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The 2006–2007 academic year marked the introduction of the Yale School of Management’s integrated curriculum model.

In the last thirty years, while the management profession has changed significantly, management education has not. Most business school curricula remain compartmentalized by discipline — Marketing, Finance, Economics, and so forth. This model made sense when a successful career was characterized by vertical advancement in a single field within a large, functionally divided corporate bureaucracy.

But today, managerial careers cross the boundaries of function, organization, and industry, as well as cultural and political borders. Managers in large organizations must be entrepreneurial in the sense that their success depends on their ability to synthesize disparate information, analyze competing functional priorities, and draw together and coordinate resources and individuals in a context that is often fluid and decentralized. So rather than teaching management concepts in separate, single-subject courses like Finance or Marketing, Yale SOM ’s approach teaches management in an integrated way — the way in which most managers must function every day to achieve success.

The heart of the first-year curriculum is a series of eight multidisciplinary courses, called Organizational Perspectives, that are structured around the organizational roles a manager must engage, motivate, and lead in order to solve problems — or make progress. These roles are both internal to the organization — the Innovator, the Operations Engine, the Employee, and Sourcing and Managing Funds (or CFO) — and external to the organization — the Investor, the Customer, the Competitor, and State and Society.

This focus on organizational role, instead of disciplinary topic, creates a richer, more relevant context for students to learn the concepts they need to succeed as managers.

Orientation to Management

Introduces basic language, concepts, tools, and problem-framing methodologies that will be drawn on broadly throughout the curriculum but are not easily introduced in subsequent courses; develops techniques for interpersonal effectiveness in critical work relationships and teams; and begins the process of focusing career aspirations.

Managing Groups and Teams
This is a short course on the theory and practice of leading, managing, and functioning in task-performing groups and teams. It has two primary goals: first, to provide students with a conceptual framework for analyzing group dynamics, diagnosing performance problems, and designing appropriate interventions, and second, to help students develop practical skills for building effective groups and teams. Both of these objectives are important to students’ effectiveness in study groups at SOM and in organizational teams they will join or lead after graduation. The design of the course is based on the belief that conceptual understanding of the principles of team effectiveness is of little use without a more direct experiential understanding of group dynamics (or process) and the behavioral skills required to implement this knowledge.

Basics of Accounting
The course helps students acquire basic accounting knowledge that is extremely useful in the day-to-day practice of general management. This basic accounting knowledge is indispensable background for the work to follow in the Organizational Perspectives courses as well as for elective courses in accounting, finance, marketing, and strategy. Accounting systems provide important financial information for all types of organizations across the globe. Despite their many differences, all accounting systems are built on a common foundation. Economic concepts, such as assets, liabilities, and income, are used to organize information into a fairly standard set of financial statements. Bookkeeping mechanics compile financial information with the double entry system of debits and credits. Accounting conventions help guide the application of the concepts through the mechanics. This course provides these fundamentals of accounting.

Data and Decision Analysis
The ability to understand and apply probability concepts and statistical methods is fundamental to management education. The concepts covered in this course include probability, decision analysis, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, and applied regression modeling. This course provides a foundation of basic statistical concepts that are essential for many other courses at SOM. These materials surface routinely in students’ Organizational Perspectives courses and electives and are useful for decision-making applications in financial analysis, marketing, operations management, and other areas.

Basics of Economics
This course concentrates on the role of market processes in determining the opportunities facing individuals and business firms, the policy issues facing public officials, and the patterns of resource allocation in the economic system. It is intended to be accessible to students with little or no prior exposure to economics. The mathematical prerequisite is competence in high school algebra and in the interpretation of graphs. The aim is to provide students with analytical tools to help them tackle economic problems, which arise whenever agents must make economic trade-offs or engage in trade. While we cover a range of topics in microeconomics, the emphasis throughout the course is on learning how to approach and tackle economic problems—a skill that will be useful in making managerial decisions. Topics include supply and demand, consumers, production, equilibrium, imperfect competition, competitive strategy.

Interpersonal Dynamics
Studies have shown that the average manager spends about two-thirds of his or her time interacting with others. It should be no surprise that skill in interpersonal relationships is one of the most frequent determinants of managerial success or failure. This course is designed to help students learn some of the skills necessary to build more open and effective working relationships. Improving knowledge and abilities in these areas is critical to being an effective manager in today’s global and highly interdependent organizations. This course builds on students’ experiences in the Managing Groups and Teams course. The learning teams created during the latter part of that course continue to work and learn together in Interpersonal Dynamics.

Individual Problem Framing
The objective of this course is to provide students with tools for framing and structuring problems. The course begins with general problem structuring heuristics that are useful for almost any sort of problem. These include simplifying a problem, searching for related but simple problems that one knows how to solve, anticipating the form of a solution, changing the problem to an equivalent problem, breaking problems down into parts, and recognizing common structure in different settings. The course continues with a variety of guest lectures with different perspectives on framing problems. It concludes with a unit on how to set up and frame problems in strategic settings; that is, in settings in which the outcomes depend not just on your own actions but on the actions of others.

Careers
This course focuses on the individual and the idea that he or she is going to have a career over forty or fifty years. We take a long-term focus in order to highlight frameworks, concepts, and theories that detail the ways in which careers unfold over time and the forces that guide career trajectories. Through a combination of course readings, experiential exercises, lectures, and illustrations from others’ careers, students gain a deeper understanding of the choices and tradeoffs they may face and how to assess these against the backdrop of the frameworks offered. Specifically, we focus on developmental frameworks, theories of resilience and transition, and the role of different kinds of capital—such as human capital, social capital, and financial capital—that people build in creating their careers.

Organizational Perspectives

Presents each course from the viewpoint of a key internal or
external role, rather than a discrete function. Contextually
grounded, each course frames the managerial questions
necessary for engagement of that role, brings insights from
the functional management disciplines (Finance, Marketing,
etc.) to provide answers to those questions, and affords the
opportunity for focused consideration of values-based and
ethical issues, creating a coherent view of problem solving,
engagement, and leadership.

Introduction to Negotiations
The course objective is to learn a conceptual framework for analyzing and shaping negotiation processes and outcomes. Negotiation can be broken down into two basic activities: creating value and capturing value. Creating value is about making the pie bigger, while capturing value is about getting the largest possible slice for yourself. The course presents strategies for achieving both of these objectives at the same time. The course also helps students to develop a repertoire of negotiation strategies and skills. There are several opportunities to negotiate with classmates in a simulated environment.

Competitor
This course enables students to be better managers by equipping them to (1) identify key players in the environment both from a competitive and a cooperative perspective, (2) identify the objectives and constraints of those players given the environment in which a manager’s own organization and competing organizations are embedded, (3) anticipate the likely actions that competitors will take given their objectives and constraints, and (4) recognize and deal with the feedback between their own actions and the actions of other agents. The course explicitly recognizes that relevant players in the environment include government and nonprofit organizations as well as corporations and that these players act both cooperatively and competitively. Thus an important premise of this course is that the environment within which organizations compete is multi-layered, encompassing not only the market but political, cultural, and legal dimensions. Finally, the course explicitly draws attention to the fact that objectives and constraints arise not only from the external faces of the environment but from internal features of the organization. The course draws from the disciplines of economics, marketing, organizational behavior, and politics.

Customer
The course takes the viewpoint that the best way to create and keep a customer is to develop a deep understanding of customer behavior, integrate that understanding across the organization, and align the organizational structure to both satisfy current customer needs and adapt to changes in customer needs better than competitors. To be truly customer-focused and market-driven, a company (profit or nonprofit) should develop the capability to sense and respond to the changing needs of customers in the market. An important element of the course is the idea that customer focus must extend to the entire organization across all its major functions for it to be successful. The course consists of two main modules: (1) Understanding Customers and Creating a Superior Value Proposition and (2) Creating and Maintaining a Customer-Aligned Organization. The first module focuses on understanding customer needs in consumer and industrial markets from a multidisciplinary perspective (economics, psychology, and sociology) to create a superior value proposition; the second highlights how creating a customer-aligned organization requires functional perspectives that span marketing, operations, accounting, finance, and human resource management.

Investor
This course is about investors: what they do, how they think, and what they care about. The course is, in places, quantitative. It makes use of basic concepts in probability, statistics, and regression analysis. Course topics include returns, risk, and prices; asset allocation; efficient markets; valuation and fundamentals-based investing; the capital asset pricing model (CAPM); quantitative equity investing; bond markets; evaluating money manager performance; futures and options; investment errors and human psychology; and sourcing and managing funds.

Sourcing and Managing Funds
This course considers groups within the firm tasked to raise money from different sources as well as manage different aspects of those funds within the organization. Many of these functions are concentrated within the office of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), split between the Treasurer and the Controller. But many other functions are spread across the organization, principally in the hands of strategy groups and product managers. Topics include capital structure decisions; capital structure: equity funding; capital structure: debt funding; capital budgeting: cash flow analysis and techniques; capital budgeting: incorporating risk; taxes; the planning process; inputs for decision making; performance evaluation; transfer pricing; and corporate risk management.

State and Society
This course has five objectives. First, it aims to provide students with insight into the motives driving a diverse array of nonmarket constituencies. These constituencies include elected and unelected public officials, leaders of NGOs, interest-group advocates, and representatives of multinational organizations, as well as organized (and sometimes unorganized) movements that arise in a society. Second, the course examines underlying societal trends that can have a significant impact on the opportunities and risks faced by business management. Third, it provides insight into some of the systematic sources of variation across the nation-states that can impact managerial and investment decisions. Fourth, the course helps students read the institutional environment of the firm—legal and regulatory frameworks, media market structures, religious organizations, and many other factors. Finally, the course repeatedly asks students to reflect on the differences between what is legal and what is right, what is customary and what is legal, what is customary and what is right.

Employee
Leadership influence on employees is at least threefold: an impact on the employees who are brought into and retained in the organization; a strong role in shaping the context in which employees act (culture, rewards, etc.); and a personal relationship with those whom you manage, which can profoundly influence subordinates’ values, beliefs, and behaviors. The purpose of this course is to enhance the student’s capability as a manager and leader to take actions that align employees’ actions with organizational goals and objectives. The course is organized into four parts. It begins by placing the manager’s relationship with employees in the broader context of the organization’s human resource strategy. Then it examines in closer detail some of the main levers that managers and organizations can use, paying attention to four factors: recruitment and selection; employee evaluation and development; extrinsic rewards, compensation systems, and job design; and the connection between the employee’s identity and organizational objectives. The third portion of the course briefly considers the challenges of transforming employment relations. The course concludes by discussing how employment relationships are shaped by values and ethics—those of the manager, as well as those of the larger organization.

Innovator
This class studies issues of idea generation, idea evaluation and development, creative projects, and fostering and sustaining innovation in organizations. Students are exposed both to the ways of thinking of innovators and to the promises and perils of interacting with and managing innovators. Students generate ideas in a number of contexts, and evaluate ideas that they and others have generated in terms of customer adoption (the market) and feasibility. They analyze innovation in a set of companies across sectors. Students also engage in a role-playing exercise to get a sense for how the innovator’s perspective interacts with a managerial perspective rooted in the other Organizational Perspectives courses.

Operations Engine
The course broadens the traditional operations management course by including and emphasizing linkages to organizational behavior and workforce management, strategy, accounting, finance, and marketing. At its heart, this course is about using quantitative models to provide managerial insights. The framework for this course is simple: First, we focus on how work is organized and how processes are improved. At the next higher level, we consider the relationship among work centers, suppliers, and customers: the design and improvement of the supply chain. Finally, operations analysis influences and is influenced by the organization’s competitive strategy. While carrying out these activities, organizations need to continually improve manufacturing and service quality. These activities of process improvement, supply chain management, and quality management fundamentally involve issues of workforce management and organizational behavior and require understanding and applying capital budgeting and other accounting/finance tools, and coordination with the marketing function.

Integrated Leadership Perspective

Merges perspectives in a series of interdisciplinary
cases structured to describe challenges faced by leaders
of organizations of differing size, scope, and sector.

This course asks students to bring together skills learned throughout the core curriculum by working through a series of cases about organizations of different scales. All of the cases involve current situations, and much of the class material is “raw,” consisting of financial filings, data sets, news reports, company material, and other primary source data. The course is organized in four parts. The first part focuses on organizations that are just beginning. Students examine how ideas are generated from existing holes in the market and how leaders think about positioning and developing their organizations to fill those holes. The second phase focuses on the leadership challenges associated with organizations in transition. Students examine how organizations handle the challenges of raising new capital, finding new partners, expanding geographically, and growing through acquisition. The third phase focuses on mature organizations and also gives students the opportunity to step back from the cases and think about the broader ways in which leadership styles and organizational challenges connect. The course concludes with high-level, modern management challenges bridging the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.