As attaining B is simply a matter of acquiring very specific analytical and communication skills to supplement your innate ability in abstract, analytical thinking, there's no value in pursuing lengthy, general purpose alternatives vaguely targeting less able thinkers. For those few comfortable with abstract, anaytical thought, the most efficient route to "B," is our Core programsAs with all isa (integrated strategic analytics) programs, the Core programs present
ALL key elements of Accounting, Economics, Finance, Marketing, Operations, and Quant
within an integrated, analytical framework. (No silo-centric coverage.)

The isa learning approach is task-centric — as opposed to theory-centric — and is entirely hands-on.
The perspective is strategic, so all analysis is undertaken with a full understanding of
organization-wide impact.

The isa Core is quant-lite; college finite math (geometry, algebra, and trig) suffices.
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...and help requested: We're wrestling with how to get the student costs to a minimum and need your help on some administrative specifics. BTW, "distance-ed" is a non-starter since it's proved a disaster for building the face-to-face communication skills imperative for career success.

Specifically, we're trying to figure out how to provide solo-individuals (at a cost comfortable for them) the education available to corporate fast-trackers in (astronomically... as in $55,000 per semester! high priced) CLOSED-enrollment, cohort programs. Would you please take a few minutes to help us try to do so? Where we need your help is in balancing (1)"do-able" for working students with (2)"sustainable" as a program:
(1) Do-able contemplates a variety of costs: Tuition, travel, time, room, and board.
(2) Sustainable is more focused: TuitionTuition for even the relatively inexpensive OPEN-enrollment courses runs:
AMA ($1048/day and up), Chicago ($1450), Wharton ($1750). Tuck (Dartmouth), at $1640, bless 'em, at least throws in room & board. Worse than daily tuition rates, coverage roughly commensurate with our Core requires a bunch of courses. Of the above, the worst offender is the AMA, requiring 47 days and totaling some $57,805.

Unbelievably, it gets even worse. No matter how many you take, NONE provides any quantitative analytics. ALL target working-Joes with typical baccalaureate, non-preparation in mathematics. While most reflect the good sense to remain silent on analytics and computation, one of the AMA's ($1998/day!) in advanced (?!?) finance trumpets the stipulation that participants bring an HP-12c. All courses are presented in, now traditional, silo-centric isolation.

Click "Tuition" for reference links.
constitutes the critical factor in retaining qualifiedQuick question: How many B-School professors do you know who are/have been C-Level executives?
Now, eliminate from your list any who aren't conversant with vector (tensor preferred) calculus, applied statistics, operations research, and IT; multinational experience required. Familiarity with OOP, numeric methods, sparse hypercube compression, and CAD/CAM highly desirable. See the problem? professors.

If you're in a real hurry, here's a link to the SURVEY, though you might do well career-wise to read on and work through this example, too. For you confirmed autodidacts, here's a (worst case) do-it-yourself primer and reading list. (Engineers, etc., can obviously skip the remedial math which should leave only a few months of spare time reading. However, we've included some advanced titles anticipating the content of our "Engineering-level" modules, e.g., partials, calculus of variations, line integrals.) In all, it should keep most gainfully occupied for a time.

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Crisis = Opportunity: First, some level-setting. Feel-good rhetoric aside, businesses are in business to make a profit. Forget vision and passion (Bang & Olufsen's CEO as visionary, 12/05); be profitable (B&O CEO and earnings up, 7/07) and have positive cashflow or it's, "Game Over" (B&O CEO fired, 1/10/08). Globalization and the looming depression are heightening these profitability and cashflow imperatives. With executives ever more painfully aware of their need to better understand where their business is and where it's headed, there's a growing, global need for analysts who are quantitatively literate AND able to effectively communicate with non-quants.A different kind of "fortune" cookie:

Making the boss feel stupid is ill-advised; making the PHB look stupid is suicidal.
Making the "suits" feel smarter makes you look smarter.
Communicate using appropriate economic concepts couched in accounting-ese.

Mathematics annoys and alarms non-quants; present graphically in Excel.
Support Excel with SUCCINCT PowerPoint slides; avoid Redmond-induced excitement, e.g., OLE/DDE.

You're NEVER writing a mystery: State conclusion first; support it with "arguments" in descending importance order. Executive crises constitute opportunities for those capable of bringing analytical, abstract thought — e.g., engineers, CS/IT-types, JD's (surprise!) — to bear on complex business problems. (Aside: The perspective must be strategic and the analytical approach must be integrated, of course.)

WTF ... Business = Mathematics? At root, any business is a system predicated upon rates of change, related rates, systems of differential & integral equations, myriad endogenous/exogenous variables, and so on. Business analysis is, therefore, about inflection points, complex dynamics, risk probabilities, and n-space Being the PHB is seldom the lark most presume; therein lies the opportunity.

Instead of physical 3-space/time (skipping quantum space), one's confronted with: multiple economies and taxation authorities (global, hemispheric, national, regional, state, municipal), product/market (sector, competition, channel, feature-set, value-proposition, life-cycle stage), firm-specific circumstance (capitalization, investor expectations, liquidity, cash flow, profitability, labor relations, equipment/facility condition, product "pipeline") to name but a few. All bear on corporate decision-making.

Moreover, whereas the four-forces are (largely) predictable, the economic arena features actively adversarial competitors, arbitrary (generally ambiguous) rules, and un-knowable terrain.

Chess it is not.
systems. Individual businesses are bundles of portfolios; individual portfolios are vector matrices; individual investments — securities, products, processes, people — are vectors. Though the math-lite Core sips. Okay, this is an admittedly corny Easter Egg.

His fellow principals don't, but your scribe gleefully accepts postings to micro-brewery towns. Sadly, this [photo from France] has yet to prove among them! Suggestions for running sessions in such locales are always warmly welcomed — still way too many functional grey cells for current world affairs.

Sláinte!at these concepts, the other isa courses exhibit less restraint.In short, much of business analysis finds analogs in field theory.

Familiarity with sources/sinks and div/grad/curl "works" in much of the advanced work. Not in direct application, rather, they constitute useful abstractions for internalizing conceptual frameworks. For instance, in advanced financial work, even dim recollection of DSP, spherical harmonics, Ritz's method, et cetera, can aid conceptualization. Absent such grounding, grappling with complexities such as financial derivatives (e.g., the sub-prime mess as well as the recent Société Générale, Bear-Stearns, Lehman, Citi, Hypo, AIG, WaMu, UBS fiascoes ... collectively merely faintest harbingers of FAR worse to come) can prove quite a challenge.

Despite one student reviewer's strong protest, this seems not the forum for delving into the looming (hint: the current sub-prime-led "recession" is a mere "blip") global derivatives mess. You may, however, find several apposite links and brief discussion at the very bottom of the NEXT page.

(Written: May 2007, updated "bodycount" February 2009.) Obviously, those with superior analytical and quantitative skills are unusually well-suited to the task, needing only to learn the integratedVery roughly: Students learn to address business problems via an iterative four-component approach —
Conceptualize, Contemplate, Compute, Communicate. analytical framework and effective use of business language. (It's vastly easier to teach accounting to engineers than it is to teach vector calculus to accountants.) All material is presented three ways: Verbally, graphically, and mathematically.Though the Core is math-lite, a refresher in pre-calc can prove useful, oddly, for quants later trying to explain their findings to non-quant execs. Equally, those rusty in math can click on "mathematically" for a brilliantly readable, concise (~120pps) review by an equally brilliantly prepared author (Cal-Tech, Chicago, Yale) who happens to be an acclaimed teacher. It's the title we've recommended for many years; students love it.

Now, a quick stake through the heart: Less than 1/3 of NYSE CEO's hold MBA's, e.g., Jack Welch, BS/MS/PhD (Chem Eng), Illinois, holds no MBA. Thanks to a nearly 40-year dumbing-down of curricula, what had been a great credential is now a grossly over-priced farce; the MBA has fallen on richly deserved hard times. Our objective is to remedy the situation. Our two-part goal:
First, we'd like to remedy what we see to be a serious problem. To wit: the unavailability of meaningful business education owing to the dumbing-down of curricular content and the growing irrelevance (see: Sidebar) of B-School academics and academicians.

Second, we'd like to create something enduring. That demands faculty succession, in turn, presupposing economic viability. Frankly, it's very difficult to find individuals who are qualified to teach integrated analytics; expecting them to participate for free is simply asking too much. While this isn't intended to be a money-spinner, neither is it intended to run loses.

Sidebar: The irrelevance stems largely from university committees too heavily predicating professorial rewards upon (and the slavish adherence by B-School academicians to) the still-born "physics" research model foisted upon them by the 1958 Foundation Reports. The research is nonsense, pure and simple. It fundamentally stems from the lunacy of attempting to put "IBM" under a bell jar, statistically or otherwise, and expecting hard-kill "answers." (At issue, inter alia, is ceteris paribus.) Significantly, randomness, though rarely satisfied, is invariably assumed. Rounding out the trifecta, academics regularly fail to identify the most plausible rival hypotheses much less disprove them. In simple fact, the root-cause regularly falls outside the researcher's investigative curricular domain. Frankly, it's all pretty pathetic. (Relatedly, see, "Loyalty," and, on a "happier" note, B-Schools aren't alone.)

Were all this not pain enough, this from 1992: Take anyones choice for the top ten graduate business schools, eliminate Harvard, sum the headcount of senior executive graduates at "significant" firms of the remaining nine schools. That sum will be less than the combined number of comparable graduates from NYU and Rutgers. (Obviously, geography plays a large part. Until relatively recently, these two offered the part-time programs of choice for Manhattan's hard-chargers.)

Background: Open- vs. Closed-enrollment. Select universities offer accelerated, advanced, caste system Advanced Management Program / Executive MBA:
Closed-enrollment programs enjoying all the benefits of a "cost is no object" budget.
They are taught by outside faculty, invariably those with noteworthy business experience — we among them.

The success of these programs has spawned named-alike clone programs aimed at the open-enrollment (general student) population. However and significantly, these clones are taught by cloistered, silo-centric faculty. Result: Clone program students lament learning FAR more from one another than from the faculty.
No great surprise, that; the students have actual real-world experience.-based programs open ONLY to corporate-sponsored, fast-track employees at upwards of $55K per semester per student; we teach in several. Our take: AMP-like coverage should be extended well beyond its current narrow, clubby confines but offered at a total cost appropriate for normal folk. In essence, determining comfortable solo-student costs is the point of requesting your opinion. Aside: We've provided clients such coverage since 1991. Moreover, as our coverage is both accelerated and integrated, Managerially, business operating units are generally split along functional lines. Beyond trivial issues though, managerial decision-making can almost never be solely function-centric. Academia, yoked with its silo-centric, function-based model, is incapable of offering anything other than grossly flawed monocular perspectives of decision-making.

Our perspective and approach are strategy/tactics/metric-centric, i.e., entirely integrative, and supported by our own cross-functional mini-cases. Case exploration ties analysis and decision-making across functional lines as well as back to theoretic underpinnings; mathematics provides the exploratory engine.

Thus, accounting, economics, finance, marketing, operations, strategy, and mathematics/statistics provide constant, common grist for the student analytical mill — appropriate to success in real-world settings. it results in more cost-effective learning in far less time than even AMP's.

Boredom breeds inattention, so our pace is intenseOur pace spurs engagement, which spurs rapid "internalization." Result: real learning in real-time.

To date, our "record" for effective rate of understanding is 45 minutes from start of day-one. It's held by the, then, CFO of a division of UTC. Forty-five minutes from topic introduction (broadly, a constrained optimization of a composite financial metric) to real-world application commencement.

Concurrent with application commencement from a modeling perspective, was the real-time, on-going involvement of their Washington-based lawyers, the divisional president, the CFO-via cell, and the CFO's team-leader, spread out along the eastern seaboard. The model successfully trialled 8-hours later.
Worth noting, the issue had been a substantial ongoing corporate problem of some 7-years standing. Such being among the joys of governmental contracts.; we cover the typical AMP/EMBA in two 5-day sessions We cut the first MBA year to 10 days, while delving far deeper in economics, accounting, finance, and marketing.
Far more significantly, our coverage is extremely analytic and quantitative with JIT-coverage of statistics at appropriate points.

All the pieces are pre-assembled for you. You don't pore over stacks of textbooks; you don't puzzle over how the various bits 'n pieces from different subject areas fit; you don't wade through 100-page cases.
Most notably, you don't have to sort wheat from chaff; there is NO chaff.

Merely prepare the nightly mini-case (typically an hour) and come to class ready to learn.
You supply analytic ability and enthusiasm; we supply the rest in ten days.
Guaranteed.. While our Core has been termed a near-religious experience and our spreadsheet modeling as Excel-on- steroids, it's proved accessible and non-quant safe.On a bit of a "dare" from a client in 2002, we undertook a somewhat watered-down "Core" program. For 2-days per week and 2-weeks per month, we worked with a group of 9 supermarket employees who had, on average, just about a high-school education.

Result: Their Grade 12-educated meat department manager successfully conceived, created, and deployed an Excel matrix-based model to routinely execute a complex, multi-level pricing strategy to the ends of optimizing region-wide profits through production mix and coördinated incentive initiatives across the supply chain.

Those with higher education levels fared best. The Comptroller/CPA created a successful cash management (optimization) model and a BS/ME created an inventory management system (43,000 SKU) which resulted in both substantial annual savings and operating efficiencies.

All but one of the 9 participants sailed home with colors flying. In a second, larger group, all succeeded. There are ready work-arounds for the intelligent, if not-so-mathematical, Core student. To wit: MD's (executive roles in health care) and JD's (M&A/PE) have proved apt and avid isa-Core students. One needn't know a PDE from a PDA because the Core module is quant-lite, even if the rest of the modules are not. Those able to mentally map the front-view of Snoopy's dog-house onto mental graph paper can readily handle the Core. (Of course, that particular mental abstraction is sufficient for dispatching basic differential and integral calculus!) In all, Excel with add-ins does the heavy lifting. As all modules are financial statement-centric, everything covered applies to ANY commercial enterprise. Ergo, any Core graduate's previous career business-sector confinement is eliminated, while prior acquired business knowledge becomes immediately applicable globally.

Several former students who previewed this survey for us, suggested highlighting the following implementation strategy. First, code-scavenge and re-purpose a model — this one was most often mentioned. Second, lay-in your firm's numbers. Third, after showing your boss, "float" your model outside your realm — typically in the financial, marketing, or operations areas.

Quite a few seem to have received immediate, "Wow!," responses and favorable results. One enterprising soul apparently parlayed a variant into 4 promotions in 14 months — your mileage will likely vary. If you've got the moxie, skip the classes and just use the models, but make sure that you understand and can explain what the specific model's doing. [To that latter end, here's some help. In fact, here's a (worst case) do-it-yourself primer.]