This program is designed to provide senior technical managers with the financial concepts, strategies, and tools needed to deal more effectively with corporate financial management. Course curriculum focuses on basic financial principles for project evaluation, funding, and resource allocation, helping leaders to work more effectively with financial decision makers and apply the principles of finance to short-term and long-range goals.
Fundamentals of Finance for the Technical Executive
Certificate Track:
Management and Leadership
Location:
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Tuition:
2016 dates: $3,300 (excluding accommodations) | 2017 dates: $3,500 (excluding accommodations)
Program Days (for certificate credit): 2
Today's technical executive must be able to use finance to persuade corporate financial officers to fund projects as well as use financial tools to address senior management's concerns about risk. Focused on basic principles of accounting and financial decision making for managers, this program will help transform a technical manager’s ability to manage and advocate for both day-to-day and long-term activities.
This interactive, hands-on program will enable participants to:
This program is designed for executives who manage project teams and departments, and technical professionals involved with R&D, product and software design, engineering, and other scientific and technical work. No advanced quantitative skills are required, but participants should bring calculators.
Past participants have included key members of technical management, such as:
Paul Mende is a Lecturer in the Finance Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Mende co-founded, co-owned, and served as director of research from 2002 to 2010 for Fort Hill Capital Management, LLC, a hedge fund specializing in equity derivatives and dedicated to quantitative research, trading, and risk management. Fort Hill actively participated in the launch and success of Bay Hill Fund LP and Bay Hill Capital Management LLC in 2007 as a multi-strategy volatility hedge fund. In 2004, Fort Hill launched Absolute Strategies Fund and Absolute Investment Advisers LLC as an innovative absolute-return fund-of-funds structured as a Securities and Exchange Commission registered mutual fund, with daily liquidity for investors and full position-level transparency from managers.
Mende previously held positions as director of the Money Management & Trading Group at Cambridge Technology Partners, Inc., and as an analyst in the Quantitative Strategies Group at MDT Advisers, Inc. He also held positions as an assistant professor of physics at Brown University and as a research associate at the Center for Theoretical Physics and the Department of Mathematics at MIT.
Mende holds an AB in physics from Harvard University and a PhD in physics from Princeton University.
Sample Schedule—Subject to Change
| DAY 1 SAMPLE | |
| 07:45AM - 08:30AM | Registration and Continental Breakfast |
| 08:30AM - 12:30PM | Basic Concepts of Finance, Case Study of Wilson Lumber and In-Class Group Work |
| 12:30PM - 01:30PM | Networking Lunch |
| 01:30PM - 05:30PM | Introduction to Project Evaluation, Investment Evaluation Exercise |
| 05:30PM - 06:30PM | Reception |
| DAY 2 SAMPLE | |
| 07:45AM - 08:30AM | Continental Breakfast |
| 08:30AM - 12:30PM | More on Project Evaluation |
| 12:30PM - 01:30PM | Networking Lunch |
| 01:30PM - 04:30PM | Project Evaluation, Case Study and In-Class Group Work |
If you want to know what credit card companies think of you, look at your mail.
VIEWInvestment advice business needs its own Hippocratic Oath.
VIEWIn an effort to create a successful retirement portfolio, investors often find their way to professionals who loosely call themselves advisers or their services financial planning, even though they are de facto sales agents paid commissions by their company. This compensation structure can lead to conflicts of interest between financial professionals and their clients. Do financial professionals help retail investors make better financial decisions and educate investors? Or do they put their own interests first and attempt to generate more commissions and fees?
VIEWThe ongoing debate on the financial scandal involving the Saradha group in West Bengal has put the focus on chit funds, one of the oldest but still poorly understood financial institutions in India.
Seeking financial advice is bad for your wealth. New research by top academics concludes that the advisor industry mostly reinforces bad behavior, rather than fixing it, even when clients start with a well-diversified, low-fee portfolio. High fees and commissions incentivize advisors to promote performance chasing and costly actively-managed products.
VIEWThe study, by Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan, Markus Noeth of the University of Hamburg and Antoinette Schoar of the MIT Sloan School of Management, looks at the behavior of typical investment advisers available to the general public through their banks, independent brokerages or investment advisory firms (focusing on the market for those with less than $500,000 to invest).
VIEWKeith P: This excellent course built on and expanded my project financial analysis skills that I first learned years ago during my undergraduate MIT chemical engineering education.
Christos P: Excellent and very in-depth course!
Raymond M: Very comprehensive overview. Mostly, a deep dive into the details of actually doing financial evaluations. I was expecting a little more of a 30K perspective of what to do with the information rather than a focus on creating it myself. With that said, I will let some time pass to see if this approach actually benefits both - I suspect it will.
David A: As an engineer, this course filled huge gaps in my knowledge. Great course!
Satish Narayanan S: The topics covered really gives us a overview of the finance world for technical persons. The language, content were also structured to make it understand for the technical minds. It was great experience and helps a lot for me. Couple of suggestions is 1. Provide the reading materials 4 weekends in advance, not all of us have time to read it in this short period. 2. Provide ebooks instead of paper books. It's easy to carry and use it. And we save paper. (I say this for all MIT courses).
Greg S: Excellent program, but it comes with a whole bunch of pre-reading that is absolutely necessary to get the most out of the time in class. Faculty members were excellent, and did a great job of leading a diverse class through a complex topic. By the end of the second day, everyone was able to assess complex financial situations that would have been impenetrable just a few days earlier.
Elba P: Content of the program is straight to the point. Case studies convey the messages clearly and highlight important issues to be kept in mind. Excellent course.
Rashmi S: It would have been helpful to bring “pencil and eraser” in the class (along with the computer) as we did Income Statements with Xavier Giroud.
Bradley M: This was an excellent investment! As an Account Executive, I often work within complex sales cycles that involve a lot of financial scrutiny. The course gave me a perspective from the other side of the table. I now have a better understanding of common challenges as well as the language spoken by the financial teams.
Robert G: The handouts were not as good as in other courses.
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"This was an excellent investment! As an Account Executive, I often work within complex sales cycles that involve a lot of financial scrutiny. The course gave me a perspective from the other side of the table. I now have a better understanding of common challenges as well as the language spoken by the financial teams." -Bradley M.
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