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Yale School of Management

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Yale School of Management 135 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT, 06520-8200
United States
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Demographic Information

Number of full-time MBA students (2011): 

216

Number of part-time MBA students (2011): 

0

Total duration of full-time MBA program: 

21 months

MBA faculty (Fall 2010): 

119

Females as percent of student body: 

34%
Who Are the Students? See what percentage of the 2010-2011 graduating class came to this MBA program from the private sector, the non-profit sector and government jobs
 
Private Sector (76%)
 
Non-profit (16%)
 
Government (8%)


Description of MBA Program: 

The mission of the Yale School of Management is to educate leaders for business and society. Throughout its history, Yale SOM has been known for its social and environmental commitments and its focus on ethical leadership.

 

Social, environmental, and ethical considerations are included in the overwhelming majority of courses in SOM’s innovative integrated MBA curriculum. In core classes, students have created proposals for redeveloping Governors Island near Manhattan, analyzed South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment program, and studied General Electric’s Ecomagination initiative. Advanced electives, both at SOM and elsewhere at Yale, allow in-depth study of social and environmental topics. A student-managed elective on Global Social Enterprise pairs student consulting teams with nonprofit organizations in the developing world. The Global Social Entrepreneurship elective facilitates education and interaction between social entrepreneurs and SOM students both at Yale and in the entrepreneurs’ home countries.

 

Social and environmental scholarship is a hallmark of Yale SOM. Our faculty includes world-renowned experts in fields such as nonprofit management, development economics and microfinance, and environmental management. The school has also pioneered new multimedia “raw” cases, many of which include social and environmental considerations. SOM has created such cases for use by the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education’s Business Leadership Case Competition in 2008 and 2011. Yale SOM also partnered with the Aspen Institute in developing the “Giving Voice to Values” curriculum. Recent guest speakers at the school include Robin Chase, founder of ZipCar; Ezekiel Emanuel, former special health advisor to the director of the Office and Management and Budget; and Alex Counts, president and CEO of the Grameen Foundation.

 

The school’s Program on Social Enterprise supports scholars, students, alumni, and practitioners interested in exploring the ways in which business skills can be harnessed to achieve social objectives, facilitating work on nonprofit and public sector social entrepreneurship as well as initiatives in private sector social enterprise, including courses, research, publications and working with SOM students to sponsor conferences. The school’s Center for Business and the Environment at Yale, a partnership with the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, provides a focal point for research, education, and outreach to advance business solutions to global environmental problems. The Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance aims to be the leading research, teaching, and policy center for effective corporate governance, focusing on issues of corporate and shareholder accountability.

 

Students also pursue social aims through extracurricular and professional activities. Through SOM Outreach, students consult pro bono for nonprofit, public, and private organizations in the New Haven community. Yale SOM’s NetImpact Chapter is consistently one of the most active in the country. Every year, students plan, organize, and run conferences that promote discussion and action around social, ethical, and environmental themes. Three of the largest annual conferences at the school, each drawing hundreds of participants, are the Healthcare, Philanthropy, and Education conferences.

 

SOM provides unsurpassed resources for students and graduates pursuing careers in socially beneficial fields. The SOM Internship Fund unites the community in financial support for students who take summer internships with nonprofit organizations. In 1986, the school pioneered its Loan Forgiveness Program for graduates pursuing public or nonprofit careers, a model subsequently adopted by many business schools across the country.



How does the MBA program 'walk the talk' of social and environmental impact?: 

In spring 2010, students led the Yale SOM Sustainability Project, an initiative to reduce the consumption of resources and the waste produced at the school. The project, which included sifting through the contents of dumpsters to survey how much waste is thrown out at SOM, was undertaken as a for-credit independent study class with support by a grant from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the Yale Office of Sustainability. The project helped launch a school-wide program to address improved practices in four areas - energy, transportation, procurement, and waste – and, in January 2011, SOM was awarded Yale University’s highest certification level for developing green practices in the workplace.



Since 1986, the school has underscored its mission of educating leaders for business and society by providing support to qualified alumni working in the public or nonprofit sectors through a generous educational loan forgiveness program. The first program of its kind, it has provided a model for similar programs at business schools around the country since its establishment. Beginning with the Class of 2009, the program expanded to include qualified graduates who work in L3C organizations and certified B Corporations.



The Center for Business and the Environment supports student and faculty efforts to start environmentally oriented for-profit businesses with cash prizes totaling $25,000 awarded through the Sabin Environmental Venture Prize. The Sabin prize has been awarded annually since 2009 to the best Yale student and/or faculty ideas for a product, service, project, or program that advances a more environmentally sustainable way of life.



Yale SOM’s new 4.25 acre campus designed by Foster + Partners is currently under construction, slated to open in 2013. The new campus will incorporate the latest in “green construction” materials and practices. The school will pursue LEED certification for the new building.



The school prints all of it publications on at least 30% post-consumer waste recycled paper. The school’s magazine, Qn, is mailed in a corrugated cardboard mailer that is fully recyclable and made with 70% post-consumer waste recycled paper, and the greenhouse gas emission associated with its printing are offset through the purchase of renewable energy certificates.

Academic Department

Course Name: Legal Aspects of Entrepreneurship
Instructor: Bagley, Connie

This course covers key US laws and regulations relevant to start-up and established businesses, including employment law, securities law, torts, intellectual property, and other topics. Professor Bagley is strongly concerned with the public interest, and the intersection of private business and society. Relevant examples include creating a diverse and ethical workforce, fulfilling responsibilities to all stakeholders (such as the fiduciary duty a venture capitalist sitting on a portfolio company board owes to the portfolio company and its shareholders), practicing strategic compliance management (for example, by converting seeming restraints into opportunities for innovation), and developing a legally astute top management team exemplified by value-laden attitudes, a proactive approach, the exercise of informed judgment, and the application of context-specific knowledge of the law and legal tools. Through the use of Professor Bagley's Ethical Leader's Decision Tree (published in HBR), students learn to analyze decisions by asking not just what is legal but also what is ethical. For example, even though the New York Court of Appeals ruled that a finder did not have a legal obligation to disclose the unsavory reputation of a proposed buyer to his client, students are challenged to consider whether disclosure is ethically required. Similarly, the discussion of intellectual property includes consideration of whether pharmaceutical companies should provide life-saving drugs at affordable prices in developing countries.

Course Name: Listening to the Customer
Instructor: Shin, Jiwoong

This course is designed for students interested in strategy consulting, market research, and brand management careers. The course takes a decision oriented perspective about data collection: students will gain experience in understanding what data about consumers and markets, if available, will help them make strategic marketing decisions. Students explore both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods such as focus groups and survey design. A systematic approach to identify and understand the social and environmental effects, such as observational and ethnographic method, is covered in the course, including a lecture in survey design for non-profit organizations. At least half of independent final projects have previously focused on customer analysis for local non-profits with a social impact mission.

Course Name: Management and the Environment: Issues and Topics
Instructor: Brewer, Garry

This course explores key environmental issues faced by businesses, and how managers can respond to these issues through risk management, long-range planning, scenario modeling tools, and sustainability initiatives. Course topics include essentials of environmental science; environmental politics, with illustrations of special-interest influences, public perceptions, successful bargaining, negotiating, and conflict resolution; and several emerging environmental management approaches and movements, including “green boards” and accounting, industrial ecology, and other techniques designed to improve sustainability. The course also describes several other comprehensive approaches such as those seeking a “Triple Bottom Line” or “The Natural Step.”

Course Name: Managerial Controls
Instructor: Antle, Rick, Ederhof, Merle

This course emphasizes the use of financial information for internal planning and control and performance evaluation. The first part of the course covers alternative costing methods and illustrates how the resulting cost information can be used to guide strategic decisions such as product-mix decisions and to analyze the profitability of individual products and customers. The second part of the course focuses on the role of internal accounting systems in evaluating managerial performance and in coordinating the activities among departments and divisions within a firm. Students identify social and ethical management topics discussed in this course to include predatory pricing and global pricing inconsistency.

Course Name: Managing a Modern Workforce
Instructor: Brescoll, Tori

Minorities, women, and immigrants currently make up the majority of the United States workforce, and these groups are projected to make up approximately 85% of the workforce within the next ten years. Moreover, more and more organizations require cross-national interaction. Managers are therefore faced with the task and ethics of effectively working with and managing a diverse workforce. The purpose of this course is to give students the ability to discuss and manage the myriad issues that accompany working in a diverse environment. Topics include employee recruitment and hiring; evaluation and promotion; employee retention; the role of one’s own identity and how that impacts managerial decision-making; how to handle conflict; and how to effectively leverage diverse perspectives. Prejudice, discrimination, stereotypes, multicultural teams, respect, trust, and different organizational responses to biases (e.g. affirmative action) will all be discussed as fundamental components of these topics.

Course Name: Managing Education Reform
Instructor: Harries, Garth

An examination of current topics in public education reform from the perspective of a leader and manager. The course will emphasize strategies to close the achievement gap in American public schools, ranging from school level design to district and national policy. Students will explore different theories of action and challenges of execution in education reform, including in depth evaluation of school turnaround and new small schools, the expansion of charter schools, district accountability systems, management labor relations, and the education of students with disabilities. Garth Harries served for 5 years as a member of the leadership cabinet in the New York City Children First Reform under Joel Klein. Over the course of his tenure, his responsibilities included the creation of new small schools, the creation and management of charter schools, the redesign of special education and career and technical education, the early launch of the Autonomy Zone and the Partnership Support system, and a redesign of the DOE’s central organizational structure. Prior to joining the Department of Education, Garth was a consultant with McKinsey & Company. Garth is currently the Assistant Superintendent for Portfolio and Performance Management for the New Haven Public Schools.

Course Name: Managing Groups & Teams
Instructor: Vroom, Victor, Brescoll, Tori, Wrzesniewski, Amy

This is a short course on the theory and practice of leading, managing, and functioning in task-performing groups and teams. It has two primary goals: first, to provide students with a conceptual framework for analyzing group dynamics, diagnosing performance problems, and designing appropriate interventions; and second, to help students develop practical skills for building effective groups and teams. Both of these objectives are important to students’ effectiveness in study groups at SOM and in organizational teams they will join or lead after graduation. The course employs a combination of exercises and discussion to address topics including trust, hierarchies, intergroup dynamics, effectiveness, and leadership & decision-making in teams. These activities and discussions often bring up social and ethical issues. A discussion of the film Twelve Angry Men, for example, highlights how individual biases and adverse incentives can result in unjust decisions. In the Star Power game, students are forced to decide what they think is justified to move up the hierachy into higher power groups and to determine who to exclude and the rights of the lower ranked groups.

Course Name: Managing in Times of Rapid Change
Instructor: Foster, Richard

This course highlights the difficulties of making effective leadership decisions during periods of crisis or catastrophe, showcasing the challenges managers face in a business environment with ever-increasing change. Social and ethical questions contribute to the overall foundation of the course. In particular, the course emphasizes role of deception in decision-making and the social consequences of such an ethical void. Specific examples include the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the near bankruptcy of US states. Content also asks questions, such as the results of non-profits being dependent on marketing and seeking funds. Students are encouraged to raise ethical questions and assumptions in the course, even when such issues are not the focus of the lecture.

Course Name: Managing Marketing Programs
Instructor: Simmons, Joseph

This course focuses on the decisions managers must make to successfully implement marketing strategies. Successful marketing implementation requires the managed introduction of new products, effective setting of prices, persuasive communication of product value, and the distribution of the product through intermediaries or direct sales teams. The course uses cases, lectures, hands-on exercises, and class discussion to teach how organizations could make effective decisions within the “marketing mix” or the “4 P’s of Marketing” — product, price, promotions (communication) and place (distribution). The course also emphasizes the interconnections between the different elements of the marketing mix. Student projects, which are then shared with the class, often address social- or environmental-themed marketing programs.

Course Name: Managing Strategic Networks
Instructor: King, Marissa

Networks of relationships determine who is likely to get a job and get promoted, the innovativeness and profitability of organizations, how effectively industries and communities can coordinate, and the speed at which ideas and innovations spread. Although the importance of social capital is self-evident, few managers and entrepreneurs know how to effectively structure and coordinate their networks. The goal of this course is to gain a better understanding of how to create, use, and manage networks effectively. The course examines the impact that homophily has on diversity within organizations and labor issues, among other topics. One case addresses negotiations with the Canadian Auto Workers to avoid a strike.

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