creating value in deals and disputes. Learning objectives focus on the development and practice of key negotiation competencies. Extensive personal feedback, peer review, coaching, and personal journals are used to help each student develop strategic flexibility across a variety of contexts, whether cultural, professional, or personal. Given the experiential nature of the course and pedagogy, enrollment in each section will be limited, and in addition, attendance will be mandatory. Consistent with that policy, registered students must be present from the beginning of the first class session to retain their registration in the class.

WMBA 613 Strategic Cost Management

Term Offered: F(Y2)

Strategic Cost Management — This course examines the decisions managers make and the financial measures they use to achieve strategic objectives. The course takes a historical perspective, tracing the development of modern cost system design for externally-focused and internally-focused strategies.

WMBA 615 Global Strategy

Term Offered: W(Y2)

Global Strategy — This course is designed to enable you to make better strategic decisions in a world in which global competition is growing rapidly. The foundational idea in the course is that even in a rapidly globalizing world there remain significant institutional, social, and economic differences across nations. These differences provide both challenges and opportunities in global strategy. Firms that are able to identify and implement mechanisms for bridging these differences will be the winners in the global strategy game. The course covers three main areas. First, we develop frameworks for understanding differences across countries and mechanisms for evaluating global strategic alternatives. Second, we proceed to focus on three generic global strategies – aggregation, adaptation and arbitrage. Third, we also integrate special topics, ranging from global organization, emerging players/markets and competitive global strategies to entrepreneurial and non-market strategies. The cases in the course cover a wide variety of national contexts, including developed and developing countries.

WMBA 617 Project Management

Term Offered: F(Y2)

Project Management — This course focuses on strategies and tools useful in management of non-repetitive business activities. Examples of such activities include construction, new product development and market introduction, consulting engagements, and organization restructurings. Tools to be introduced include work breakdown structure, network representation, PERT/CPM models and analysis, Gantt charts, time and cost models, PM software, and probabilistic analysis. Strategy considerations covered will include dealing with uncertainty, resource constraints, dealing with shared and requested vs. dedicated and commanded resources, and milestone management.

WMBA 618 Capital Markets and Investment Strategy

Term Offered: F(Y2)

Capital Markets and Investment Strategy — This course covers portfolio analysis, asset pricing models, and investment strategies. It uses both the lecture and the case method of instruction to develop a practical understanding of some of the more important financial instruments and markets. Security valuation and management of investment strategies are major themes present throughout the course. A fundamental objective of the course is to enable students to gain a robust familiarity with approaches that can be adapted to analysis of broad classes of financial assets and markets. Such skills are indispensable to investments analysis in an economic environment characterized by an unprecedented amount of financial innovation, both in the creation of new securities and in the development and evolution of financial institutions.

WMBA 621 New Age of Innovation

Term Offered: W(Y2)

This course introduces students to the emerging nature of competition and the critical capabilities that firms need to build to thrive in this environment. Based on the contents in a book co-authored by professors C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan, the course presents a different perspective on business innovation focusing on co-creating customer experience and global resource leverage with the social and technical architecture in the firm as the two key enablers. The specific implications for various business functions in this new approach to compete will be discussed. Students interested in functional roles or consulting will find this course useful.
 

WMBA 623 Applied Business Analytics for Decision Making

Term Offered: F(Y2)

Applied Business Analytics for Decision Making — Strategic and tactical decisions problems that firms face became to complex to solve a naive intuition and heuristics. Increasingly, making business decisions requires “intelligent” and “data-oriented” decision, aided by decision support tools and analytics. The ability to make such decisions and sue available tools is critical for both managers and firms. In recent years, the toolbox of business analytics has grown and many of them can be implemented with spreadsheet-based models. These tools provide the ability to make decision supported by data and models. This course prepares students to model and manage business decisions with data analytics and decision models.

WMBA 627 Mergers Acquisitions and Corporate Development

Term Offered: SS(Y2)

Strategic Management of Alliances — This course will study the theory and practice of business alliances. Alliances among businesses are a fundamental necessity of corporate strategy. Every student in this school will spend part of her or his working life addressing business activities that span the boundaries of their own corporation and intertwine with the activities of corporate partners and other organizational allies. Although alliances are necessary for every organization, poorly managed alliances often create substantial problems for one or more of the alliance partners. The goal of this course is to understand the benefits and risks that alliances create for the individual partners and to learn how to manage alliances effectively.

WMBA 631 Corporate Governance

Term Offered: W(Y2)

Corporate Governance — This course examines how corporations are governed and to whom they should be responsible. Topics include the role of the board of directors: re-aggregation of shareholder power due to concentrated institutional holdings; effects of legislation on corporate governance, including laws that permit or require the board of directors to consider the interests of stakeholders like employees, customers, suppliers, and communities. Consideration is also given to international comparisons of corporate governance structures and legal issues arising in contests for corporate control. This course fulfills the MBA law/ethics requirement.