Art and science of financial analysis using simple cases

Abstract

In my own teaching experience at top business schools, I have found that the MBA curriculum often lacked the one class that brings together knowledge from diverse areas such as accounting, economics, finance, production and marketing to analyze and solve business problems. While students understand different subjects/topics pretty well in isolation, they often cannot see how they are connected, or how to integrate knowledge from different areas to analyze and solve unstructured problems.

Then there is this elusive quality called intuition which cannot be taught! For many years, I have been trying to teach a class that not only integrates different subjects usually taught in a business school (the science part), but also show how intuition (the art part) plays a significant role in solving problems.

The aim of this lecture is to introduce you to some of my ideas through short cases in financial analysis.