The University of Utah Executive MBA program features a high-level general management curriculum designed for experienced leaders. EMBA courses deliver the in-depth knowledge needed to drive creative solutions and vision beyond current role, industry, and region. Students also balance problem-solving with broad perspectives and conceptual skills. In the end, our students create and implement solutions within the context of an organization with confidence.

Schedule

Our students are busy professionals who have high demands on their time. The Executive MBA schedule is predictable and the entire 21-month program is planned out before it begins. Classes meet 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. every other week on Friday and Saturday. This allows students to plan work, travel, and personal commitments far in advance. Schedules are subject to change in rare circumstances, but students will be notified ASAP.

Class of 2027 Schedule
(Beginning August 2025)

Class of 2026 Schedule
(Beginning August 2024)

Class of 2025 Schedule
(Beginning August 2023)

Courses

First Year Courses

Intensive Week (Off-site Immersive Learning Experience)

This course is an experiential introduction to working in teams, emphasizing socialization, early-stage team formation, and team building. Using team-building exercises, the class leads students through the initial steps in team formation and through common challenges teams and their members face. In addition, the course discusses tools to address these challenges and identifies them as opportunities for proactive and thoughtful action.

Personal and organizational statements of values and codes of ethics are discussed in an environment of competing and complementary objectives and constraints. Readings of a classic nature are presented to underscore the timeless and multi-cultural nature of business and the relevancy of great works to today’s business environment.

Fall Semester

This course introduces the basic concepts, standards, and practices of financial reporting to serve the needs of decision-makers. The curriculum focuses on basic financial statements, analysis and recording of transactions, and underlying concepts and procedures. Key concepts for this course include accounting for cash, receivables, inventories, long-term productive assets, bonds and other liabilities, stockholders’ equity, and the statement of cash flows. This course provides students with an understanding of how financial statements are prepared, the ability to interpret information provided in financial statements, and the ability to conduct a preliminary financial statement analysis of a firm.

This course addresses the diagnosis and management of human behavior in organizations. The specific learning goals of the course are: 1) To increase student conceptual and analytical knowledge about human behavior in complex organizations at the individual, interpersonal, group, and inter-group level and to examine how organizational, societal, and cultural contexts affect these behaviors; 2) To increase students’ awareness of their own and others’ assumptions, motivations, and values in managerial and organizational interactions; and 3) To sharpen student skills in problem definition, enrich students’ set of diagnostic models, and refine the process students use to generate and select alternative actions.

This class involves learning new skills and, in some cases, unlearning some assumptions and behavioral patterns students may have acquired over the years that could be holding them back. This course will focus on developing an awareness of individual communication styles, developing the ability to interact with others in various contexts effectively (convincing, collaborating, coaching, etc.), and authentic communication skills that can translate into professional and personal gains. In this course, students will learn the following skills: awareness and understanding, non-verbal communication, feedback, managing conflict, writing, and presentation skills. Students will use a variety of approaches and methods to achieve learning goals.

Spring Semester

Statistics provides a systematic approach to make intelligent, fact-based decisions and improve processes. The emphasis is on understanding concepts and their application to real-world business situations. The conceptual material focuses on the importance of statistical thinking in making sound business decisions. The statistical methods are implemented using a computer to analyze business and economic data sets, emphasizing interpreting the output. Topics covered include statistical and process thinking, summary statistics, probability, distributions, sampling, statistical inference (confidence intervals and hypothesis testing), and the study of relationships (regression and correlation), including an application to portfolio management.

This course provides an overview and integration of major marketing management concepts and principles. The course covers the fundamentals of marketing strategy and the decisions related to marketing that must be made in every profit or nonprofit organization. Emphasis is placed on applying these concepts to marketing decisions to develop or enhance students’ skills at critically thinking about marketing management issues. Topics for discussion will include external analysis of the competition and customer, internal analysis of the decision-making company, and formulation of marketing mix decisions.

This course develops a framework that can be applied to financial planning and analyzing the major types of investment decisions made by firms, emphasizing the efficient allocation of resources within the organization. Topics include the formulation of financial plans and estimating financing needs, financial mathematics, valuation of real and financial assets, capital budgeting and corporate investment decisions, risk and return, and the cost of capital.

This course aims to understand the theory and processes of negotiation in a variety of managerial contexts. A basic premise of the course is that while a manager needs analytical skills to discover optimal solutions to problems, a broad array of negotiation skills is needed for these solutions to be accepted by others and implemented in collaboration with them. The course will allow participants to develop these skills experientially and understand negotiation in useful analytical frameworks.

Summer Semester

This course teaches the basic principles of microeconomics and macroeconomics and their usefulness in making business decisions. The course covers supply and demand, individual consumption, savings, and labor behavior. In addition, the course analyzes both short-run fluctuations and long-run growth of the aggregate economy. Topics include profit maximization, utility maximization, demand, supply, uncertainty, game theory, agency theory, booms and recessions, inflation and unemployment, monetary and fiscal policy, budget and trade deficits, and interest and exchange rates.

Firms transform raw materials into finished goods through production processes. For example, in a hospital, sick patients are the ‘raw materials’ transformed into cured patients, representing ‘finished goods.’ In this course, we develop a framework to analyze business processes, that is, the flow of work within the firm. With the help of case studies, we identify ways a firm can increase its profitability by improving process management. We follow this with a look at supply chain management, which involves managing operations across firm boundaries and studying quality management, inventory policies, and other topics.

Second Year Courses

Intensive Week (Off-site Immersive Learning Experience)

This course is a mid-program experience for Executive MBA students. It will include in-class modules and possibly visits to local companies. Expanding the learning environment outside of the classroom allows a broader curriculum for areas that cannot fit into the traditional on-campus schedule. Previous topics have included the global business environment, international marketing, multi-national enterprise strategy, and social entrepreneurship. Classes may be taught by faculty from other universities and will emphasize the culture and business climate outside of the USA. The location has not been determined.

Fall Semester

This course introduces the basic concepts and tools for formulating business strategies. It focuses on how firms can develop sustainable competitive advantages. Central topics include assessing industry economics and dynamics to identify strategic threats and opportunities, evaluating the profit potential of strategic resources and capabilities, and strategic diversification. Other topics include assessing actual and potential cost and differentiation advantages, the vertical scope of the firm, strategic management of multi-business firms, global strategy, strategic alliances, strategic management in technology-intensive industries, and strategy under uncertainty.

This course builds concepts, frameworks and skills for students targeting commercial-facing, revenue-related career paths across a broad range of industries. We will explore methods and techniques in the areas of product management, customer management, channel management and sales management. The overarching domain of this course will be business-to-business markets, since most every company (even the CPG variety) uses business partnerships throughout their path-to-market.

Some of the most visible changes in strategy occur at the corporate level: acquisitions, mergers, spin-offs, vertical integration, hostile takeovers, and diversification. This course focuses on the strategic decisions that confront the senior-most managers in complex, typically multi-business corporations. Finding ways to add rather than destroy value at the corporate level can be a difficult task. In this course, we will examine the objectives, issues, and tools that confront corporate managers. The course will focus on leveraging resources and competencies, drawing horizontal and vertical boundaries, diversification, corporate organization, and corporate governance.

Spring Semester

This course focuses on firms’ internal systems. The students first examine firms’ managerial accounting systems and their use in decision-making. The curriculum will focus on identifying and extracting relevant information from managerial accounting systems as an input to decision-making, concentrating on product costing. Throughout, students will consider the role of management accounting in decisions concerning resource allocation and performance evaluation and the limitations of and assumptions underlying these data. The students then apply these skills to two broad topics: cost analysis and performance evaluation.

This course addresses how international factors affect the operating, investing, and financing functions of a firm. The key objectives of the course are to:

  • Understand the role of foreign currency exchange and how it affects both multinational and domestic-only firms
  • Understand the effects of political risk on the multinational organization
  • Understand the use of currency forward, futures, and options contracts and their role in hedging risk inherent in a firm’s cash flows, even in domestic-only firms
  • Understand how to pose and analyze the capital budgeting decision of the multinational company
  • Understand the importance of global corporate governance practices for strategic partnering and investing decisions

This course focuses on the tasks of strategic leadership. Students examine the role of the leader in determining organizational purpose and strategy. The course also addresses the leader’s role in leading change and adaptation. Students also address how leaders affect organizational architecture, such as structure, culture, networks, systems, and incentives. Students will also be introduced to conceptual tools for assessing their strengths and examining various organizational dynamics.

This intensive course will examine human resource management functions in a corporate setting and focus on developing knowledge and skills that all managers and leaders need. The course will focus on such subjects as the selection process and behavioral interviewing, pertinent laws and regulations associated with human resources practices, performance management, coaching, motivating, Color Code Personality Traits, and maintaining effective environments. The classes are designed to familiarize participants with current human resource practices that apply to their careers regardless of their field.

This course aims to tie together several core concepts that you have learned thus far in your professional and educational career. In addition, it will introduce many new content topics. The core topics will cover valuation, stock options, and financial markets. The material is far-reaching, and in the event some of the content is not familiar, you may have to undertake outside research into the issues and/or read the appropriate chapters from last year’s corporate finance textbook before analyzing the cases.

This course applies principles of microeconomics to business questions around human resource management and organizational design. Topics include hiring, retention, promotions, employee training, pay-for-performance incentives, and divisionalization.

International Field Study (Off-site Immersive Learning Experience)

This course introduces considerations in international trade involving strategy and operating of the multinational firm, global industry analysis, and country analysis. This course includes a trip to a foreign country with visits to corporate offices in the country and governmental and educational agencies, if available. The trip will emphasize the culture of the country visited through group participation in selected cultural events and visits.

Application Fee Waiver

We understand that the application fee can be a barrier to entry for some students so we are offering an application fee waiver for a limited time.

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