Western North Carolina is one of the world’s most unique, beautiful, and inspiring areas.  Our scenic beauty and biodiversity are balanced by the challenges of our environment and location.  It isn’t only important for us to understand the world around us; we must also understand how to create lives and careers that include our role as stewards of place and advocates for the communities we want to build and support. 

We think it only appropriate that our MBA program be equally unique.  One natural outcome of our location is that our community is dominated by small and mid-size businesses.  At first glance, this might seem to simplify our challenges.  After all, small businesses don’t have big problems?  Do they? 

Of course they do, and unlike large organizations, small businesses don’t have the luxury of specialized staff and support functions.  Leaders of small and mid-size organizations must play multiple roles and must understand the integration of business functions, not just the functions themselves.  Our leaders are Chief Marketing Officers at breakfast, Chief Financial officers before lunch, and restocking shelves at dinner time.  

We must develop this flexibility and breadth of skills in a world where we compete on a global stage, even in the smallest of markets.  We must pay as much attention to activities in Shanghai as we do activities at our local courthouse.  We must be prepared for continuous, rapid, massive change and redesign.  Our future and our community’s future depend on our success.   To address these challenges we must be great managers and great leaders, capable of making good judgments in increasingly complex settings.

Our MBA program is designed without prerequisites, other than the reasoning, communications, and mathematical abilities that we evaluate from undergraduate transcripts and the Graduate Management Aptitude Test.    Our first four courses are about mastering management in applied settings.  Students will form small work groups and be trained to deal with real-world problems through hands-on real world assignments.   Students may choose to use their own workplace as a laboratory, or may be assigned to new enterprises that need support to grow and flourish.

After mastering management, our students will enter the C-Suite.  The C-Suite in any organization is that group of chief officers who share nearly equal authority in their functional areas.  Often led by a Chief Executive Officer, these functions include marketing, research and development, information, communications, law, operations, and finance.  Ideally constructed C-Suites have members that synthesize knowledge and create great judges, capable of making decisions that balance opportunities and risk.  Our MBA is designed to create these leaders for organizations, no matter how large or small. 

The College of Business at Western Carolina University is fully accredited by AACSB-The International Association for Management Education, the internationally recognized accrediting agency for business schools.