Career Focus

This course provides a general management perspective on corporate finance and is designed to improve your ability to create value. It should appeal to students who want to work as finance executives within organizations (both for-profit and non-profit); as strategy consultants or investment bankers who advise organizations; or as private equity, public equity, venture capital, or hedge fund investors. The course should also appeal to students who simply want to deepen their understanding of corporate finance in a range of topics and settings not covered in the required curriculum courses.

Educational Objectives

The goal of the course is to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and judgment required to make good investment, financing, and operating decisions. The course emphasizes the development of practical insights rather than formal theories. We will refine and extend the analytical tools covered in RC Finance 1 and 2 and apply value-based management techniques to a broad set of business decisions.

Course Content and Organization

Most class sessions will be case-based. While the Fall and Spring versions of the course will utilize many of the same cases and cover many of the same topics, each will have a different emphasis.

The Fall version of the course emphasizes the activities performed by the chief financial officer (CFO). This focus intends to expose you to what these activities are, to engage you in rich discussions about the key considerations behind fundamental choices CFOs face, and to teach you financial decision making frameworks and processes that firms often use. The key modules include

• Measuring and Driving Performance
• Managing Funding Sources and Cash
• Managing Risk
• Managing Investment

In the Fall version, we will have numerous guests over the course of the semester, most of whom are CFOs and HBS graduates. In addition to hearing from several case protagonists, we will be joined by CFOs who are subject matter experts on topics we will discuss. In the past, guests have included Amy Hood, CFO of Microsoft; Eleanor Laurans, CFO of Boston Public Schools; Doug Maine, former CFO of MCI and IBM; Jonathan Mariner, former CFO of Major League Baseball; Byron Pollitt, former CFO of Visa; Helen Riley, CFO of Google X; Robert Ryan, former CFO of Medtronic; Dhivya Suryadevara, CFO of GM; Scott Ullem, CFO of Edwards Lifesciences, and several other current or former CFOs and CEOs. We will use part of our time with these guests to discuss their career paths and explore career options.

The Spring version of the course is intended to be a capstone course for the MBA program by integrating and extending topics covered in various RC courses particularly strategy, finance, and leadership. It will place more emphasis on strategic analysis-the financial implications of major strategic decisions. It will utilize more strategy concepts (creating and sustaining competitive advantage, managing competitive interactions, etc.) than a typical RC Finance class, and will utilize more financial concepts (measuring value, assessing risk, and analyzing cash flows) than a typical RC Strategy class. In short, it is designed to teach a set of quantitative tools (microeconomics of supply and demand curves, the strategic value of optionality, and the concept of price elasticity) and frameworks that can help you make important strategic and operating decisions. In the end, the goals are to improve your financial acumen, deepen your strategic thinking, and unify the knowledge you’ve learned across multiple functional silos. The key modules include:

• Understanding Value Drivers
• Creating Competitive Advantage
• Sustaining Competitive Advantage
• Driving Profitable Growth
• Setting Corporate Objectives

NOTE: Because there is considerable overlap between the fall course, Corporate Finance: Corporate Financial Operations (CFO) 1416, and the spring course, Strategies for Value Creation (SVC) 1417, students cannot take both of them.

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