Courses
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Current Courses
Women, Leadership and Entrepreneurship - AEM3340
This seminar makes use of lectures, guest panels and readings to focus on issues facing women (and their partners) in their careers. Sessions include topics such as: status of women in business leadership, pathways and strategies for leadership development, family/life balance issues, gender issues in the workplace and resources for emerging leaders.
Women, Leadership and Entrepreneurship
Personal Enterprise and Small Business Management - AEM 3250
Focuses on the activities involved in planning a start-up business, including the exploration of strategic dimensions, performance of marketing research, and planning of financial aspects related to the new company. Lectures and hands-on clinics include visits by real world entrepreneurs, who discuss the start-up process and the challenges of managing growth in a small business. Term project is the development of a business plan, completed in teams of no fewer than three students.
Personal Enterprise and Small Business Management
Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Management - Prison Course
This course is an introduction to the concepts of entrepreneurship, designed for individuals who are considering either working for a small business or starting a company of their own. Individuals will generate and analyze a variety of business ideas using the concepts presented in the course. Students will work on teams to cultivate their teamwork skills and to gain a better understanding of the key drivers of business.
Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Management
Entrepreneurial Leadership - AEM 4360
Participants learn about concepts and practice skills important to becoming an entrepreneurial leader in startup or small business, corporate environment and/or the public sector. Set in a global context, issues related entrepreneurial leadership are covered: vision, opportunity identification, engagement of teams in resource-constrained situations, and tolerance for ambiguity and risk.
Previous Courses
International Entrepreneurship - AEM 494
This is a course for students who are either going abroad or going to a non-US country for either winter or summer break. The focus is on how entrepreneurship manifests itself in different cultures. Participants will conduct audio interviews with entrepreneurs during their travel. Students will attend 4 sessions during the semester preceding their travel to: get an orientation in international entrepreneurship, write a proposal for their country (based on study and discussion), and create a project plan and timeline.
International Entrepreneurship
Introduction to Applied Economics and Management - AEM 1101
The purpose of this course is to acquaint first-year students in AEM with their new department and better enable them to make academic and early career decisions. A cross-section of faculty will lead discussions that introduce most of the major academic subjects taught in AEM. In addition, there are guest presenters on topics such as career planning, student organizations, course planning, and ethics and academic integrity. There are several homework assignments.
Introduction to Applied Economics and Management
Finance - AEM 3240
Focuses on the mathematics of finance, valuation, and the economics of managerial decisions, corporate financial policy, risk management, and investments. Topics include the time value of money, bond and stock valuation, capital-budgeting decisions, financing alternatives, the cost of capital and the capital-structure decision, distribution policy, mergers and acquisitions and restructuring, options, forward and futures contracts, market efficiency and market anomalies, strategies of successful investors, and personal finance.
Decision Models for Small and Large Businesses - AEM 4170
Focuses on economic and statistical models of decision analysis and their applications in large and small business settings. Demonstrates how use of models can improve the decision-making process by helping the decision maker. Emphasizes the importance of sensitivity analysis and the need to combine both quantitative and qualitative considerations in decision making. Draws cases from small business scenarios, the public policy arena, and corporate settings. Lab sessions focus on implementing decision models with computers.
Decision Models for Small and Large Businesses
Small Business Management Workshop - AEM 425
Students serve as counselors to small businesses in the central New York area and confront problems facing small personal enterprises. Encourages the application of business principles to an existing business and the witnessing of the results of firm-level decision-making. Student teams meet with the business owners and course staff members at arranged times during the semester.
Small Business Management Workshop
My Teaching Approach
"Teaching: the earth doesn't move every time, but when it does, what a RUSH!" -- Cameron Beatty
Learning is not a transfer process
Wikipedia's definition of learning begins: "Learning is acquiring new knowledge..." The part that bothers me is the verb "acquire" which sounds very transactional to me - as if to say "I'm going to go to the store and buy me some learning." Deep and lasting learning always involves unanticipated gifts, insights, and connections brought by the learners and is never a simple transfer from teacher to student.
I prefer the following saying from Confucius: "Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three."
Accordingly, all my teaching activities feature the following common ideas:
- Provide enough structure and support to make it comfortable for students to take chances.
- Teach frameworks for understanding rather than facts.
- Teach frameworks for understanding rather than facts.
- Offer opportunities to reflect and generalize in order to convert experiences to experiential learning, where the outcomes can be interpreted and understood in a broader context.
Structure and support
When student experience is dominated by courses in which there is a precise answer to homework questions (e.g. math, statistics, physics), students can become very risk averse, because they can only succeed by arriving at a given endpoint. By contrast, in entrepreneurship most important questions (e.g. what is the right idea? How do you make money? What is the right target market?) do not have a single answer. Thus, it is critical to provide mentoring and support so that the very unstructured questions can be explored without fear of failure. Students learn best through projects, researching, iterating, writing and rewriting.
Conceptual Frameworks
It is easy to get carried away with all the fun of story-telling that enlivens entrepreneurship education and to forget about the need for conceptual frameworks to create a more lasting way to interpret and understand those experiences.
I use concepts from economics, such as supply and demand, blend them with frameworks, such as SWOT analysis, from the strategy literature and add ideas from the entrepreneurship arena, such as "value proposition." This blend allows students in a business planning class to learn how to repeat the analysis it takes to study markets and prepare a strong business plan.
Experiential Learning - Allow for failure
There is a lot written on experiential learning. One of my favorite pieces is the outcome on a committee I served on years ago and can be found online here.
Meanwhile, a neglected topic is building failure into learning. When you do experiential learning with students (e.g., projects with the community, business plans, idea generation), they are bound to fail at some point. The answer is not in the back of the book! So many external events can impact their experience that it is unlike the very controlled lab experiment or stats homework where you are fairly confident of the learning journey ahead of the student.
Techniques that help accommodate failure:
- Avoid grading structures that put too much pressure on a one-time performance by the students (i.e., lower the cost or risk).
- Allow for reasonable iteration.
- Reward risk-taking and hard work, rather than specific outcomes.
- Encourage a collaborative environment, so students support each other during difficult periods.
- Acknowledge the challenge of dealing with failure.
Engagement: Wake up your students with the power of story!
Another key principle of my teaching is to use rich media (audio and video) to integrate the wisdom of the real world with the discipline of the classroom and to provoke and engage the learner. My belief that stories from the real world could help my students learn and remember led to the creation of eClips.
Some teachers consider the use of video or other multimedia as dangerous, catering to the worst tendencies of our learners to be require what Baby Boomers see as the "overstimulation" need by a generation that is already too TV or computer-oriented. I disagree. In my experience (20+ years of teaching), when used properly, video and audio can have a strong and riveting impact on learners, deepening their engagement with the subject matter.
Educator John Roueche once said that, "Teachers who cannot keep students involved and excited for several hours in the classroom should not be there." While I don't think educators need to be pure entertainers, I do agree with the sentiment that engaging learners is essential.
I have found that using audio and video in small doses, administered at strategic moments, can be extremely helpful in renewing the ever shortening attention span of my students in class. More importantly, they serve as a type of anchor for the material, helping students remember the concepts and ideas over the long term. Why is digital media so effective when used in this way? I believe it is because they add a human story element to the learning environment.
"Thought flows in terms of stories - stories about events, stories about people, and stories about intentions and achievements. The best teachers are the best story tellers. We learn in the form of stories." -- Frank Smith
As human beings, we relate to stories in a special way. For example, Bielenberg and Carpenter-Smith (2002) showed with their research that when story lines were used in computer-based adult learning, students were able to construct detailed memory of the course content and showed high levels of interest. Part of the effect came from the fact that learners often compared the experiences presented to their own lives. This is reinforced by Rossiter (2002) who argues when stories are used in teaching, it makes the knowledge believable and credible, inviting the learner to make meaning of the actions and words of the characters, and leading them to create and discover the deeper meaning.
Take, for example, a discussion of cash flow statements and the danger of allowing cash to dwindle in a startup company (one of the major causes of deaths in new businesses). In and of itself, the subject matter is rather dry, requirement the explanation of the accounting terms and methods used to track and reflect the cash flows of a company over time.
When teaching about cash flow, in addition to handouts with tables and numbers, and explanations of how to construct and interpret the statements, I use the following videos to bring the subject to life.
In the first clip, Aaron Rosenberg starts with the term "flame date," a very visceral description of what happens when a company runs out of cash. The colorful terminology and earnest demeanor never fails to capture the attention of the students. Tom Szaky starts his comments with "Cash flow is King. Absolutely. And I'll give you some examples of how we have dealt with that." Again, the descriptive language and the specificit of the examples command the attention of the listener. What I have found over the years is that the comments by these two young entrepreneurs have real "staying power."
Interspersing these two clips in the cash flow lesson is effective. Then, I end with one of my favorite clips, by Earl Blanks, where he compares cash flow to oil in a car. When students leave class, they have this mental picture of an engine seizing up and smoking because it lacks fuel, just as happens when a company lacks cash flow.
These are just a few examples of how video can be used in an effective way to engage and inspire students. See my blog for more ideas and thoughts on the topic of teaching.
References
Bielenberg, D.R. and Carpenter-Smith, T. "Efficacy of story in multimedia training Andersen Consulting Education," 1405 North Fifth Avenue, St. Charles, 60174, Illinois, U.S.A.
Rossiter, M. "Narrative and Stories in Adult Teaching and Learning." Educational Resources Information Center, No. 241, 2002.