Course Catalog

Communication Skills for Business Transformation

Within the team setting, students practice specific methods to enhance a broad range of communication skills and their “emotional intelligence”, including listening, observing, self-assessment, self-reflection, seeking feedback, providing feedback, addressing conflicts constructively and ethically, collaborating toward a common goal, and team evaluation based on shared standards. The instructor provides extensive feedback to individual students and teams regarding their ability to analyze, synthesize and convey complex ideas in writing. This course is taken concurrently with MBA 5303: Organizational Behavior for Business Transformation.

Course Number: MBA 5301
Credit Units: 3.00
Professor: Julianne E. Maurseth, Ph.D.

Critical Thinking for Business Redesign

This course introduces students to concepts and methods for leading the redesign of existing systems and enterprises to meet the authentic needs of humanity and the natural world. Students explore the anatomy of well-reasoned judgments by learning how and when to apply them to perceived opportunities and problems. Knowledge mapping and presentation skills, as well as observational challenges, external interviews and artistic work, infuse the course with a rhythm that includes head, heart, and hands.

Course Number: MBA 5300
Credit Units: 6.00
Professor: Jane Lorand, JD, MA

Eco-Commerce Models

This survey course provides an overview and comparative analysis of the major initiatives at the intersection of business development and environmental and social responsibility. Students conduct integrated sustainability audits of existing companies using a broad range of methodologies to help those companies achieve green business certification. Through these hands-on consulting projects, students experience a wide array of eco-commerce models and green business strategies.

Course Number: MBA 5320
Credit Units: 3.00
Professor: Susan Briski, MBA

Ecological Economics

In this course students explore how people, acting through the private, public, and nonprofit sectors, can effect change using a "triple-bottom-line" approach-sustainable scale, just distribution and efficient allocation. Students will learn how diverse organizations - private firms, non-profit organizations and government agencies - are in the process of designing and testing models of commerce in the hope of finding ways to protect the earth and its inhabitants while still generating profits.

Course Number: MBA 5351
Credit Units: 3.00
Professor: Héctor Sáez

Entrepreneurial Finance

This course covers the creation and interpretation of financial statements, with a particular focus on building financial statements and making a case for outside funding for new enterprises. Students create financial models for their own enterprise or for a major initiative at an established organization.

Course Number: MBA 5309
Credit Units: 3.00
Professor: Paul Bozzo

Innovation, Design and Entrepreneurship

All organizations need to be innovative and entrepreneurial in today’s economy. Effectively conceptualizing and leading initiatives that address critical environmental and social issues in business requires creative thinking, market research, financial acumen, resource allocation and the ability to produce new business models. This course challenges students to transform their capacities to generate, plan and execute opportunities to bring new products, services and approaches to the market that have a positive impact on society.

Course Number: MBA 5360
Credit Units: 3.00
Professor: John Stayton, MBA

Intrapreneurial Finance

This course introduces students to the basics of financial planning and management for running any business venture. Students are enabled to use these financial models and tools to build and analyze business plans and to justify management decisions in a sustainable venture. Examples of topics covered in understanding capital markets and their relation to internal capital budgeting include: cost of capital, valuation, risk and rate of return, time value of money.

Course Number: MBA 5319
Credit Units: 1.50

Managerial and Environmental Accounting

Students learn the fundamentals of managerial accounting and how to use quantitative tools to measure organizational performance in order to achieve economic and environmental objectives. The course teaches students how companies, institutions and regulators can incorporate the concept of triple-bottom-line reporting. Students gain experience researching the financial, environmental, and social performance of various organizations.

Course Number: MBA 5305
Credit Units: 3.00
Professor: Jennifer Wells

Marketing Research Methods

This course teaches students methods and practices for applied field research to support environmental sustainability in business decision making. Students learn and practice qualitative and quantitative research methods through developing and implementing a research plan and generating a report relevant to a specific industry. Other common market research methods such as observational studies and in-depth interviews with local experts are explored.

Course Number: MBA 5330
Credit Units: 1.50 - 3.00
Professor: Ethan Newby, Lisa Chiapetta

Marketing Strategy and Tactics

This course introduces students to the principles and vocabulary of marketing management, to the strategic implications of marketing decision making in the domestic and global marketplace, and to the most current marketing tactics for achieving strategic marketing goals. Instruction focuses on the marketing environment, the competitive challenges of the changing market structures, and the tools that today’s marketing manager needs to manage and mitigate risk in both for-profit and non-profit companies.

Course Number: MBA 5306
Credit Units: 3.00
Professor: Thea Bellos, MBA

Organizational Behavior for Business Transformation

This course investigates how and why systemic complexities and ethical challenges increase as individuals form groups or teams, and as various groups form organizations. Students explore ways to ethically bridge leadership-management roles, how to distinguish between an organization’s required system and emergent system, and how to assess ego-motivation, eco-motivation, and employee ownership in designing effective teams and workplaces. This course is taken concurrently with MBA 5301: Communication Skills for Business Transformation.

Course Number: MBA 5303
Credit Units: 3.00
Professor: Julianne E. Maurseth, Ph.D.

Social Impacts of Enterprises

“Enterprise” is embedded throughout our lives. We must transform enterprise design and its social impacts by recognizing how “micro-level choices lead to macro-level impacts” in consumerism and workplaces, with both positive and negative consequences to society. In this course student teams conduct qualitative social research to investigate social impacts of and on enterprises, their consequences, and future alternatives. Money systems, globalization, economic history, and community-based cooperative models are explored to support students’ empowerment for economic choices, career choices and social transformation.

Course Number: MBA 5302
Credit Units: 3.00
Professor: Julianne E. Maurseth, Ph.D.

Strategic Enterprise Planning [Capstone]

This is a "capstone" business incubator course. Students develop either an entrepreneurial business plan or a strategic plan for a major new initiative for an existing business, integrating learning from the entire GreenMBA program curriculum. Students build on their understanding of financial projection and capital planning by learning about funding options (from self-funding to venture capital), and how to develop flexible and adaptive organizations through the business planning process.

Course Number: MBA 5380
Credit Units: 3.00
Professor: John Stayton, MBA

Sustainable Enterprise Metrics, Advocacy & Policy

This course explores systemic organizational sustainability issues from the perspectives of the internal change agent and the external consultant. Multiple approaches are learned and practiced, from advocating organizational, state, national and global policies that create ground rules with the right incentives to designing metrics that illuminate organizational performance in natural, human and financial capital accounts. The course includes a significant consulting project that integrates and applies learning from this and prior courses.

Course Number: MBA 5315
Credit Units: 3.00

Sustainable Operations Management

This course is focused on the concepts and analytic methods that are useful in the design and management of an organization's operational processes. Concepts of operational excellence, Lean and DMAIC are reviewed through exploration of current marketplace practices to identify risks and opportunities for operations managers. This survey course provides students with a review of the language, concepts, insights and tools to assess and improve operations in order to gain competitive advantage.

Course Number: MBA 5340
Credit Units: 3.00
Professor: Roberto Piccioni, MS

Systemic Thinking Labs

Complexity theory and the value of a systems perspective as leaders in business and society are explored through experiential exercises, readings and lectures. Essential techniques, tools and practices of systemic thinking and concepts for addressing complex issues are applied as ways of helping organizations take a systemic approach to complexity management.