Stanford Graduate School of Business Courses

Strategic Thinking for Growing Your Enterprise

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Economics professors Paul Oyer, Mike Mazzeo, and Scott Schaefer have spent the past six years visiting small to medium-sized ventures around the world, gathering stories of success and failure.This course uses those stories to provide lessons that can help business leaders identify new opportunities and avoid pitfalls as their company reaches for the next level. We will do a deep dive into key strategy concepts, based on economic fundamentals, that will help you think about growing your business. You will learn about these concepts through the examples of real-life businesses and then practice applying the concepts to your business (or a business you know well).

The Finance of Retirement & Pensions

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In this eight-week course, you will learn the financial concepts behind sound retirement plan investment and pension fund management. Course participants will become more informed decision makers about their own portfolios, and be equipped to evaluate economic policy discussions that surround public pensions. The course begins with the principles of financial economics, such as the distribution of outcomes when investing in stocks, bonds, or annuities. These serve as the building blocks for an understanding of different retirement strategies that can help you improve your asset allocation. Finally, the course applies these principles to government programs and policies.The Finance of Retirement and Pensions will culminate in an interactive symposium about the challenges of U.S. pension systems. Held in January 2014 at Stanford Graduate School of Business, the event will feature representatives of the MOOC teams with the five most promising ideas for pension reform, who will present their proposals to a distinguished panel of faculty and experts in finance and public policy. Expenses will be covered by Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hoover Institution. Recommended Background:Ideally, you will have had some exposure to economics or finance in the form of college-level courses, even if that exposure is not especially recent or extensiveYou’ll want to understand the value of a diversified stock portfolio, interest rates, and inflationYou’ll be able to follow along best if you understand the present value formula, as well as statistical concepts like means, medians, standard deviations, and percentilesWe will provide review sheets about formulas for the present value of a perpetuity, a growing perpetuity, and an annuity, and suggest that you review a few concepts about probabilityWe will be doing calculations in Microsoft Excel as part of the coursework