Week 1 – Information System Strategy and Strategic Use of Information Resources I’m thinking this course might not be too challenging for me given that this is what I do for a living, but I would like to know more about the strategy behind it, just not the day to day stuff. The course is …

Week 5 – Financial Analysis and Standard Costing We’ve come to the final week of this class and wow it’s been a doozy. This week we learned about ratio analysis on financial statements and had to make an informed investment analysis between two national home improvement brands. On the Managerial side we reviewed standard Costing, …

Week 4 – Statement Of Cash Flow and Flexible Budgeting Now we move into the Statement of Cash flows, probably the most difficult to analyze and prepare statement. It’s often an afterthought, but it’s the most useful statement and needs to be reviewed with the balance sheet and income statement. I always remember hearing about …

Week 3 – Income Statements and Static Budgeting On the flip side, we moved down the financial statement reporting package and focused on the income statement. We worked through the income statement and the many facets and portions of it,  including any management interpretations of the results and biasness introduced by it. For the management …

Week 2 – Balance Sheets and General Cost Accounting We deep dived into the balance sheet and understanding the nature of assets, liabilities, and stockholders equity. We also went into Cost Volume Profit (CVP) analysis, which is an incredibly important concept. From this we talked more about revenue and its relation to variable costs to …

Week 1 – Introduction Excited for this course, but a little weary. It is a prerequisite for other MBA classes, and it is known as being difficult. I have an accounting background so I hope I can lean on that to work through these concepts easier. This week we talked about regulatory environment, accounting standard …

Week 5 – Change Management A more scientific approach to change and managing it in an organization is probably apropos given the consequences of mishandled change. Communication is an important component of it because it builds trust with those being affected. Stakeholders need to be identified and brought into the change plan. People fear change …

Week 4 – Culture Of all the organizational studies we’ve undertaken, I feel this was the most important subject we broached. Culture within an organization is a powerful tool that can help or hinder an organization and how it is deployed and maintained our vastly important. A culture that fits the environment it works in …

Week 3 – Teamwork There was a lot here I wanted to unpack and understand. I’ve been a part of several high functioning teams and I wanted to know why. A team forms from a working group by using a common approach, holding each other accountable, and getting everyone to trust each other to accomplish …

Week 2 – Motivation Understanding motivation is difficult, and this evidenced by the many theories of motivation out there. We talked about the baseline motivation model – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – and how most other motivation frameworks fall within that pyramid in some fashion. We then broke the theories down into three sectors which …