Education

The Basics of Business Education - What Business Students Should Study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69dLyztc-As 

Lecture Summary:

What will be discussed:

1. Foundation courses you should study

2. Business core courses

3. Business specializations

4. Business extensions

5. Education problems [How and why business programs fail]

6. Conclusion

There is a difference between global business and global studies.

Global business is a small field in global studies

Global studies include – politics, law, culture, anthropology

There are two areas you need in terms of understanding basics of business

1. Business math

a. Statistics (Analyzing and interpreting data) 

e.g. economic growth can be related to investment, consumption, export.

2. Economics

Economics is divided into 15 different fields

Basic introduction to economics is includes two fields.

1. Micro-economics [Behaviors of individuals, consumers, families](How families make economic decisions like spending money and making money)

2. Macro-economics

Deals with general economy

General economics is about production and output. GDP-Gross Domestic Production

Labor, Wages, Interest Rates, Cost of Capital

Most important price in the economy is the price of money.

The price of money is also called exchange rate

Four Main Fields of Business:

1. Accounting 

2. Finance 

3. Marketing

4. Management 

1. Accounting helps us translate business activity into numbers.

There are two areas of accounting – 1. Financial Accounting.  2. Managerial Accounting.

Financial Accounting:

Financial accounting is about how you make the accounts and how you report them.

You report them with financial statements

People outside the company can understand how the company is doing by reading these financial statements

The financial statements are standardized all around the world. 

Managerial Accounting

Accounting designed to serve the needs of management, so that management can make decisions.

These are the internal reports.

Decisions like how to price a product, how much to produce will be taken from these reports.

These include various sorts of budgets.

2. Finance

Finance is about how you manage money

Financial management is about how you manage assets, liabilities and investments.

How you get money – borrowing, selling bonds, selling stocks etc.

3. Marketing:

Marketing about the customers. What the customers want, what they are willing to pay.

What the customers want in a product

You need to think about competitors and customer services. 

Advertising – making the customers like, want and buy the products.

4. Management:

Planning, organizing (what departments do we need); leadership (how to manage and motivate people to do your work); Control (How do you monitor and make sure that employees are going to do their jobs)

After you are done with all the core courses, you will get to do

 Strategic management:

 Strategic management requires understanding from all four core areas. 

 It deals with how you are going to compete in the market.

 You can compete on the basis of efficiency, price, better product, variety of products, how you innovate the product.

Business Specializations:

Accounting:

Finance

Marketing

Management

International Business

Business Extensions:

1. Programming Languages (Especially a statistical programming language)

2. Database Systems

3. Management Information Systems (MIS)

4. Web (Internet) Systems

5. Extension in law

Problems with Education

Problem with the Institutions:

1. Weak Foundation (Students pass the exams and forget about it) [similar to flushing the toilet]

2. Many fancy courses with not much content

3. Few course chapters

4. Too many projects (learning does not happen properly)

5. Heavy-Weighted projects

6. Poor/Easy exams

7. Few failing students

Problems with the students:

1. Memorizing

2. Study from PowerPoint

3. Not reading textbooks

4. Not enough exercises

5. Big-group exercises

6. Group free-riding

7. Too much fun/party/internet/Facebook

8. Study for grades only

9. Study to make parents happy (more prominent in Asia)

Conclusion:

Business studies is not easy.

It is very competitive.