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

Career Focus

SVC should appeal to students who aspire to work in senior leadership positions (CEO, CFO, COO, or CMO) in both large and small companies; as strategy consultants or investment bankers who advise companies; or as private equity, public equity, venture capital, or hedge fund investors seeking to gain a better understanding of what creates value and why.

Educational Objectives

SVC is a capstone course that integrates and further develops concepts developed in RC Courses namely Finance 1, Finance 2, and Strategy, and to a lesser extent LEAD, Marketing, and LCA. It is a case-based course that is designed to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and judgment needed to make better investment, strategic, and operating decisions. The goal is to see value creation as an important—but by no means the only—corporate objective and a guiding principle for making important business decisions. In short, the goal is to develop a value creation mindset.

The course emphasizes the development of practical insights rather than formal theories, and the application of relevant theories to practice. Toward that end, the course includes several “Policy Days” which analyze current policy debates in corporate America such as payout policy (share repurchases), CEO pay, and activist investors. The policy days typically follow related cases and use readings from business journals, academic journals, and trade publications to illustrate opposing viewpoints.

Course Content and Organization

Cases typically analyze the value implications of major strategic decisions or analysis of unique business models. 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 and assessing risk) than a typical RC Strategy class. It is designed to teach a set of quantitative tools (microeconomics of supply and demand curves, the strategic value of optionality, the concept of price elasticity, etc.) and frameworks that will help you make important business decisions.

The course has five modules based on the Value Driver Framework developed by Fruhan and others.

● Understanding Value Creation (Value Driver Framework)

● Creating Competitive Advantage

● Sustaining Competitive Advantage

● Driving Profitable Growth

● Setting Corporate Objectives

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