Weekend Executive MBA Curriculum | UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School

Build a foundation with core courses.

The Weekend Executive MBA curriculum begins with core courses that form a common foundation for you and your peers. You will build your leadership and team skills as you complete projects with your study team. To maximize productivity, the Weekend Executive MBA program blends in-person learning with asynchronous, online coursework — providing more time for meaningful discussion and shared perspective with faculty and your peers during class weekends.

Leadership courses are integrated into the core curriculum, and additional leadership courses, assessments, and development opportunities are woven throughout the program experience. The leadership curriculum is specifically designed for mid- and senior-level executives with high potential careers and is designed to help you refine, improve, and strengthen your personal leadership style.

Customize your coursework to meet your goals.

During your second year in the program, you will take 12 to 13 electives from several dozen course options, including experiential opportunities such as the Global Entrepreneurship Lab (GEL), Global Immersion Electives (GIEs) and STAR consulting projects. Executive MBA electives are offered in a variety of scheduling options, including some virtual spaces and course options, giving you significant flexibility to pursue courses that best align with your career objectives and interests.

Select courses that will help you climb the corporate ladder, shift to a new career focus or build a business – in topics that range from managerial decision making, to negotiations, to entrepreneurial finance, to brand strategy. Few top executive MBA programs offer more curriculum flexibility or this many elective options.

Focus your skillset with a concentration.

As an Executive MBA student, you’ll also have the opportunity to select from six concentrations that help you build knowledge in a particular focus area to support your career goals. To complete a concentration, you’ll take a minimum of five of the seven courses offered in each area. You can also choose to combine two concentrations that align with your personal and professional focus.

Concentrations are optional, and you have the opportunity to take electives in any discipline to create a custom curriculum, if preferred. The concentrations offered in our Weekend Executive MBA program are:

Data Analysis and Decision Making: Topics explored include: communicating with data, analytics for decision making, consulting skills and frameworks, and operations strategy.

Entrepreneurship: Topics explored include: strategy and business innovation, entrepreneurial finance, entrepreneurship – launch and discovery, and negotiations.

Finance: Topics explored include: corporate financial strategy, mergers and acquisitions, global financial markets, and investments.

Leading People and Organizations: Topics explored include: leading diverse and inclusive organizations, people analytics, storytelling to influence and inspire, and leading in the middle.

Customers and Markets: Topics explored include: marketing strategy, marketing analytics, global brand strategy, pricing, and sales.

Strategy: Topics explored include: strategy and business innovation, consulting skills and frameworks, strategic operations, and industry-intensive topics (such as strategy in high velocity markets).

Core Courses

During the Executive MBA program core, each term has an outcomes-based theme, ensuring you build a relevant and deep skillset that will act as the foundation of your MBA experience.
*Course sequence is subject to change.

January Term: Communicating Strategic Data-Driven Decisions

Business Statistics and Analytics (2.0 credit hours)
Most interesting management problems include uncertainty, and data collection and analysis is the natural way to understand and manipulate uncertainty. Understanding how to think about uncertainty, what to do with data, and how to harness data for effective decision-making are core management skills. This basic course in statistics and simulation modeling will provide you with fundamental tools for data analysis and decision-making.

Financial Accounting (2.0 credit hours)
Financial accounting depicts the economic reality of an entity, communicating information between firms and outside stakeholders, including investors, creditors, customers, suppliers and regulators. Accounting supplies critical information that provides a basis for managing organizations, securing capital from investors, supporting strategic decision-making, analyzing competitors and customers, and disciplining the behavior of corporate executives. This course will increase your sophistication in extracting information from financial reports and communicating the financial implications of decisions and events with others, both inside and outside of your organization.

Strategy (2.0 credit hours)
This course will increase your ability to analyze the strategy of corporations. You will gain an understanding of what allows certain firms to succeed, earning positive economic profits, while others fail. You’ll also learn why certain firms sustain their economic profits over long periods of time, while other firms’ profits quickly disappear. We will focus on large strategic decisions that firms face and review broad principles that can be applied across firms and markets from the frameworks of economic and behavioral theories.

Communicating Complex Information (2.0 credit hours)
Leaders at all levels of an organization must know how to communicate complex—often data-laden—information to non-experts, decision-makers, and other target audiences. This course will help you learn how to write effective and efficient information-rich informative and negative messages, design audience-centered slides and visualizations, organize informative data-driven presentations, and navigate interactive meetings and presentations. You will receive personalized feedback throughout the course on your writing and presenting skills.

Impact Weekend I: Redefining Leadership

Leading Complex Change (2.0 credit hours)
This course is a deep dive into topics introduced in the Leading and Managing course. We will focus on identifying, understanding, and leading complex change in organizations. You will learn new science and frameworks, but the bulk of the course is focused on practice, discussion, self-reflection and application. Through a mix of activities, reading, self-assessments, breakout discussions, and team activities and competitions, you will learn how to be an effective leader in challenging circumstances and have fun doing so!

April Term: Creating Value in Organizations

Financial Tools (2.0 credit hours)
This course will strengthen your ability to actively participate and contribute to the value-creation process in your company. You’ll explore the methods and techniques of modern finance for financial decision-making. We’ll focus on the value creation process and economic value drivers, with the aim of providing executives with a clear framework for corporate value maximization. We’ll also discuss specific techniques for assessing value created by investment projects in the context of capital budgeting. This will include topics such as time-value of money, profitability and value drivers, financial forecasting and cash-flows projections, assessment of risk factors, and project/firm valuation.

Marketing: Core Concepts and Tools (2.0 credit hours)
The role of marketing management is to identify, measure and deliver the needs and wants of customers, to determine which targets the business can and should serve, to decide on the appropriate offerings to serve these markets, and to determine the optimal methods of pricing, promoting, and distributing the firm’s offerings. In this course, you’ll learn how successful organizations integrate their objectives and resources with the needs and opportunities of the marketplace.

Operations (2.0 credit hours)
Operations management can be defined as the design, operation, and improvement of the systems that create and deliver the firm’s primary products and services. This course provides you with an understanding of the operations management function – focusing on managing activities necessary to utilize its resources to meet its customers’ needs – and its relationship to other functional areas within the firm.

Leading and Managing (2.0 credit hours)
This course covers and applies a variety of core concepts and theories from sociology, psychology and organizational science, which form the knowledge base for leadership and management skills. We will focus on surveying key core skills and preparing you for continuous learning of these skills. You will be provided with in-depth materials for every topic through recent significant articles on the topic, self-evaluation instruments, and specific suggestions for further learning and skills development.

July Term: Customer and Strategic Analysis

Finance (2.0 credit hours)
Through a combination of lecture and class discussion, this course will advance your training in the theory and practice of financial management so you’re well-versed in using finance concepts to make decisions — skills applicable both in your current organization and beyond. Specifically, we will delve into two topics that will give us insight into financial decision-making: Options and Capital Structure.

Customer Values Strategies (2.0 credit hours)
The very existence of for- or non-profit businesses depends on their ability to create, communicate, deliver, and capture customer value. Customer value represents the primary pursuit of firms so business processes and offerings are geared toward monetizing this value. This course will help you conceptualize customer value and take a customer value perspective to understand strategies that seek to design, cultivate, and harvest customer value. You will explore case studies to develop frameworks and toolkits to enhance and enrich your understanding of customer value and strategies to ‘profitably’ manage customer value.

Microeconomics (2.0 credit hours)
This course will serve as an introduction to Microeconomics. Successful business leaders need to understand, explicitly and implicitly, the essential tenets of microeconomic thinking. That knowledge will drive your decision-making, and affects each aspect of the firm’s operations — including how it finances, markets and produces its products.

Strategic Cost Analysis and Performance Management (2.0 credit hours)
The objective of this course is to develop a sophisticated understanding of the powerful role of strategic cost analysis and performance measurement in supporting decision-making, performance management and incentive alignment. This course will help you make business decisions, evaluate business units, and evaluate others (or be evaluated) through the use of cost and performance measurement systems. If you intend to further your career as a management consultant, entrepreneur, manager (e.g. CEO, CFO, COO or product manager), or a role that requires you to understand how firms make decisions and evaluate performance, then this course will be highly relevant to your work.

Impact Weekend II: Innovating for your Future

October Term: Thinking Globally in a Diverse World

Global Supply Chain Management (2.0 credit hours)
The world of business has become increasingly global and highly competitive. Effective supply
chain management has become a key determinant of success and a main focus for senior management in many industries. This course focuses on analysis, management and improvement of global supply chain processes. You will learn tools and strategies that enable firms to coordinate, configure and customize their global supply chains in an ever-changing ecosystem. Upon completion, you will have the necessary knowledge and tools to evaluate a current global supply chain and recommend strategic changes to the supply chain processes.

Global Context of Business (2.0 credit hours)
In this class, you’ll explore all aspects of business — strategy, finance, operations, human resources and marketing — in a global context. We’ll leverage the learning from other classes that you will have completed in the program as we explore the construct of “globalization” — keeping in mind recent events. The course is taught in an inductive approach (i.e. the only assigned readings on each day of the class will be cases). You are required to read the cases and come prepared to discuss them in each session.

Global Economics (2.0 credit hours)
Global Economics introduces you to the major economic factors and relationships most relevant to today’s business decisions. The course focuses on understanding how the current environment and associated policy choices impact companies and individuals, with special attention to foreign currency and lending markets. You’ll be required to follow current events in the global economy to better understand how these events impact managerial decisions.

Ethical, Inclusive Leadership (2.0 credit hours)
This course focuses on identifying and building leadership skills that will enable you to match your leadership approach to specific organizational demands focused on leading ethical and inclusive outcomes. You’ll develop these skills through course material on theoretical principles of ethics and inclusion, and experiential learning through cases, scenarios, and activities. You will learn to recognize ethical aspects and inclusion opportunities in business situations, diagnose problems associated with ethics and inclusion, and develop action plans to best fulfill ethics and inclusion priorities within your organization.

Elective courses

*Courses are subject to change

Communication

Experiential Learning Opportunities

Finance and Accounting

Entrepreneurship

Management and Strategy

Marketing

Operations

Technology and Data

Electives after graduation

You can keep your MBA current by taking Executive MBA elective courses in Chapel Hill for a nominal fee. This benefit is offered throughout your career and many of our alumni use it to strengthen their skills in a particular area to prepare for a new role or career transition.

I’m interested.

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