MBA
Develop the core knowledge global recruiters demand
Rigorous academic frameworks. Applied project work. Benefit from leadership skills training and the opportunity to tailor your MBA studies. Our Business Fundamentals core provides a robust and analytical grounding in the tools and techniques necessary for future career success.
Pre-term core
Get started before you even set foot on campus. Three online modules in finance, accounting and quantitative methods ensure you have a strong foundation in key skills before the start of term. Designed by LBS faculty, the courses utilise rigorous online testing and integrate seamlessly with our Business Fundamentals core.
Students with prior knowledge and experience in these areas may take the tests without completing the coursework.
Business Fundamentals core
Combine a solid business toolkit with the skills and cultural sensitivities to succeed anywhere in the world. Running across the first two terms, our Business Fundamentals core is a dynamic introduction to management and global leadership tools and techniques. It’s also an essential step in securing your summer internship. Courses include:
- Understanding General Management
This course highlights the professional challenges and responsibilities you will face as a general manager and creates a road map to navigate the twists and turns of the MBA programme over the next two years.
- Global Leadership Assessment for Managers (GLAM)
Develop into the best leader you can be on this self-discovery course. While management skills can be taught, leadership is about making a difference to the challenges we face with people and projects. Discover how to make a difference and be yourself, with skill.
- Data Analytics for Managers
Discover how to use data to make, and argue the case for, business decisions. Business decisions are often too complex to be made by intuition alone, so if you bring the analytical thought we will give you the tools to make informed decisions.
- Perspectives in Business Ethics
World-leading faculty are at the helm of this completely redesigned and insightful course. Taught early on in the programme, the content will have a profound impact throughout the MBA.
- Finance I
Learn how to manage your company’s finances and develop a framework to help you make the right financial decisions.
- Strategy
Explore a new range of strategy tools and frameworks and apply them to a variety of competitive situations.
- Marketplaces
Learn about applied microeconomics, with a management focus. At the end of this course, understand how markets operate and how market mechanisms affect the choices of firms.
- Accounting
Analyse financial information and judge a firm’s prospects based on performance, patterns in their financial statements, profit drivers, assets and obligations.
- Marketing
Your passport into the world of strategic marketing; this course gives a solid foundation to enable you to apply marketing concepts, and prepare and evaluate marketing plans with confidence.
- The Science of People in Organisations
Develop the skills to predict the behaviour of individuals, groups and organisations to lead a company or team towards success.
- Operations Management
Take control of business processes by learning the basic terminology, concepts and quantitative tools of operations management. Learn how your managerial input, and data, can match supply and demand.
- Macroeconomics for Managers
Learn about applied macroeconomics, with a management focus. At the end of this course, understand how markets operate and how market mechanisms affect the choices of firms.
Customise your learning early with our tailored core courses
Shape our MBA in line with your personal and professional goals. Year one is as flexible as possible - start customising the programme from the second term.
Explore a number of exciting options: deepen existing expertise in areas such as analytics and finance, investigate new subjects like digital strategy, or leverage our strong London network on the highly practical LondonCAP module.
- Business Analytics
Business decisions are too complex to make by intuition alone. Equip yourself with analytical thinking and powerful tools to become more effective in these tasks. Learn to use data to ask questions, build simple but powerful models that test your intuitive reasoning, improve managerial thinking and facilitate the communication of your recommendations. You’ll develop specific skills in decision modelling, risk assessment, business simulation, project evaluation and resource management.
- Customer and Market Insights
Learn how to navigate the tools and methods available to provide the customer and market insights relevant to managerial decision-making.
- Determine the most appropriate research method for a given question
- Understand the logistics associated with customer and market insight exercises
- Design a questionnaire that generates useful data
- Identify good and bad practices with respect to sampling, data analysis, and the interpretation of results.
- Design Led Innovation
Developed by expert faculty at the Royal College of Art (RCA) and delivered by RCA faculty and leading practitioners in the world of design, this course focuses on the importance of innovation in product, services and customer experience in the commercial and public sector.
Learn the concepts, methodologies, tools and techniques of design thinking and especially service design, and how these can be applied for the development of new products and services as well as addressing operational challenges in business. Explore how these methods can be integrated with other innovation methods such as Lean, Agile, and Scrum.
- Developing Entrepreneurial Opportunities
What is the most efficient way to generate and develop new ideas so they can succeed, despite the odds? Build the skills, tools, and mind-sets to discover and develop opportunities upon which entrepreneurial ventures may be built, exploring idea generation; opportunity evaluation & selection; idea development; scaling; and corporate entrepreneurship.
- Develop a systematic approach to identifying an entrepreneurial opportunity
- Marshal a range of lenses and frameworks for generating ideas
- Understand the pitfalls and challenges associated with idea development in an entrepreneurial and a corporate setting
- Inform and prioritise your choices of entrepreneurship courses and extra-curricular activities.
- Digital Strategy
How have new trends in data, internet usage and AI changed firms, industries, and the institutional foundations upon which firms operate? Explore new frameworks and techniques to better understand these business models.
- Understand how digitisation influences firms’ business models, their competitive advantage, the industry structure, and the foundational institutions upon which industries operate
- Discover the key aspects of multi-sided businesses (platforms) and learn how to analyse or design a multi-sided business
- Make sense of how some of the recent technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence could lead to foundational transformations in how firms operate in the future.
- Finance II
Should a company issue debt, equity or hybrid forms of financing such as convertibles and warrants and how are these securities priced? How should you finance the investment projects you choose to undertake? How do you distinguish between good investment projects and bad ones?
Explore capital structure choice studying the seminal Miller and Modigliani (MM) Theorem, which provides the conditions under which project choice and financing choice can be separated. Then, focus on the concept of optionality and how to apply it to both financial assets. Cover standard options, apply these insights to risk management and discuss corporate risk management, with a focus on the strategic decision of whether a firm should hedge its risk exposures.
- Develop your own view on the optimal capital structure for a corporation
- Understand the importance of asymmetric information and signalling in capital markets and financing
- Understand the ideas underlying option pricing
- Apply option pricing to financial and real options
- Understanding the role of banks as financial intermediaries.
- ESG Reporting for Today's Economy
This course introduces the concept of sustainability reporting and responsible investing. It critically evaluates the potential benefits of disclosing ESG information as well as significant challenges to be overcome, including the risk of greenwashing. It introduces students to existing and emerging ESG regulations and frameworks for ESG performance metrics. The course also explores how key capital market participants, such as asset managers, analysts, and banks, could incorporate ESG information into their valuation models and investment decisions.
Analyze and critically evaluate a firm’s sustainability/CSR report.
Identify the material ESG issues impacting business and make recommendations for improvement.
Describe and critically evaluate the methodologies underlying ESG ratings implemented by rating agencies.
Incorporate ESG information into traditional financial and valuation analysis.
Make investment decisions based on ESG factors.
- Information in the Modern Economy
The modern economy is centered around information. Managers need to organize communication within teams and assess their performances. Digital businesses can collect precise information about consumers' taste and use it to target promotions. Firms sometimes rely on influencers to market their products. Platforms collect information about different sides of the market, which is then elaborated in complex algorithms to create high quality matches. E-commerce platforms, like Amazon or eBay, need effective review systems to create trust amongst their users.
Building on Microeconomics for Managers, this course studies what information is and how information affects the modern economy.
- Global Economic Analysis
Explore key issues in macroeconomics and international finance, including:
- What are business cycles, what drives them and how do they affect the decision-making process of firms and policy makers?
- What is monetary policy? What role does it play for providing economic growth and stability? Have firms and financial markets become “addicted” to low interest rates?
- What is the role of fiscal policy in the economy? When should a country worry about its level of debt and when is it ok to spend more? Why are sovereign debt crises costly both for firms and for the economy and how can we avoid them?
- What theories can explain the behaviour of one of the most important macroeconomic variables for business, finance and trade?
- What are the current and capital accounts of a country and how do we think about the debt sustainability of a whole country? Can countries have stable exchange rates, free flow of capital and monetary policy independence all at the same time? If not, what are the trade-offs? How do they affect the ability of governments to provide a stable macroeconomic environment for business?
- Innovation and Technology Strategy
This course explores the basis of competition in high-technology industries through conceptual frameworks and explicit insights from rigorous academic research. You will gain an in-depth understanding of how high-technology industries work and how to develop strategies for managing firms in such industries
- Learn how firms leverage technology to build sustainable competitive advantage
- Decide what are the optimal strategies for building technology-based business models
- Understand how an incumbent firm can respond to “disruptive” innovations
- Determine how firms may be able to commercialise and protect new innovations or scientific discoveries
- Study how technologies change business models, and how companies can respond
- Systematically analyse and generate ideas for technological innovation
- Marketing Planning Under Competition
Learn to develop and execute a marketing plan in a competitive, fast-paced and unpredictable marketplace. Develop a positioning strategy, identify which businesses and segments to compete in and how to strategically allocate scarce resources across the marketing mix in both mature and new markets. Explore pricing strategies, the product life cycle curve, new market entry strategies, word of mouth/social contagion, and competitor analysis.
Compete in teams against your classmates in the Markstrat simulation, selling products in both new and maturing markets. Obtain hands-on experience executing on your marketing plan and use it as a jumping off point for class discussion about real world marketing strategy.
- Performance-Driven Strategy Execution
Identify key tools and techniques to execute business strategies. This course partially builds on the Seven Strategy Questions: Who is your primary customer? How do your core values prioritise shareholders, employees, and customers? What critical performance variables are you tracking? What strategic boundaries have you set? How are you generating creative tension? How committed are your employees to helping each other? What strategic uncertainties keep you awake at night? Learn to:
- Organise business for better performance
- Design jobs for better performance
- Design markets inside the firm
- Design incentive systems for executives and other employees
- Identify and manage strategic risks
- Design boundary and internal control systems
- Build profit plans and budgets (as part of the optional lab).
- Pricing
Study the strategic choices faced when a business enjoys market power but acts in the presence of competitors. Understand how businesses can exploit market power via pricing, market segmentation, and marketing; use game theory to analyse strategic interaction in oligopolistic scenarios; and evaluate network effects that are important in contemporary platform-mediated marketplaces.
Understand the determinants of the shape of demand for a product
Make output and pricing decisions that respond to different demand shapes
Characterise basic strategies for advertising, marketing, and product design
Optimally sell a product line of different qualities
Apply discriminatory pricing via market segmentation and versioning
Make optimal supply decisions in capacity-driven oligopolies
Further explore the relationship between competition and economic performance
Choose prices appropriately when competitors sell differentiated products
Understand the strategic effects of product and process innovations
Evaluate the properties of entry to oligopolistic markets
Understand the key concepts that drive platform-mediated networks
Appreciate recent strategies that allowed platforms to start, embed, and develop.
- Value Chain Management
Learn to match supply with demand in uncertain, highly variable environments. Covering management interventions on both demand-side and supply-side, this course introduces rigorous quantitative methods to inform both tactical (service level, material flows, prices, capacity control) and strategic decisions (product design, facility location, contract design, information sharing).
- Understand how and when operational excellence can contribute to the achievement of competitive advantage
- Explore how organisations create superior value for customers and build competitive advantage through operations
- Acquire key methods to control and improve operations
- Challenge your managerial skills and apply them in realistic settings.
Electives
See the business world from all angles. Benefit from cross-generational learning with students from across our community.
Explore our elective portfolioCore Courses FAQs
- What is the purpose of the core courses?
Core courses are split into two distinct sections – Business Fundamentals and our flexible Tailored Core.
Core courses are usually taught in three-hour periods (including a short intermission) once a week for between five and ten weeks. Business Fundamentals run across the first two terms, starting with a leadership module which introduces you to issues and concerns in global general management.
Other courses cover business functions and disciplines, with care taken to help you make the link between the different perspectives covered. Our flexible Tailored Core begins in the second term, and allows you to deepen your existing expertise in areas such as economics and finance, investigate new subjects like digital business, or leverage our strong London network on the highly practical LondonCAP (London Core Application Practicum).
The courses are sequenced so that there is a logical progression between subjects. This prepares you for summer internship interviews, especially those in finance and consulting commencing in January, ahead of other internship interviews.
- How many hours a week will I need to study?
You will usually take four courses at any one time. Typically these will involve a weekly three-hour class. You should expect to spend about two and a half hours in private study, group meetings and group work for every hour in the classroom. You will also participate in Career Centre sessions, workshops and activities throughout the term.
- How is the programme assessed?
We have a duty to you, our alumni and future students to maintain the integrity and standard of the degrees we award through a rigorous assessment system. The purpose of the various assignments and examinations we ask you to complete is not simply for assessment: these are also intended to help you to structure your learning to help you gauge your progress through the programme.
The assessment system makes use of elements like course assignments, projects, group work, class participation, examinations and simulations. You will be expected to prepare for and attend class and participate actively in discussion both in class and in your group. The precise assessment model for each course - for example, whether class participation and oral report presentations count towards your final grade - will be set out clearly from the outset.
You must successfully pass all core courses. Your grades will be adjusted to a grade curve from A+ to C, with a maximum of 10% of the class achieving A+. The decision to Pass or Fail is a matter of academic judgement, and there is no obligation to fail any students.
To earn your degree, you must complete all requirements of your programme. This includes both courses and programme elements. You must pass all Business Fundamentals and Tailored Core courses, and successfully pass a minimum of ten elective courses, but you may carry one elective fail. You must also successfully complete Leadership Launch and the Global Experience.
- How does the flexible completion date work?
The MBA programme has 15, 18, and 21-month exit points. These time frames capture the amount of study you are expected to undertake. I.e. if you start in August 2025, you may be permitted to take your last class in December 2026.
In order to graduate from the programme at one of our early exit points, you will need to have met all programme requirements: pass your Business Fundamentals, Tailored Core and a minimum of 10 elective courses, and complete experiential programme elements like Leadership Launch and the Global Experience.
Please note that, by choosing an early exit, you may limit your choice of available electives. Those going on International Exchange will not be able to exit the programme at 15 months.
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