Financial Decision-Making for Leaders

Are financial statements a mystery to you? Do all those terms and metrics make your head spin? Do you avoid conversations with your finance leaders because you are not confident of your finance ability?

Having a solid understanding of financial terms, statements and metrics is critical to becoming a successful entrepreneur or manager. In this finance course, you will learn how to interpret and use the information contained in financial statements to make key operating decisions, evaluate business performance, and create forecasts of profits and cash flow.

This course introduces you to the form, content and definitions included in the primary financial statements: income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. You will learn how to use this information to make key operating decisions, such as how to balance growth with cash constraints. You will learn how to use ratios to diagnose a company's financial health and apply these concepts and tools to evaluate a company of your own choosing.

Eliminate your fear of accounting! Financial accounting can be fun once the barriers to learning are broken down. Through a series of learning scenarios that take you through the creation of a simple business, you will become comfortable with basic accounting tools and concepts that you need to more effectively manage your business. By the end of the course, you will become a much more confident user of financial information and will be able to effectively engage with your finance leaders.

This course is part of the Business Principles and Entrepreneurial Thought XSeries.

How do you find the money necessary to effectively manage your business? How do you know if a business opportunity is worthwhile? When should you invest in a stock, bond or company? Do you fear the financial side of growing your organization?

This finance course will take the mystery out of financial analysis and help you make the right business decisions. In order to establish your company you need to secure funding. Once you have money, you need to determine the most efficient and effective use of your capital. You also need to have the knowledge to have professional and engaging conversations with finance professionals who control access to funding.

In this course, you will discover a variety of options for funding your business and how to successfully negotiate financial opportunities. You will learn how to value and evaluate ideas to determine the appropriate benefits and costs in order to screen them correctly. Finally, you will learn how to value a business and the securities you can use to potentially fund your organization.

This course is part of the Business Principles and Entrepreneurial Thought XSeries.

Want to know how to avoid bad decisions with data?

Making good decisions with data can give you a distinct competitive advantage in business. This statistics and data analysis course will help you understand the fundamental concepts of sound statistical thinking that can be applied in surprisingly wide contexts, sometimes even before there is any data! Key concepts like understanding variation, perceiving relative risk of alternative decisions, and pinpointing sources of variation will be highlighted.

These big picture ideas have motivated the development of quantitative models, but in most traditional statistics courses, these concepts get lost behind a wall of little techniques and computations. In this course we keep the focus on the ideas that really matter, and we illustrate them with lively, practical, accessible examples.

We will explore questions like: How are traditional statistical methods still relevant in modern analytics applications? How can we avoid common fallacies and misconceptions when approaching quantitative problems? How do we apply statistical methods in predictive applications? How do we gain a better understanding of customer engagement through analytics?

This course will be is relevant for anyone eager to have a framework for good decision-making. It will be good preparation for students with a bachelor's degree contemplating graduate study in a business field.

Opportunities in analytics are abundant at the moment. Specific techniques or software packages may be helpful in landing first jobs, but those techniques and packages may soon be replaced by something newer and trendier. Understanding the ways in which quantitative models really work, however, is a management level skill that is unlikely to go out of style.

This course is part of the Business Principles and Entrepreneurial Thought XSeries.