TECH 5310 - Business Fundamentals

Fall. 1 credit. Letter grades only (no audit).

Enrollment limited to: non-MBA Cornell Tech students. Offered in New York City at Cornell Tech.

M. Khaire.

This course is an introduction to fundamental concepts in business management – strategy, finance and financial accounting, marketing, organizational design, operations management, and negotiations – that are crucial knowledge for any entrepreneur and/or product manager. The course will help you learn the ‘language of business,’ and prepare you to take business electives in the near term and to run your own firm or product unit in the not-too-distant future, after you graduate from Cornell Tech. Business Fundamentals is not just economics, psychology, sociology, or mathematics, but draws from all of these disciplines. As a result, some of the concepts may sound familiar to some of you, but we will focus on understanding how they are applied to real-world business problems. In order to do so, we will use business cases and exercises in addition to lectures. Analyzing a case study and the resulting deductive learning will help you think in a different way, and will teach you to be comfortable with ambiguity, uncertainty, and contingencies, which are inevitable realities of business life. The general structure of the course is to introduce core concepts in each business area – strategy, finance/accounting, marketing, organizational design, operations management, and negotiations – through a lecture and a reading and then to apply those concepts in analyzing a custom-written case that draws from current business news.