As a student in the one-year Global Executive MBA program, you will be immersed in a full-time learning environment leveraging your professional experience as you collaborate with your classmates and gain knowledge and insights from top faculty and business leaders. The program culminates in a team-based consulting project tackling real-world challenges that face organizations. You will synthesize the knowledge you and your classmates have gained throughout the program to present your solution.
In line with UW Foster’s Purpose Statement of “Together, we foster leaders, insights, and progress to better humanity,” the Global Executive MBA curriculum incorporates theme-based learning with a focus on how businesses can better humanity. The 2024-2025 class will include learning about managing climate risks and opportunities. This topic will be a course offering as well as integrated in the global immersion experience during Spring break 2025, where students will visit key organizations and learn from faculty.
Students have the option to take select electives to pursue their own areas of interest as well as to qualify for a STEM-designated degree, allowing international students the option to extend their OPT experience.
The curriculum highlights executive perspectives from the Greater Seattle region, allowing students to connect with and learn from some of the most successful global leaders.
Program Structure
GEMBA program includes four quarters, beginning with summer quarter in June 2024. The 2024-2025 will begin with in-person orientation June 6-7, 2024 with summer class beginning on June 17, 2024. For international students, the F-1 visa will allow you to come to Seattle 30 days prior to the orientation date. Graduation takes place in early June 2025.
Teamwork and Managerial Effectiveness
This course introduces concepts and principles fundamental to building and maintaining effective work teams and cohort cohesion. It will address how to (1) develop strong, shared commitment to a compelling purpose, (2) bring about collective buy-in to concrete performance objectives, (3) ensure adherence to a set of suitable work rules, and (4) build the interpersonal trust crucial to mutual team member support and, ultimately, exemplary student performance.
Financial Reporting & Analysis
This course focuses on the rules by which firms (and individuals) report the results of their operations to outsiders such as stockholders, potential investors, creditors, suppliers, and regulatory agencies. Students will learn to create balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements from the underlying transactions. Students will learn accounting vocabulary and some of the limitations of the basic accounting model. By examining the political process by which accounting standards evolve, students will gain insights into why these limitations exist and why they are likely to persist. The text materials will be supplemented with actual case studies and current articles from the financial press (e.g., Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes, Fortune and Barron’s). Students will go beyond simply learning and applying the rules to the “art” of using and interpreting accounting information. Financial accounting is a measurement tool and a communication system for the transmission of relevant economic information to decision-makers (i.e., user groups) for efficient resource allocation and utilization.
Marketing Strategy
This course focuses on marketing strategy from a decision-making perspective by linking marketing decisions and strategy to business performance. In the course, students will learn about specific marketing strategies including developing and launching innovative products and building customer loyalty as well as critical marketing tools and processes.
Microeconomic Analysis
This course has a dual purpose. First, it teaches students the fundamental principles of microeconomics, the theory of individual markets and individual agents. Second, it shows students how these principles can be applied to managerial decisions and firm optimization.
Statistics
This course reviews the uses of statistical tools to present, analyze, and interpret business data. We emphasize applications of statistical tools and their uses for organizational decision-making, not the theoretical bases of statistical tools. Students will develop data and analysis skills to apply in other courses, work experiences, and life experiences. Activities include representing data through tables, graphs, and numerical summaries; examining the role of probability in statistics; estimating populations and testing hypotheses about populations using sample data; conducting correlation, regression, and time-series analyses; and analyzing contingency tables.
Global Competitive Strategy
This course is intended to help students develop a better understanding of the global environment in which US businesses compete. The US economy is increasingly linked to the rest of the world and many industries are global; therefore, international markets and competitors cannot be ignored. Organizations are affected by international developments, and international business is critical to many. In a global economy, this means that managers need to develop a broad vision and an organization that can operate and compete effectively worldwide. This requires an appreciation of the importance of international markets. It means being willing to really think about the similarities and differences that exist among national markets and national business practices.
Leadership Development
The focus of this class is to expose the GEMBA students on different leadership styles and strategies and how organizations deal with current and future challenges. Seattle is the home of some of the most successful companies in the world. Executives from these organizations will come to class and share their leadership values, philosophies, and strategies and provide opportunities for the students to ask questions and learn from their experience.
Decision Support Models
This course presents and illustrates the use of techniques (such as simulation, heuristics, queuing, decision analysis and linear programming) that have been developed to help managers deal with complicated choice problems in manufacturing, service operations, marketing, and other areas.
Operations Management
This course is concerned with the system of delivery in any enterprise, manufacturing, or service, public or private, profit or non-profit. The basic mission is to foster an understanding of how to continuously deliver superior value for customers in a manner that is profitable for the firm. This understanding is important both for those who manage operations and those whose career plans lie in other areas. For example, the commitment of product delivery dates is typically viewed as a marketing issue, yet products are built by manufacturing. Knowing how and why inventories accumulate permits more effective financial controls. Facility justification is typically a financial concern, but the capacity additions can have a dramatic effect on operational performance, especially at peak times in service organizations. Traditional accounting practices may inadvertently provide disincentives toward productive behavior.
Corporate Finance
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to corporate financial management emphasizing relevant modern theory and practical applications. Topics include financial statement analysis, financial planning, financial markets, principles of valuations, capital budgeting, capital structure, the cost of capital, dividend policy, merger analysis and issues of financial policy.
Macroeconomics
This course builds a framework for understanding movements in economy-wide magnitudes such as price level, gross domestic product, unemployment rate, interest rate and exchange rate that affect business decisions. The framework is used to analyze contemporary economic issues that impact business, including the recent conduct of monetary and fiscal policy, growth, competitiveness, and trade.
Leading Teams and Organizations
This course introduces concepts and principles fundamental to creating and leading effective organizations. Major topics include perception and decision-making, employee motivation, group and team processes, human resource management practices, strategic organizational design, power and politics, corporate culture, and organizational change and transformation. The instructional approach includes readings, discussions, lectures, case analyses, video presentations, experiential exercises, and analyses of “living cases.” A central goal of this course is to provide a foundation for a lifetime of leadership practice through the development of analytic skills to understand and influence your own and others’ behavior at work.
Ethical Leadership
This course examines business ethics through case studies and short readings in ethical theory. Class discussions rely heavily on student contributions supplemented by brief lectures. Emphasis is placed on the development of a framework that helps managers make ethical decisions in a business environment.
Elective Course Offerings
In addition to the core courses, the GEMBA students will have the opportunity to take 8 credits from a designated list of elective courses.
Students travel outside the country for a weeklong International Immersion, gaining an in-person understanding of conducting business globally. Students prepare by learning about the selected country’s economic, social, political, and business environments. While in-country, students visit and interact with leaders representing a wide variety of important industries and types of organizations. The program fee covers most on-the-ground expenses of the International Immersion including hotel accommodations and many meals; the program fee does not include flight or other transportation costs or incidentals.
In-person (Seattle, UW Campus)
Managerial Accounting
This course deals with the preparation and use of accounting information by managers for decision-making purposes. Topics include cost concepts, cost behavior, overhead allocation (including activity-based costing), budgeting, responsibility accounting, short-term decisions, and capital budgeting. Cases based on actual management decisions are used to enhance understanding of concepts and techniques.
Applied Strategy/Business Consulting Project
This course exists to facilitate successful completion of a mutually agreed-upon project for a client organization, while offering a practical “learning by doing” experience in which students apply concepts, tools, and theories from the MBA curriculum to complex real‐world challenges and opportunities. Each year, the consulting project organizations and focus area vary depending on current trends and issues facing the business environment.
Elective Course Offerings
In addition to the core courses, the GEMBA students will have the opportunity to take 8 credits from a designated list of elective courses.
Students who complete 16 credits from a defined list of management science elective courses and meet the degree requirements of the GEMBA Program earn both the MBA degree and the STEM-designated MBA Management Science Option. Importantly, GEMBA students will be able to earn the 16 credits with careful elective course selection without having to lengthen their program or incurring additional cost. The GEMBA team will be able to help you with planning this option.
Completion of the MBA Management Science Option also permits GEMBA students studying on F-1 visas to participate in the initial 12-month period of post-degree Optional Practical Training (OPT) while also applying for the 24-month STEM OPT Extension.
You can find additional information about the STEM designation and OPT extension, and U.S. Government policies here.