Business School Profiles

The University of Michigan has been regarded as one of the best public research universities. Ross delivers management education with best-of-class training in all disciplines and functional areas—from finance and marketing to corporate strategy and entrepreneurial studies. Students have access to a large research university, with opportunities for interdisciplinary learning in a range of academic and professional fields. Courses at Ross are offered in ten departments.

Action-based learning is the Ross approach to business education. It requires students to connect with the world of practice. The Multidisciplinary Action Projects (MAP) is a large portion of the distinctive style of learning. The approach looks beyond problem solving to help students realize an opportunity. Students must apply both analytical rigor and the creative imagination. Ross believes leadership can be learned when students are thrust into leadership roles.

First year Ross MBA students devote themselves exclusively to MAP for the spring semester as a requirement of the core curriculum. MAP projects can be corporate, entrepreneurial, or nonprofit projects in the U.S. or abroad which require thoughtful and actionable recommendations to address pressing organizational challenges. Each team of 4–6 students are guided by faculty advisers. At the end of the project, teams present analyses and recommendations in a written report and a presentation.

The Ross Leadership Initiative is an action-based learning program that immerses students in real-world situations. During the first week, students engage in a weeklong, action-based immersion learning program for leadership development. The Foundation Session is a six-day orientation session that exposes students to the latest on leadership and seeks to help students build teamwork, creativity, and innovation skills. In the Leadership Crisis Challengeprogram, student teams are immersed in a crisis case situation where they must present a point of view to an audience of various stakeholders. Finalists appear before an external corporate board, who will choose a winning team.

The first year of the Ross MBA program immerses students in a broad business curriculum, and concludes with a seven-week Multi-Disciplinary Action Project, enabling students to apply what they’ve learned in a real-life business situation. Students take their core courses in cohort sections.

Principles of Financial Accounting

This course introduces the basic concepts and methods used in corporate financial statements. Readings, problems and cases are used. Major topics included are: The Basic Accrual Model, Analysis of Transactions, Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement Construction and Analysis.

Applied Microeconomics

This course provides students with the foundations of microeconomic analysis. The primary objective is to develop the abilities of students to apply fundamental microeconomic concepts to a wide range of managerial decisions, as well as public policy issues. Foundation topics include: costs and supply behavior of the firm; consumer behavior and market demand; market forces, price formation and resource allocation; international trade and trade restrictions; and, market power and price-setting behavior. Students will also be introduced to more advanced aspects of microeconomic analysis. Advanced topics include; decision-making with risk and imperfect information; and, complex pricing strategies.

Corporate Strategy

This course focuses on the job, perspective, and skills of the general manager in diagnosing what is critical in complex business situations and finding realistic solutions to strategic and organizational problems. The course provides a total business perspective, and thus serves as a foundation on which to build expertise in various functional areas.

Applied Business Statistics

This course covers probability, sampling distributions, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, correlation, and simple and multiple regression analysis. Business applications are used to illustrate these concepts. The course requires familiarity with the statistical analysis package of MS Excel.

Managerial Accounting

This course introduces the basic concepts of managerial accounting for internal decision-making. Major topics included are product costing, emphasizing costing approaches used in today's business environments, relevant costs for decision analysis, variance analysis, divisional performance evaluation, and transfer pricing.

Operations Management

All value in society is generated by transforming one set of things into other, different things. Without such transformations, there would be no wealth creation and no rationale for business. Operations management is the design and management of those transformation processes. In this course, we will provide a framework for systematically examining and understanding operation management issues. We will also expose you to a few of the most important tools and practices that are useful in managing manufacturing and service production systems.

Financial Management

The course is primarily devoted to the principles of financial valuation. We will first discuss the concept of present value in extensive detail, and then apply the principles of valuation to value (a) real projects (or what is commonly referred to as capital budgeting) and (b) financial securities (stocks and bonds) under certainty. Since financial decision-making virtually always involves risk & uncertainty, we will then introduce the concept of risk, and the relation between risk & return. We will integrate our knowledge of cash flows with our understanding of risk to modify capital budgeting techniques in the presence of risk & uncertainty. The course concludes with an introductory treatment of the effects of financing on capital budgeting decisions. Although the concepts of competitive capital markets and market efficiency will not be covered in a separate session, they will be woven in the fabric of the course.

Marketing Management

This course is concerned with understanding 1) an entity's own goals and abilities and 2) its potential and existing customers and competitors as bases for setting objectives and making decisions about products, services, pricing, promotion, and distribution. The ability to analyze current situations and objectives, recognize impediments, and generate solutions is the foundation for creating, achieving, and maintaining competitive advantage. This is a management-oriented course designed to give students an integrative framework for analyzing marketing programs and making marketing decisions. Leveraging the Business School's action-based learning approach, student teams take an active part in course development by creating cases based on their own areas of interest. The course consists of a mixture of lectures, student case presentations, in-class exercises, and a case-based final examination.

Human Behavior & Organization

This is a course in the diagnosis & management of human behavior in organizations. One of the most important keys to your success as a manager is the ability to generate energy & commitment among people within an organization and to channel that energy and commitment toward critical organizational goals. Doing this requires a thorough understanding of the root causes of human attitudes & behavior and how they are influenced by your actions as a manager and by the surrounding organizational context. Thus, the course seeks an understanding of human behavior in hopes that such an understanding will enhance management practice. It is designed to include both individual level and organizational level concepts to enable students to develop an understanding of both psychological and contextual factors that affect behavior in the workplace