MBA and M.S. in Sustainability Management Dual Degree Master’s Program

This is a weekly seminar series that features invited speakers from various professional fields related to Sustainability Management. Speakers are recognized experts from academia, industry, and the government who present on a spectrum of topics ranging from research work to industry projects. Speakers attend a meet and greet with students, thereby providing valuable networking opportunities for future job seekers in the sustainability field. Seminars are open to all members of the Stevens community. Students enrolled for credit will have specific task requirements.

This course addresses environmental management and its role in sustainability from multiple perspectives, including but not limited to that of a natural scientist, an engineer, a marketing manager, an economist, an environmental lawyer, and a policy maker. The course also introduces students to some of the many tools used by environmental managers, such as life cycle analysis, environmental audit, etc. Students will learn from the course instructor and invited subject matter experts, who will explain in a non-technical manner that is intended for adequate comprehension by students from diverse fields of study on how their respective disciplines contribute to proper management of our environment, thereby making our world more sustainable.

This course is tailored for environmental scientists, marketing and project managers, economists, environmental lawyers and policy makers, but is also relevant to engineers, which addresses environmental assessment and its role in sustainability management. The course introduces students to issues and tools relevant to sustainability management practice such as environmental risk management, life cycle assessment, socio-economic impact assessment, environmental economics, total life cycle costing, decision making, resource management, environmental audits, and environmental management systems, along with an overview of the regulatory framework and methodologies used in environmental impact assessment. Students will learn from the course instructor and carefully selected materials in a soft-technical manner that is intended for adequate comprehension by students from diverse fields of study.

This course will focus on best practices and emerging trends in sustainable business management. Topics will include corporate social responsibility, sustainable business theories, green business models, value chain management, green marketing, triple bottom line reporting, benefit-cost analysis and sustainability metrics and reporting. Students will explore the relationship between business management and sustainability goals for a number of industrial sectors. The course will include case studies as a tool for assessing strategies, identifying opportunities for improvements and recommending future actions. Students will be introduced to commonly used sustainability reporting frameworks and will use them to evaluate objective-setting and progress towards green goals.

This course addresses issues of sustainable development at the local, regional and global scales. Topics include understanding of the definitions, history, current status and future outlook of sustainable development. Population dynamics, wealth distribution, principles of economic growth, social dimensions of sustainable growth (poverty, food security, health, education, social inclusion), biodiversity and ecosystem dynamics, climate change. Sustainable development stakeholders and their roles and responsibilities including individuals, advocacy groups, local, regional and country-level governing bodies, NGO’s and corporations. Legal, policy and regulatory aspects of sustainable development. A systems view of sustainability and sustainable development including the concepts of global boundaries and resiliency.

This course will provide students with an overview on the various assessment tools and technical skills that corporate sustainability professionals would use in their roles. Sustainability can be quite vague and how do we know if we have achieved it? In this course, we examine setting sustainability goals, measuring progress towards sustainability outcomes, and managing so-called "sustainability transitions". We will take a look at how sustainability is measured and communicated through sustainability reporting frameworks such as GRI & SASB as well as a deep dive into how to quantify greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and set goals and targets for a climate action plan.

A survey of legal and regulatory approaches to environmental protection. Topics include: environmental ethics, National Environmental Policy Act, State and Federal environmental agencies; and the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Superfund, Resource Recovery and Conservation Act, Right-to-Know, Environmental Cleanup Responsibility Act, and wetlands protection.

This course will provide students an opportunity to develop research and analytical skills needed to design an independent project in sustainability management. In the first part of the course, students will learn how to collect and analyze information from available literature, how to organize conceptual ideas logically and formulate a research proposal, and how to review and present proposals. The second part of the course will focus on studying published articles and project reports on how to design project tasks, how to analyze scientific, engineering, and survey data, and how to present and report processed data. Final products will include a proposal clearly identifying the goals of a sustainability project and proposing methods to fulfill the goals, plus a "mock" journal article based on real life natural science or social science sustainability data that will be provided to students depending on their disciplinary backgrounds.

This course will provide the student with the principles and techniques of financial and managerial accounting for technical organizations. The emphasis will be on the use of financial data for decision making. The basics of accounting will briefly be covered, with the major amount of time spent on ways to understand, analyze and use the data for decision making. Budgeting and analysis of performance, as well as, recognizing fixed and variable expenses are other key areas of financial management. Issues of valuation, time value of money, uncertainty and risk will be integrated in the material. The one-term course will make extensive use of the text by Weygandt et al (see below), supplemented by cases, exercises, homework and examinations. Emphasis will be on real-world, practical application of the tools of finance to management decision making.

This course introduces managers to the essence of business economics – the theories, concepts and ideas that form the economist’s tool kit encompassing both the microeconomic and macroeconomic environments. Microeconomic topics include demand and supply, elasticity, consumer choice, production, cost, profit maximization, market structure, and game theory while the Macroeconomic topics will be GDP, inflation, unemployment, aggregate demand, aggregate supply, fiscal and monetary policies. In addition the basic concepts in international trade and finance will be discussed.

This course deals with the basic problems of managing a project, defined as a temporary organization built for the purpose of achieving a specific objective. Both operational and conceptual issues will be considered. Operational issues include definition, planning, implementation, control, and evaluation of the project. Conceptual issues include project management vs. hierarchical management, matrix organization, project authority, motivation, and morale. Cases will be used to illustrate problems in project management and how to resolve them.

Project success depends, largely, on the human side. Success in motivating project workers, organizing and leading project teams, communication and sharing information, and conflict resolution, are just a few areas that are critical for project success. However, being primarily technical people, many project managers tend to neglect these "soft" issues, assuming they are less important or that they should be addressed by direct functional managers. The purpose of this course is to increase awareness of project managers to the critical issues of managing people and to present some of the theories and practices of leading project workers and teams.

This course provides students with a rigorous introduction to the fundamental principles of finance. The primary concepts covered include the time value of money, principles of valuation and risk. Specific applications include the valuation of debt and equity securities as well as capital budgeting analysis, financial manager’s functions, liquidity vs profitability, financial planning, capital budgeting, management of long term funds, money and capital markets, debt and equity, management of assets, cash and accounts receivable, inventory and fixed assets. Additional topics include derivative markets.

Executives make decisions every day in the face of uncertainty. The objective of this course is to help students understand how decisions are made, why they are often less than optimal, and how decision-making can be improved. This course will contrast how managers do make decisions with how they should make decisions, by thinking about how “rational” decision makers should act, by conducting in-class exercises and examining empirical evidence of how individuals do act (often erroneously) in managerial situations. The course will include statistical tools for decision-making, as well as treatment of the psychological factors involved in making decisions.

The study of marketing principles from the conceptual, analytical, and managerial points of view. Topics include: strategic planning, market segmentation, product life-cycle, new product development, advertising and selling, pricing, distribution, governmental, and other environmental influences as these factors relate to markets and the business structure. 

This course covers the general area of management of operations, both manufacturing and non-manufacturing. The focus of the course is on productivity and total quality management. Topics include quality control and quality management, systems of inventory control, work and materials scheduling, and process management.

In this course, students will evaluate and create their own prospective business strategies. They will develop an understanding of entrepreneurship and innovation in starting and growing a business venture. Students will be given an opportunity to actually start their own business or create a business in their company by learning how to take advantage of the new order of business opportunities of the information age. This course’s main objective is to show students how to identify these opportunities, be able to formulate and evaluate both qualitatively and quantitatively whether the opportunity is worth pursuing, and, of course, how it may be pursued. Actual case studies and experiences will be intertwined with the course content.

This course deals with the theory and methods associated with design thinking, a problem-solving protocol that spurs innovation and solves complex problems. Design thinking involves a unique form of inquiry which goes well beyond product and service design. Students will develop an appreciation for design and develop skills for studying design systems. These concepts and methods have wide applicability as they can be used to design organizations of people, information structures, compensation systems as well as the entire consumer experience. Applying these approaches can often create entirely new systems that are more useful and usable. The logic of this approach can sometimes solve "wicked problems" which have defied previous solutions.

An interdisciplinary course which examines the elements of, and the framework for, developing and implementing organizational strategy and policy in competitive environments. The course analyzes management problems both from a technical-economic perspective and from a behavioral perspective. Topics treated include: assessment of organizational strengths and weaknesses, threats, and opportunities; sources of competitive advantage; organizational structure and strategic planning; and leadership, organizational development, and total quality management. The case method of instruction is used extensively in this course.