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MMS: Foundations of Business
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"I believe that the new Master of Management Studies graduates will have a significant competitive advantage over undergraduate candidates, providing business leaders a more experienced, entry level asset. The Duke MMS program is a perfect complement to the innovative Duke MBA programs, and will greatly enhance the University's appeal as a one-stop solution for a rapidly changing global business community. Once again, Duke raises the bar and reaffirms its role as a world class business school."
John Mendel
Executive Vice President, Automobile Sales
American Honda Motor Co., Inc.
Fall Term I Courses
Financial Accounting
The objective of financial accounting is to develop students' ability to read, understand, and use corporate financial reports. The course introduces students to the basics of bookkeeping, accounting terminology, and fundamental accounting concepts, including the definitions of financial statement elements. The course will also cover the accounting treatments of key transactions (e.g., making sales on credit to customers and collecting cash from those customers; raising capital). The emphasis of the course is on understanding how financial reports portray the effects of underlying economic events and on using this portrayal to draw inferences about future profitability. The course also introduces students to the financial reporting process, because understanding the environment in which financial reporting takes place facilitates the evaluation of information provided by firms in published financial statements.
Business Economics
This course covers the fundamental ideas and tools of microeconomics. The course begins with:
- Supply and demand analysis, the basic tool for analyzing and understanding competition and the market determination of prices and quantities
- Consumer choices and market demand
- Production and cost theory
The tools for market structure analysis are then developed and applied to monopoly and oligopoly markets as well as to price discrimination. Game theory tools are developed and applied to analyze strategic interactions.
Management and Organizations
This course prepares you to be an effective leader and manager of others, whatever your level in the organization. We will examine practices that make teams more efficient and adaptable and that help harness diversity and enhance innovation. We will also study the theory and practice of negotiation. We will study how you can improve your personal contribution to your team and your firm and how you can lead others to respect your views and listen to you. Much of the content of the course will be put to use in learning teams used throughout the program.
Fall Term II Courses
Marketing Analysis
Modern marketing philosophy holds that only those firms that provide high customer value can succeed in the long run. Creating this value requires that managers must effectively:
- Assess marketing opportunities by analyzing customers, competitors, and their own company (the 3 C's)
- Design effective marketing programs via selecting appropriate strategies for pricing, promotion, place, and product (the 4 P's)
Accordingly, this course will introduce students to the principles, processes, and tools necessary to analyze markets and design optimal marketing programs.
Foundations of Strategy
This course helps you learn to identify business opportunities in dynamic competitive environments and, in turn, develops skills necessary to be an effective strategy analyst as part of any business position. We will tackle the complexity of analyzing competition in this era of globalization and changing firm boundaries, as well as assessing strategy under increasing uncertainty. You will develop strategic thinking by learning the concepts, models, and tools of strategic analysis and by applying them to competitive situations. The course develops the capability to assess a firm's strategic position with respect to rivals, the larger industry, and customers, given the firm's internal resources and capabilities.
Investments and Financial Markets
This course provides a rigorous treatment of the fundamental principles of asset valuation, investments, and investment management. Topics include time value of money and discounting, diversification and risk, arbitrage and hedging, asset allocation, asset pricing models (including the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), factor models, and consumption based asset pricing), active portfolio management, performance evaluation, and the interaction between capital markets and the macro economy.
Spring Term I Courses
Corporate Finance
This course examines important issues in corporate finance from the perspective of financial managers who are responsible for making investment and financing decisions. The concept of net present value, suitably adapted to account for taxes, uncertainty, and strategic concerns, is used to analyze how investment and financing decisions interact to affect the value of the firm. A key component of the course is the coverage of capital budgeting, first without and then with uncertainty. Throughout, emphasis is placed on the interaction between taxes (corporate and personal) and the cost of capital. The course also includes a treatment of dividend policy and capital market efficiency, as they relate to the value-maximization objective of the firm.
Marketing Intelligence
This course is about gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data about markets and customers. In this course, students will learn:
- To define decision problems and determine what information is needed (e.g., engage in 'backward marketing research' by envisioning decisions that will be taken based on the research)
- To acquire trustworthy and relevant data and judge its quality (e.g., to utilize secondary research such as internal customer databases or knowledge management systems)
- To analyze data relevant to classic marketing decisions (e.g., understanding state-of-the-art data analysis techniques)
The context for learning these analysis skills will be common marketing decision problems, including target market selection, new product or service introduction, customer retention, and pricing.
Managerial Accounting
This course emphasizes the use of accounting information for internal decision-making and control purposes as opposed to the external disclosure focus of the financial accounting course. The course integrates accounting principles with ideas from microeconomics, data analysis, decision analysis, finance, and operations management. The topical coverage of the course emphasizes the design of management accounting systems for analyzing costs in the context of the firm's business model, and the use of managerial accounting data in planning and controlling operations.
Spring Term II Courses
Financial Analysis
This course focuses on financial analysis of a firm and on valuation of its shares. The course provides a framework to analyze and interpret financial statements, exposes students to the publicly available sources of financial information used in capital markets, and develops important Excel modeling skills pertaining to financial planning, analysis, and valuation. The course builds on prior coursework (in financial accounting, strategy, managerial accounting, investments, and corporate finance) by having students:
- Evaluate the financial implications of a firm's articulated strategy
- Use that information to project the firm's financial statements several years into the future
- Apply various valuation techniques (such as free cash flow valuation and multiples approaches) to determine forecasted (target) prices of the firm's shares.
Supply Chain Management
A supply chain comprises all the processes and activities involved with product delivery, from the extraction of raw materials, through transportation and processing, to the delivery of finished products to the customer. These activities typically involve numerous geographic locations and firms with different objectives. The crucial decisions include infrastructure investments, the quantities to produce and ship, the timing of shipments, where to hold inventories, and which firms should be responsible for which activities. The management of supply chains is difficult and complicated, but essential in the modern economy. This course will cover the basic facts and principles of the subject.
Decision Models
Successful management requires the ability to recognize a decision situation, understand its essential features, and make a smart choice. However, many of these situations — particularly those involving uncertainty and/or complex interactions — may be too difficult to grasp intuitively, and the stakes may be too high to learn by experience. In these cases, we may benefit from using decision models - simplified representations of these situations that allow you to consider the different possible scenarios and learn more about the problem. This course introduces several commonly used modeling tools (decision trees, Monte Carlo simulation, and optimization) and provides an introduction to the art of modeling in a Microsoft Excel environment. Familiarity with Excel is an important prerequisite for this course.