Negotiation is a foundational leadership skill. It is also the art and science by which agreements are reached, problems are solved, and disputes are settled between two or more parties. This course has two main objectives. The first is to discuss and apply theories that you may find helpful in your own negotiations. The second is to sharpen your skills in negotiation by having you engage in this activity with your colleagues in realistic settings.

Starting from a critical incident (a conversation between two administrative employees passing a potential dubious payment) we challenge participants to reflect on two basic questions throughout the course: 1) how should organizational culture and structures help to deal with ethical issues? (What should the organization do?) and 2) how to prepare for ethical issues from a leadership perspective. (What can I do?)

Leadership development requires learning new ways of being, which is necessary to solve increasingly complex strategic organizational problems. The two-pronged responsibilities of the leader — reaching organizational goals and developing people in their teams — can be challenging, particularly when professional, personal, and global pressures compete for one’s inner resources. Being an effective leader requires an inner transformation, yet changing oneself in adulthood has proven for many to be a difficult task. This course offers students frameworks and techniques through which they will set their developmental priorities and gain the techniques and skills necessary to complete the transformation.

At the core of this course is an intensive residential retreat, during which students will be provided with carefully curated exercises designed to help them take decisive steps toward new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. The intensive work during the retreat is designed to support students in achieving crucial insights that can propel their whole development — as a leader and, more broadly, as a person. The sessions that precede and follow the retreat will help students continue working on their developmental priorities throughout their MBA experience. The final session will allow students to debrief their Retreat experience and refine their developmental commitments going forward.

This course will expose you to the most useful ideas about how to lead and will show how these ideas can be put together into a comprehensive framework. The concepts and theories are in the book and the readings. Valuable class and group time will be spent testing the ideas and applying them in various situations — through cases, videos, and personal example.

This short, but intensive course presents an evidence-based tools to help people leverage the advantages of diverse teams, while minimizing the challenges. Moreover, it provides you with an opportunity to practice your team skills through exercises, case discussions, interactive lectures, and videos. By engaging with the course material, you will gain insight into your own behaviour in teams and have the chance for self-development; you will learn how to work more effectively in the study teams you will be part of during the GEMBA program.

The course describes the process of quantitative decision making and risk analysis in general business contexts. We first explore processes associated with decision making, then we enter into a complex decision, dig into the main elements of a decision problem, and put to work the lessons learned through examples and case studies.

Businesses and organizations are constantly adapting to new pressures and instituting solutions to deal with threats from the competitive, political, social, and regulatory environments. These threats, however, are not always external in nature. Some emanate from within the company as well. During times when these threats quickly materialize, or when unforeseen events result in a crisis, adaptation is not sufficient. This course explores the role of leaders throughout the governance structure of organizations that are in crisis. Boards of Directors, CEOs, Top Management Teams, and other leaders have a profound effect on the functioning and reputation of their organizations. This effect is amplified during times of crisis. The course will look at ways to best handle these situations with the goals of preparing for and minimizing the negative effects on the organization as well as creating positive solutions for employee well-being and customer relations.

Leadership development requires learning new ways of being for solving increasingly complex strategic organizational problems. The two-pronged responsibilities of the leader — reaching organizational goals and developing people in their teams — can be a difficult task, particularly when professional, personal, and global pressures compete for one's inner resources. Becoming a leader requires an inner transformation yet changing oneself in adulthood has proven for many to be a difficult task.

This course helps explain how the usual path to change — such as implementing a new set of behaviours through willpower — frequently fails because behaviour is only one part of a larger self- system which includes wants, body/past, emotions, and thoughts, all of which can resist movement. All aspects of the self, though intricately linked, have their own mechanisms of change, and for the whole 'self' to change it requires moving all the parts together. We address the five parts of the self in turn, focusing on exercises that clarify and set them into motion. These learnings are then applied to broader organizational dynamics and means of facilitating healthy organizational change.

The goal of this course is to support students in their continuing growth as leaders by helping them exercise effective agency and accountability in achieving their developmental aspirations from the program.

This goal will be achieved by providing students an opportunity to 'get on the balcony' to assess their career progression to date and identify patterns of behaviour that are both helping and hindering their continuing development as leaders. Having identified their own developmental priorities as well as the root drivers of those behaviors, students will have an opportunity to articulate and commit to a going-forward development plan to embed new ways of acting and being that they have identified as key to becoming a more effective leader in the context of their work.

This course seeks to teach you about several aspects of statistics, including: summary statistics like means and variances; the relationship between conditional means and linear regressions; using statistical models to make predictions. Most importantly, though, the course culminates in a discussion of the fundamentals of statistical causality, which is an idea that is crucial to business decision-making.

Innovation is the key for the long term prosperity of any economy, and fosters both growth and competitiveness of corporations within mature industries.

The management of innovation is commonly related to the impact of technology on the company’s offering, and it is frequently associated to the management of the R&D departments.

Both academic research and business cases have demonstrated that innovation is, most of all, a crucial competence to be nurtured within organizations, and the output of the synergic design of dedicated processes, organizational structures, roles and methodologies.

The goal of this class is to enable a deep dive into the management of innovation, passing from the traditional and still effective product perspective, into a service perspective and getting finally to the new frontier of innovation management, which is the integrated design of business, product, and service as enablers of a targeted level of customer experience.

This course focuses on the measurement and management of market risk. The first part of the course looks at how financial institutions manage their market risk in the equity, fixed income and derivatives trading portfolios. The second part examines dynamic models to capture volatility and correlation in the return on traded assets. Copula models will also be developed as a tool to integrate market, credit risk, and operational risk as well as other risks facing the organization. Finally, we consider how market risk is measured and managed at the enterprise level.

This course provides a qualitative description of commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, mutual funds, and central banking. Cases and current examples are used throughout the course to provide illustrations of the challenges facing financial institutions, requiring both qualitative and quantitative analysis. Students will participate in a banking simulation where students are asked to make quarterly decisions on loans, deposits, securities, etc. with the objective of managing bank risk while maintaining bank profitability.

Regulation drives much of risk management in financial institutions. This course explains why this is the case. It explains the history of the regulation of banks and insurance companies focusing particularly on regulatory changes that have been implemented since the 2008 credit crisis and those that will be implemented in the next few years. An important part of the course is a group project where students will evaluate a regulatory directive and present their findings to their peers.

It is now widely recognized that Operational Risk is as important, if not more important, than credit risk or market risk for a financial institution. This course will provide a detailed analysis of key areas of operational risk including legal risk (client, employee, and shareholder claims), compliance risk (regulatory fines and sanctions), damage to assets, external events, cyber risk, internal and external fraud. Students will be exposed to the challenges of a category of risk that often results from complex interactions across people process and systems and across departments of a financial organization.

This course focuses on the pricing, measurement and management of interest rate and credit risks. It provides a broad overview of the issues in fixed income and credit risks, applies state-of-the-art credit risk pricing, measurement, and management techniques.

The emphasis of this course will be on both qualitative and quantitative aspects of credit risk management as well as the implementation of models to capture credit risk in traded assets. Key focus will be given on derivative pricing with respect to interest rate and credit derivatives, credit risk scorecard modelling, structural models for credit risk, and credit risk model validation.

We will use probabilistic modeling and stochastic simulation as tools for guiding risk-informed decisions in complex environments with material uncertainty about the future. The first part of the course will focus on quantifying various measures of equity return risk using historical data. We then focus on forecasting distributions of returns using both parametric and nonparametric approaches. Forecasting requires a 'model' so we assess parameter and model risk. This part of the course emphasizes developing models linked to financial data and assessing model performance.

The second part of the course uses stochastic simulation cases to practice deriving robust strategies for the decisions that risk managers must make in real time, including managing liquidity risk, market risk, crash risk, and real economy risks. We use the RIT market simulator platform (analogous to using a flight simulator); decision models for each RIT case are linked to data from the simulated market, that is, data generated by the class participants. The markets aggregate participants' decisions and provide immediate feedback, allowing you to adapt strategies given the range of potential outcomes experienced in the multiple replications of the case.

This course is intended to prepare MFRM students to be able to understand and monitor risks forthcoming from global and national macroeconomies. We will review a number of different sources of macroeconomic risk, both short-term and longer-term, and consider the likely greatest areas of risk over the next 5-10 years and beyond. We will examine how ongoing and 'real-world' macroeconomic analysis and forecasting are carried out, and by whom, and consider the best sources for keeping aware of key macroeconomic issues in a busy professional life.

This quantitative course presents advanced material on a broad range of topics relevant for investment professionals. Topics include the investor behaviour and preference, money management industry (mutual funds, pension funds, hedge funds, ETFs), properties of asset returns, asset pricing models, investment strategies designed to exploit market inefficiency, modern techniques for optimal portfolio selection, portfolio performance attribution, and factor approach to investing. The course interprets asset management as a problem in understanding and exploiting factor risk premiums.

This course covers topics associated with risk in the insurance industry, including life, health, property and casualty, reinsurance, as well as risk in pension plans and retirement. The emphasis is mainly put on the management of the liability side of the balance sheet of such entities, and the tools available to risk managers to find the optimal risk/reward package.

This course looks at the range of derivative products and the pricing models used to value and manage the risk of these products. The course starts with simple equity options and then moves on to exotic options and options on other types of assets. It also covers credit and interest rate derivatives.

A distinctive feature of the MFRM program is the integrated Risk Management Project undertaken from January to March, where students tackle a real risk issue that is relevant and important to financial institutions. Project placements take students out of the classroom and into the industry, allowing students to work in-house with practicing risk management professionals. Presentations of project findings will be given to practitioners, fellow students, and faculty in mid-March.

This course provides an overview of the basic tools in machine learning, with emphases on applications in finance. Machine learning plays an important role in FinTech. Individual investors and financial institutions who are able to leverage these new tools and technology will have a significant advantage. This course discusses these new opportunities and challenges. It seeks to equip students with these highly coveted skills in the market.

In addition to machine learning, blockchain is a significant component of FinTech. It is the technology behind cryptocurrencies and allows to create, record, trade, and transfer any digital assets. The last three lectures (delivered by Professor Andreas Park) cover the main ideas that are essential for the functioning of a blockchain, and it then takes a deep dive into some of the most notable innovations in the nascent field of decentralized finance (DeFi).

More than 80% of human work in organizations is carried out in groups and teams, and around 80% of an executive's time is spent on communicating. Generative AI tools (and, in particular, Large Language Models and Large Symbol Models capable of interacting with people in textual or symbolic forms) will likely be a complement or substitute for significant components of the individual work people still do in organizations within five years. We are aiming to help each participant to become more skilled at those skills that are uniquely human in an executive setting — by becoming an astute and informed observer, evaluator and designer of her/his own social, relational, and communicative interactions, and by becoming informed users of Large Language Models to generate useful prototypes, blueprints for communications in the specific genres of business, which include emails, memoranda, presentations, and pitches.

This is an advanced financial reporting course. This course seeks to deepen the students' understanding of financial reporting alternatives and how professionals can apply their professional judgement in ensuring the application is appropriate. The course will build on the very strong accounting undergraduate courses already taken by the students and will focus on integration and the development of professional skills in addition to providing additional technical content. Students will be expected to understand, interpret, and critically evaluate generally accepted accounting principles related to financial accounting topics. Cases will be used to develop and apply judgment, critical thinking, and problem solving skills. The technical competencies and enabling skills introduced in the course cover and go beyond those outlined in the CPA competency map.

This course prepares students with the competencies required to identify and address the taxation issues and planning opportunities encountered by professional accountants. This course is designed to integrate the knowledge and skills gained in the prerequisite undergraduate taxation courses with other technical areas outlined on the CPA Competency Map.

This course prepares students with to deepen the students' understanding of assurance and controls and how professionals can apply their professional judgement in ensuring the application is appropriate. The course will build on the assurance courses already taken at the undergraduate level. It will focus on integration and the development of professional skills in addition to providing additional technical content. Students will be expected to understand, interpret, and critically evaluate generally accepted accounting and assurance principles, with an emphasis on the assurance engagement. The technical competencies and enabling skills introduced in the course cover and go beyond those outlined in the CPA competency map.

This course is a capstone course that focuses on developing the judgement, analytical, diagnostic, and evaluative skills required to be a professional accountant. This course will continue to develop students' case writing and business analysis capabilities, covered in their undergraduate degree, using simulated business cases. The complex nature of business transactions and situations often require the integration of the different facets of accounting education including financial accounting, finance, management accounting, information systems, assurance, and taxation knowledge. Students will be expected to assume different roles in the business cases to develop their integrative thinking to identify and prioritize issues and develop relevant recommendations using both accounting standards and professional judgement.

Cases will be used to develop and apply judgment, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. The technical competencies and enabling skills introduced in the course cover and go beyond those outlined in the CPA competency map.

This is a course on finance as well as governance and professional practice issues that students may face in their future careers as accountants. The finance portion of the course will cover cash flows, valuation methods, determination of financing needs and analysis of financing options. Students will be required to integrate accounting, assurance, taxation, and financial knowledge to form supported recommendations for the various scenarios that will be analyzed. For the governance and professional practice portion of the course, student will be asked to analyze various ethical scenarios and develop a balanced analysis considering stakeholders involved to recommend a course of action.

Cases will be used to develop and apply judgment, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. The technical competencies and enabling skills introduced in the course cover and go beyond those outlined in the CPA competency map.