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Washington State University

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Washington State University
Washington State U. College of Business
 14204 NE Salmon Creek Ave
Vancouver, WA, 98686
United States
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Demographic Information

Number of full-time MBA students (2011): 

4

Number of part-time MBA students (2011): 

16

Total duration of full-time MBA program: 

12 months

MBA faculty (Fall 2010): 

39


Description of MBA Program: 

The WSU Professional MBA program (PMBA) prepares people for current and future leadership positions. Our program builds on the traditional foundation in accounting, finance, information systems, leadership, operations, marketing and strategy, to emphasize that managers need to understand the role stakeholders play in creating competitive advantage. Increasingly, critical resources and capabilities are provided by multiple stakeholders. Managers must understand each stakeholder’s role and provide adequate incentives to insure their participation. The stakeholder perspective is integrated into all our courses so students (1) understand the vital interdependence between businesses and critical stakeholders, (2) adopt an executive level perspective in making decisions and take actions that sustain strong relationships with these stakeholders, and (3) apply theory to solve practical problems.

 

Our program also emphasizes integration of ideas across courses and discourages silo-based reasoning. Graduating students should be able to:

 

1) Apply fundamental business theories to address ambiguous business problems.

 

2) Determine an organization’s resource needs based on its strategy.

 

3) Explain how organizational actions affect their ability to secure needed resources from stakeholders.

 

4) Explain how organization’s ethics and core values affect the formation of strategic decisions and influence the sustainability of the competitive advantage.

 

5) Assess current and forecast future market conditions and explain how market conditions influence an organization’s strategy decisions.

 

6) Apply an integrated model to assess the opportunities and risks associated with a strategic decision.

 

Learning is reinforced with practice – so real world application permeates our program.

 

Course Goals

 

Managerial Accounting – demonstrate how accounting information is used to make business decisions, design control systems, and evaluate the organization’s impact on various stakeholder groups.

 

Financial Management – apply the enlightened shareholder model to examine capital budgeting, cost of capital, real options, capital structure, payout policy, and enterprise valuation.

 

Negotiations – make you a better negotiator, across many contexts and a variety of stakeholders.

 

Business Ethics – examine stakeholder engagement from a normative perspective, evaluate the effects of publics on organizational strategy, and apply a formal process to identify and address ethical conflicts.



Academic Department

Course Name: Administration Control/Managerial Accounting
Instructor: Jane Cote

This course integrates the fundamentals of managerial accounting with strategic analysis. It examines how accounting information is used to make business decisions, design control systems, and evaluate their impact on various stakeholder groups. The focus is on accounting as a measurement process; and how accounting measures ultimately influences managerial decisions and stakeholder relationships. We explore how different cost accounting information and systems affect decision making; and focus on using, rather than producing financial information. There are 6 modules:

1. Measurement, causality, and how measurement choices affect behavior. Issues related to information asymmetry and transparency are used to examine how information structure and control impacts all stakeholders.

2. The Balanced Scorecard as a measurement system for addressing stakeholder motivations and resource expectations. It provides accountability measures for the organization’s stakeholder commitments.

3. Information quality and creating information integrity and transparency. It also includes Giving Voice to Values when information integrity is compromised.

4. Examine cost behavior and its long and short term implications for risk and opportunity assessment

5. Budgeting from a strategic and operational perspective and its impact various stakeholder groups.

6. Overhead Allocation through Activity Analysis is used to assess how inputs lead to outputs and balancing stakeholder goals.

Course Name: Leadership and Productivity
Instructor: Thomas Tripp

The objective of this course is to help you become a more effective manager. In order to achieve this objective, you need to secure the cooperation of stakeholders to achieve organizational goals with specific emphasis on four stakeholders: the employees below you, the peers beside you, the bosses above you, and the actors outside of your organization. This includes applying theories and techniques of team building, group dynamics, motivation, intra-organizational power and politics, goal setting, conflict management, persuasion, and workplace fairness to achieve the following learning goals:

1. Motivate your subordinates

2. Manage tensions between employees and other stakeholders

3. Work within and lead teams of colleagues

4. Manage your superiors and other powerful people in order to implement strategies and protect your subordinates and other stakeholders

5. Better diagnose workplace problems, invent solutions, and get the solutions implemented

6. Create decision-making procedures that stakeholders will perceive as fair

7. Explain why various stakeholders win (lose) conflicts with other stakeholders, based on stakeholder interdependence

Course Name: Marketing Management
Instructor: Joe Cote

This course covers the theory and basic issues of marketing analysis and planning from a new market entry perspective (but is application to any type of marketing strategy). At the end of this course you should be able to develop and justify an action-oriented marketing strategy. A market entry model is used to provide systematic guidelines for developing a marketing strategy. However, no single framework applies to all situations and you should be able to modify the model as the situation demands. Last, you should be able to explain how a recommended marketing strategy will affect the organization’s key stakeholders.

The specific learning goals are:

1. Identify, evaluate, and quantify customer needs in order to determine if a market opportunity exists.

2. Estimate potential benefits to the organization of pursuing a market opportunity.

3. Evaluate the long-term sustainability of a market opportunity.

4. Identify the key success factors, necessary resources (and the stakeholder that provide them) and alternative approaches for pursuing a market opportunity.

5. Recommend a marketing strategy and next-step actions for pursuing an opportunity.

6. Evaluate the indirect and direct effects of recommended actions on stakeholders

Course Name: Negotiation Skills
Instructor: Thomas Tripp

Most of us negotiate every day, though we often do not realize it. We negotiate contracts, leases, and purchases, as-well-as over less obvious issues. We need analytical skills to discover superior solutions to problems and we need negotiation skills to get others to accept and implement these solutions. Unfortunately, too many of us negotiate poorly. We often compromise or give in when creative problem solving could lead to a deal that would be better for everyone involved. The goal of this course is for you to become a better negotiator, across many contexts and with a variety of stakeholders. That is, you will develop the negotiation skills that produce more creative, satisfying agreements and avoid the worst kind of compromises, no matter with whom you negotiate. In particular, students will learn negotiation techniques to:

1. Prepare conflict strategies

2. Manage trust dilemmas

3. Collect and reveal information tactically

4. Set and reach goals

5. Discover stakeholder interests

6. Manage ethical dilemmas; listen effectively and communicate diplomatically

7. Manage asymmetrical stakeholder relationships

8. Manage multiple parties, incl. public interest groups

9. Adjust style across cultures

Role playing and negotiation exercises are used extensively, so students learn by doing.

Course Name: Operations Management (value chain partners)
Instructor: Chuck Pickett

This course applies the latest concepts, models, and methods for the design, control, operation, and management of supply chain systems. The course focuses on the key aspects of supply chain management that are most critical to the long-term success of a business and its ability to work effectively with stakeholders. Specifically students should:

1. Understand the function of supply chain operations management.

2. Understand operational strategies and approaches, and the impact these choices have on an organizations ability to deliver business results and its relationships with stakeholders.

3. Analyze decision problems in supply chain, with linkage to overall business strategy.

4. Understand and recognize emerging concepts around partner collaboration, inventory strategies, supply chain design, and information sharing.

5. Analyze and communicate effectively the results of operational analysis and actions.

Topics covered include the integration of value chain stakeholder activities, managing stakeholder relationship change, how the firm’s actions influence stakeholder behavior, the power of stakeholder cooperation, and outsourcing issues.

Course Name: Problems in Financial Management
Instructor: Jared DeLisle

This course applies finance theory and principles to the analysis of important business problems. Specific topics will include capital budgeting, cost of capital, real options, capital structure, payout policy, and enterprise valuation. The course is structured around the Enlightened Shareholder Model or Enlightened Stakeholder Theory. Students are assumed to have basic knowledge of the concepts of time value of money, valuation, capital budgeting, and cost of capital. Specifically, students should be able to:

1. Identify and critique normative theories of management’s role in the firm.

2. Conduct cash-flow and option-based valuation of real assets focusing on the long-term impact for all stakeholders.

3. Understand how capital structure, payout, and compensation policies, as well as the market for corporate control affect firm value and managerial actions.

4. Recognize the impact of agency conflicts and information asymmetries on firm performance and devise effective controls.

Additional social components include:

1. Market failures and assumptions such as the absence of externalities

2. Comparisons of the stakeholder vs shareholder view of the firm

3. “Internalize externalities” via the capital budgeting decision

4. How financial structure decisions affect stakeholders

5. Governance systems and the role of ethics

6. CSR within the market for corporate control

Course Name: Professional Ethics and Practice in Business
Instructor: Jerry Goodstein

This seminar examines the management of stakeholder relationships (shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, publics) from a normative perspective, evaluate the effects of publics (including governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, communities, and the public at large) on organizational strategy, and apply a formal process to identify and address ethical conflicts between firms and stakeholders, paying particular attention to private sector-public sector interactions. This includes:

• Identifying and evaluating the importance of resources provided by public stakeholders.

• Evaluating the role of the “moral manager” in making public and private sector decisions including resolving tradeoffs among stakeholders.

• Evaluating the social contract between the firm and public stakeholders and evaluating how this social contract should guide decision making.

• Applying a formal ethical framework that incorporates personal values and broader utilitarian, rights/duties, and justice considerations into making decisions.

The stakeholder model, ethics matrix, normative ethics theories, and Giving Voice to Values curriculum are used as theoretical foundations for the course. Students are also encouraged to reflect on their own ethical beliefs and how those beliefs may guide business decision-making.

Course Name: Resources, Stakeholders, and Competitive Advantage
Instructor: Joe Cote

The resource-based-view of the firm and stakeholder theory are used to identify the sources of sustainable competitive advantage. We examine how direct and indirect stakeholder effects influence the resources available to an organization and how these resources create competitive advantage. Ultimately students should be able determine the relative importance of stakeholders to the organization's strategy and allocate organizational assets among stakeholders to enhance long-term performance. Specifically, students should be able to:

1. Describe an organization’s strategy and competitive advantage.

2. Explain the interrelationship between the organization’s resources (competencies) and its strategy (business model).

3. Identify the role stakeholders play in providing the resources needed by the organization.

4. Create a plan for how to engage stakeholders and assess stakeholder relationships

A more detailed breakdown of the learning goals, associated readings, relevant theory, and assessment of learning goals is presented in the syllabus.

Type of Offering

MBA Stakeholder Speaker Seires

Each semester a speaker is invited to address the campus and broader community regarding the efforts a particular corporation is making to engage stakeholders and respond to important social and environmental challenges and opportunities. The following speakers visited WSU Vancouver:

Fall 2009: Dan Bross - Global Citizenship Leader at Microsoft

Spring 2010: Sherry Flies - Corporate Social Responsibility Leader at Costco

Fall 2010: Carl Talton - Founder of Portland Family of Funds, an organization that develops investments for enhancing communities in the Pacific Nortwest and around the country.

Speakers Series on Social and Environmental Justice

In conjunction with the WSU Center for Social and Environmental Justice, we host a number of speakers on a myriad of topics related to social and environmental issues as well as corporate social responsibility. The number of speakers and topics vary from semester to semester.

Center for Social and Environmental Justice
Business School Housing? No
Number of Faculty: 10
Contact Name: Desiree Hellegers
Contact Email: helleger@vancouver.wsu.edu

The Center for Social and Environmental Justice (CSEJ) catalyzes collaborations between WSU faculty, students and community partners to foster rigorous analysis of social, economic, racial and environmental justice issues and to promote human rights and conflict resolution at the local, national and global levels through:

- Interdisciplinary community based research

- Interdisciplinary curricular innovations

- Conferences, workshops, and public events

- Media projects (video documentaries, websites, radio and T.V. programming, etc.)

CSEJ leads WSU in addressing social and environmental justice issues. Within WSU Vancouver, CSEJ works with faculty, departments, student organizations, student service organizations, and other groups who have an interest in fulfilling the CSEJ mission statement. CSEJ crosses college, department, and campus boundaries to more effectively promote social and environmental justice action. CSEJ’s work includes:

- Forging partnerships with community groups to address regional, social, and environmental justice issues

- Providing grant-writing and development support to CSEJ project teams and community groups

- Sponsoring speakers and fostering public conversations addressing social and environmental justice issues

Emerging Business Initiative
Business School Housing? Yes
Number of Faculty: 4
Contact Name: joe cote
Contact Email: cote@vancouver.wsu.edu

The Emerging Business Initiative (EBI) was founded in 2009 to provide assistance to small businesses, in particular women and minority owned businesses, as well as small businesses with a social/environmental mission. EBI coordinates with small businesses to connect WSU Vancouver student teams who provide assistance for specific business related issues.

And Restorative Justice for All: Redemption, Forgiveness, and Reintegration in Organizations
Author(s): Jerry Goodstein

We explore the topic of restorative justice in organizations. The tradition of restorative justice directs attention to the aftermath of wrongdoing. We highlight three ways offenders (making amends), victims (extending forgiveness), and organizations (fostering reintegration) restore justice in the workplace. Our paper concludes with questions for future research and inquiry.

Journal Title: Journal of Organizational Behavior Volume: 31 Edition: 4 Page Numbers: 624-628
Examining both sides of stakeholder engagement: behavioral implications in interorganizational alliances
Author(s): Claire Lathan; Jane Cote

Building on prior research linking stakeholder relationship quality with financial performance, we explore interorganizational engagement from a bilateral perspective, more fully representing the dynamics within an alliance. Interorganizational relationship quality and stakeholder management theory in healthcare and in accounting research provide the foundation for these insights.

Journal Title: Advances in Management Accounting Volume: 18 Edition: Page Numbers: 175-201
Extending the Horizon of Business Ethics: Restorative Justice and the Aftermath of Unethical Behaviior.
Author(s): Jerry Goodstein

We call for business ethics scholars to focus more attention on how individuals and organizations respond in the aftermath of unethical behavior. Insight into this issue is drawn from restorative justice, which moves beyond traditional approaches that emphasize retribution or rehabilitation to include restoring victims and other affected parties, reintegrating offenders, and facilitating moral repair in the workplace. We review relevant theoretical and empirical work in restorative justice and develop a conceptual model that highlights how this perspective can enhance theory and empirical research in business ethics. We specifically identify topic areas that we believe have particular promise for business ethics scholars to pursue. We close our paper by discussing implications of the restorative justice approach for practicing managers.

Journal Title: Business Ethics Quarterly Volume: 20 Edition: 3 Page Numbers: 453-480
Unauthorized Electronic Access: Students’ Ethics, Attitudes and Actions
Author(s): Claire Lathan; Jane Cote

Universities are expected to prepare accounting students to conduct themselves with integrity in all environments, including those that utilize information technology (IT). Our study investigates student integrity in an online environment to determine if students are honest about accessing unauthorized Internet solutions. We then evaluate student responsiveness to interventions designed to discourage unauthorized access using techniques suggested by the literature to foster ethical behavior. Our examination of such factors as moral development, moral identity, age, gender, and grade point average finds no significant relationship with student ethical behavior. More problematic, classroom interventions proved ineffective in preventing students from accessing unauthorized online solutions. We conclude with suggestions for developing and encouraging ethical behavior among accounting students in IT learning environments.

Journal Title: Advances in Accounting Education Volume: 11 Edition: Page Numbers: 247-262