Curriculum-Tsinghua Global MBA - Your Gateway to the Best of China

Module I: Soft Skills

Elementary Chinese (Required for international students)
This course targets Chinese language beginners with limited Chinese proficiency that will help students build a good foundation in Chinese language and help in communicate in China. It contains the following parts:
1) Pinyin system and improvement of pronunciation
2) The course covers quite a few essential topics such as most commonly-used greetings, introducing friends to each other, the basic way to tell time, asking the price and talking about money, asking about the characteristics of commodities, ordering food and drinks, asking for directions and describing locations, the vocabulary needed in a taxi and describing routes, expressing the exchange rate etc. Each unit consists of the following parts: Sentences, Scenes, Activities, Learn and Use, Characters and Grammar.
3) Accurate usage of basic Chinese grammar rules
4) Basic knowledge on Chinese characters, including radicals, basic strokes, the order of writing characters
5) Oral and aural skills that will help students be familiar with daily conversation and they can express their thoughts and feelings in Chinese
6) Our course emphasizes on practice and requires students to practice individually or within groups. We will try to make students grasp and memorize the main points of each lesson in class and hope that students will be able to make fast progress..
Students are expected to reach a certain fluency and proficiency on topics discussed in class after a semester’s course
Managerial Thinking
This course aims to explore the fundamental mindsets and strategies that are common adopted by successful executives through exercises, simulations, interviews, assignments and individual and team projects. One will have the opportunity to reflect on one’s own strengths and opportunities for development in these mindsets and action strategies, and propose one’s own development plan during the two-year MBA program.
Organizational Behavior
This course provides a comprehensive analysis of individual and group behaviors in organizations and an understanding of how organizations can be managed more effectively while enhancing the quality of employees work life. Topics include motivation and reward, stress management, individual and group behavior, conflict, power and politics, leadership, job design, organizational structure, decision-making, communication and organizational change and development.
Ethics and Corporate Responsibility

Ethics and Corporate Responsibilities is a one-credit core course for first-year MBA students at Tsinghua SEM. It aims to help students gain a basic understanding in:
(1) the ubiquity of ethical challenges;
(2) ethical considerations as one of the most important and indispensable dimensions in decision making;
(3) to whom we should be responsible for and what responsibilities a person and an entity should bear for the well-being of the whole society; and
(4) alignment of conducts with corporate responsibilities.

The course is taught primarily by case method with various activities and a number of recommended readings. It requires one’s active and sincere participation in class discussions and activities. One will be able to understand ethical challenges when decisions or choices have to be made in one’s daily lives as well as in business practices. One will also be able to reflect on one’s seemingly reasonable claims and imbedded value systems, realizing possible consequences or impacts one’s.
Leadership Development Process
This course is designed to help students assess and understand their strengths while improving their leadership and management skills. Students will learn how to apply their leadership skills in real-life business situations besides being taught on leadership theories. Students are provided with opportunities to practice and refine their skills under various settings and will receive abundant feedbacks. To give students a better understanding of leadership from multiple angles and perspectives, participants in the course will explore the different definitions and studies pertaining to leadership and over the last century and the exercising of leadership skills in business, military, athletic and political contexts. We will read similar or contradicted leadership theories and discuss cases portraying leaders who support or challenge these theories.
Managerial Communication

More and more people realize that technical skills alone are not enough for career success. The ability to communicate effectively and efficiently and to understand and lead others successfully is crucial for individuals and their organizations. Hence, communication ability becomes one of the most desirable qualities by MBA graduate recruiters.

This course is one of the required courses aiming at helping you enhance and improve your communication skills. The following course outline is developed based on the course entitled “Communication for Managers” and “Advanced Managerial Communication” at MIT Sloan, modified in accordance with the Chinese context. The course is practice-oriented and the class language is English. It will cover communication strategy, communicating as a manager, business writing, and presentation skills.

Module II: Analysis Foundation

Managerial Economics
This course is designed to provide one with the basic tools in microeconomics and ability of applying these skills to the analyses of issues related to consumer behavior, firm strategy, market competition and government policy. These analytical skills will help one solve many real-life problems, be it in the business environment or in other fields. The concepts and principles learned in this course will also be helpful when one studies finance, strategic management, marketing or organizational behavior courses.
Data, Models and Decisions
Many managerial decisions are becoming increasingly reliant on the use of management science methods and models, which include statistics, regression, and optimization models. These methods have dramatically changed the way business operates in finance, service operations, manufacturing, marketing, consulting, and e-commerce. When used wisely, management science models have the power to enhance the competitiveness of almost any enterprise. In this course, we will present advanced methods and applications in management, which aims to help students to think structurally and strategically about decision problems, and ultimately to improve the best-practices of tomorrow’s leading managers.
Accounting
1. To introduce an overview of the broader field of financial accounting and its role as the “language of business” in business organizations.
2. To develop ethics and social responsibility in accounting professions by enhancing earnings managements and improving ethical information reporting.
3. To understand the basic conceptual framework of accounting, the accounting principles and standards based on GAAP relating to valuation and reporting of asset, liability and equity items, ethical implications in auditing.
4. To develop the fundamental skills in analyzing and interpreting financial statements.

Module III: Management Fundamentals

Corporate Finance
The objective of this course is to introduce the fundamental principles of corporate finance as well as their applications. Several key conceptual tools will be introduced in the first few sessions: value and capital budget; risk and return, capital structure and dividend policy. The rest of the sections will cover several important special corporate finance topics, including issuing securities to the public, mergers and acquisitions and corporate governance. The course covers both basic and standard concepts of corporate finance and some special issues in Chinese financial markets. Underpinning the entire course is the emphasis on the interaction between business models and finance models to realize the objective of maximizing a firm’s value (stockholder wealth).
Marketing Management

This is an introductory marketing course for MBA students. Upon completion of this course, you
will be able to:
1) Develop your marketing strategies – select your target market by analyzing the 3 C’s
(Customer, Company, Competitor).
2) Optimize your marketing tactics – implement your marketing strategies by choosing the
4 P’s (Product, Place, Promotion, and Price).
3) Design the marketing strategies and tactics for a product of your choosing.

This course explores both marketing theory and practice. The lecture sessions introduce proven
techniques to solve marketing problems, the case sessions illustrate the application of these techniques in various industries, while the practice sessions provide an opportunity for you to develop and present your own marketing plan.
Strategic Management
The objectives for the course are as follows:
1) Develop and reinforcing a general management perspective
2) Understand the fundamental concepts of strategic management: strategy identification and evaluation, firm strategic analysis, the relationship of strategy and organization, industry analysis, competitor analysis, firm and industry evolution, strategic and organizational responses to external changes, corporate strategy (diversification strategy and managing the multi-business enterprise), and international strategy.
3) Integrate knowledge gained in previous and concurrent core and elective courses with a focus on understanding of skills that will be of the most use to general managers.
4) Develop an awareness of the impact of external environmental forces, strategic actions by firms and its rivals.
5) Develop a critical and analytical perspective and skill in reporting conclusions effectively in written and oral forms.
Operations Management

Operations Management studies the processes in which inputs (including materials, labor, capital and information) are transformed into products and services which customers are willing and able to pay for. These processes can be managed well or poorly. Knowledge introduced in this course will help one understand the reasons for both. This course provides an introduction to the concepts and analytic methods that will be useful in understanding the management of a firm's operations and aims to: (1) familiarize one with the problems and issues that operations managers experience, and (2) provide one with language, concepts, insights and tools to deal with these issues in order to gain competitive advantage through operations.

One will be able to see how different business strategies require different business processes, and how different operational capabilities allow and support different strategies to gain competitive advantage. A process view of operations will be used to analyze different key operational dimensions such capacity management, flow (cycle) time management, project management, quality management, and logistics and supply chain management. We will also explore recent developments in operation management, including as lean manufacturing, just-in-time operations, and e-Business in operations.

Curriculum

Academic Calendar

Soft Skills

Analysis Foundation

Management Fundmentals

China and the World Module

One Semester Exchange Options

111+ Free Electives in 12+ Tracks

Core Courses