Master of Global Business Administration (GBA)
A global business education - in every sense
Bring an education in international affairs and business to your corner of the globe – on your schedule.
Fletcher’s online Master of Global Business Administration (GBA) is tailor-made for working professionals looking to pivot into a new sector or advance in their career. Complete coursework on your own time. In once weekly online classes, learn from both faculty and your peers – other mid-career professionals who bring their own unique perspectives to the business of global affairs.
The GBA is more than a credential – it’s a rigorous study in global affairs, helping you develop the contextual intelligence to lead your organization in an interconnected world.
Key features
- Business degree with a multidisciplinary, international outlook
- Online program allows you to work and study on your schedule
- Two in-person residences – one international and one on Fletcher’s Boston-area campus
- Asynchronous instruction – access and submit anytime from any device, no matter where you are in the world.
- Live class sessions with faculty once weekly
- Program-designated career coach to help you orchestrate your career moves
Join a highly motivated professional community
GBA students bring a wealth of global experiences into the program. Many GBA students work in nongovernmental organizations and pivot to the private sector. Others are active military and looking to acquire core business skills.
Sarah Westwood F23 worked full-time as a portfolio manager on two United States equity funds.
“I had always planned to attend graduate school, but life got in the way: months after I completed the CFA program I deployed to Iraq, and my husband and I got married and started a family not long after I returned. The pandemic appeared to offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to complete a degree online, so I began investigating options. I was looking for a differentiated, small, online-only program at a top school: the Fletcher GBA program met all these criteria.”
“While I recognized that my classmates would be significant contributors to my learning, I did not anticipate that I would feel so connected to them when we had never met in person. I had not expected classes to be so small, nor had I realized that the experience would be so personal. I remain very close to classmates that I met in those early weeks, and we check in with each other often when tough decisions or experiences arise in our personal or professional lives. My life is so much richer now that they are part of it, and I cannot imagine what the past two years would have been like without them.”
Degree requirements
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B200: Corporate Finance in Global Capital Markets
This is an introductory course to corporate finance from the perspective of a company’s chief financial officer (CFO). The first part covers financial planning and budgeting, financial analysis, and short-term financial management. The second part will help you develop a valuation framework for making investment decisions (capital budgeting) for new equipment, launching new products, managing mergers and acquisitions and LBOs, and making funding/financing decisions to be coordinated with those investment decisions. Special attention is given to the cost of capital and valuing stocks, bonds, convertible debt, and preferred stocks in the context of global capital markets.
B236: International Strategy and Innovation
This course provides an introduction to international business’s legal context. You will study the private international law issues that affect an international business transaction. You will also examine international taxation, anti-bribery law, intellectual property protection, trade law for market access, payment for goods using letters of credit or blockchain, international protection of foreign direct investment, and financing a foreign direct investment through project financing.
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B260: Global Marketing Management
The course addresses the managerial, organizational, ethical, societal, environmental, and global dimensions of marketing decision-making. The main objectives of the course are to sharpen your skills in problem diagnosis and management. You will learn fundamental marketing concepts; improve your familiarity and understanding of institutional marketing knowledge, terminology, and practice; and practice formulating, presenting, and defending your own marketing ideas and recommendations. The course will stress agility in thinking (“whole-brain” and “neuro-marketing” models), operating in complex and volatile market environments, and leading marketing actors and initiatives cooperatively.
B250 Sustainable Business Dynamics
The context for and expectations of corporations and their leaders are undergoing radical change. Population growth, increasing consumerism, globally networked supply chains, and shifts in transparency and communication are creating resource challenges and heightened expectations for governance, social engagement, and environmental stewardship. As a result, managing a sustainable and successful 21st century enterprise requires updated context, skills, frameworks, and vernacular.
This course is designed to give you a framework to lead a progressive 21st century corporation. The pedagogy is designed as a blend of lecture, case studies, practitioners’ experiences, and class discussion in order to provide you with models and tools to improve outcomes. Finally, the course will expose you to new types of challenges and opportunities that you will encounter across the value chain—from finance, to supply chain, to product development, to marketing—and prepare you with models and skills to identify solutions.
Beyond Balance Sheets is a journey. It is designed to follow, and also to fully complement, Corporate Finance in Global Financial Markets, while fulfilling two discrete goals. The first of these is to provide a review, and then an opportunity for deeper reflection and analysis of selected themes in corporate financial accounting as these specifically impact the risk and so the value of firms. The second goal is to extend the accounting paradigm to financial institutions and markets through a balance sheet “lens” to examine the role and functioning of these institutions as key components of the global finance system. As designed the course is organized into two discrete “halves”, the first consisting of five sessions culminating in the mid-term and focusing on themes such as advance accounting concepts, capital structure and corporate distribution policy, derivative securities, and forensic accounting. The second half is centered on financial institutions such as central banks, commercial banks, bond markets, pension funds, investment management companies, and private equity and venture capital firms.
B281: International Supply Chains
This course is about managing the growing flow of business between countries, especially the supply chains that interconnect economies. Supply chains are especially dynamic today—performance demands on companies are steadily rising, geopolitical risks abound, and digital technology offers new choices about how to deliver to customers and how to control the chain.
You will learn how to create, negotiate, and manage supply chains. The course operates at two levels. One is the global context: the forces that shape new supply networks, the elements that determine which ones succeed, and the particular challenges of operating in the developing world. The second is the operating level: how companies decide where to source, the partners they need, and where and how to build and control these supply networks.
The tools of the course range from hard analytics and decision-making models to soft skills in aligning incentives and conflict resolution. The course covers a great range of industries—from commodities to basic manufactures to high tech—as well as services and goods.
This course is designed to prepare students to launch new ventures. It draws from case studies and the growing body of research in entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and leadership. Upon completion of this course, students will have increased their self-efficacy, awareness, and skills needed to start and lead new business ventures. Features of this course include guest speakers, podcasts and videos, case studies, and assignments that help students to become more resourceful and build an entrepreneurial mindset. Students are not expected to have an idea for a business or social venture before starting the class, but they will complete the course having worked on a project to develop a new venture from inception. In addition, students will learn how to assess product-market fit, develop a financing plan, envision success, and apply the principles of the lean startup methodology and business model canvas. Graduates of this course will develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to support entrepreneurial activity in their career endeavors.
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L230: International Business Law
This course provides an introduction to international business’s legal context. You will study the private international law issues that affect an international business transaction. You will also examine international taxation, anti-bribery law, intellectual property protection, trade law for market access, payment for goods using letters of credit or blockchain, international protection of foreign direct investment, and financing a foreign direct investment through project financing.
L237: Mergers and Acquisitions
This course reviews the structuring, negotiation, and implementation of cross-border merger and acquisition transactions. It takes into account the applicable issues of international law and national practice. The course discusses alternative forms of transaction structure and the underlying tax and legal considerations related to choosing particular approaches. You will analyze different forms of acquisition agreements, review the role and application of key transactional concepts, and analyze how these concepts are addressed in the context of specific transactions. You will review the typical areas of negotiation in the acquisition of private and public companies and evaluate how these negotiations are affected by international regulatory, legal, and fiscal considerations. Finally, you will review trends in deal terms, drawing on recent transactions involving North American, European, and Asian companies.
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P217: The Politics of the Global Economy
Individuals have traded goods across territorial borders since the dawn of the city-state. Over time, they have altered their economic relations with each other in response to changes in technology, ideology, and the distribution of power. But what determines the direction, magnitude, governance, and fluctuation of these cross-border flows? How does trade, money, investment, and migration respond to structural change or exogenous shocks? This course surveys theories and issue areas of the global political economy from the past and present to develop a better understanding about the future.
E212: International Macroeconomics
This course examines the determination of income, the exchange rate, and the trade balance in economies that trade goods, services, and assets with the rest of the world. Theory is developed and employed to study current events and historical experience. You will study exchange rate determination, monetary and exchange rate policy, the causes and consequences of external imbalances, international policy coordination, financial crises, and the global capital market.
This course examines the use of armed force in international affairs. You will examine theories of war and bargaining, conflict prevention and termination, post-conflict management, and the role of third parties. You will study civil wars, interstate wars, and insurgencies (including terrorism) as well as different forms of warfare, including conventional, nuclear, information, and cyber warfare. Although we will consider the nature of the state system and the structure of the international order from a historical perspective, special attention will be paid to the post-Cold War era.
P292: Economic Policy Challenges in Emerging Markets
Emerging market countries face unique economic policy challenges that are shaped both by their economic structure and their domestic and foreign policies. This course will examine different case studies of how emerging market countries have addressed dilemmas such as monetary policy, trade policy, capital flows, and industrialization. The course will focus on analyzing the interaction of political and economic trends to understand how they shape and constrain policy makers. Case studies of emerging markets responding to policy dilemmas and economic shocks will illustrate broader trends in policy making as well as to specifics of key countries such as China, Russia, India and others.
Negotiating Leadership is undergoing iteration prior to the fall 2022 term. This course will be completely revised to include more simulations, voices and interviews from experts, and readings and activities. Please note, the syllabus below will change at the completion of the iteration process.
This course explores the nature of leadership in the international business and organizational contexts. A key premise of the course is that leadership is an exercise in negotiation. To lead is to negotiate. The course will examine three key dimensions of the leadership life cycle: 1) the acquisition of leadership power, 2) the use of this power, and 3) the preservation and inevitable loss of this power. You will study a wide range of leadership theories and practices (American and international), examine failed leadership examples, and discuss the role of values, ethics, gender, and culture.
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This course introduces management issues from the perspective of economics. The focus is on the strategic responses a firm can make regarding both its internal organization and its external interaction with both consumers and other firms. You will learn how economic analysis can aid the understanding and improve the design of organizational structure and the development of competitive strategies, whether the organization is a for-profit firm or a nonprofit enterprise.
P207: Decision Analysis for Business
Most students will find themselves in positions to make or provide advice regarding difficult business decisions in their work. This course provides the opportunity to help you develop a toolbox of analytic techniques that can be indispensable in understanding complicated problems and arriving at the best possible decision such techniques and methods.
You will learn about different types of decision models and how to choose the model that best represents the problem and tradeoffs at hand. Throughout the course, you will learn and practice these analytic techniques through examples and cases from different countries involving a wide variety of business problems. You will construct and solve these models in class and in problem sets. This course does not require a background in economics, statistics, or advanced mathematics.
B207: Data Analytics and Statistical Methods
In 2017, The Economist declared that the world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data. With each passing day, more data is generated. Within these data are insights to drive operational efficiencies, solve global health emergencies, and more.
To prepare you to leverage that data, this course will focus on two approaches to data-driven decision making: visual analytics and statistical methods. The course introduces you to data analysis, combining an overview of traditional methods of statistical inference with an introduction to visual analytics. The goal of the course is to provide you with the skills to make decisions and succeed in a data-rich and increasingly data-driven world.
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You may choose any three electives from the courses listed above.
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International immersions take place over four to five days in vibrant and relevant international locations in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Immersions allow you to delve into the business and geopolitical environments of a particular area, combining academic course work with site visits to organizations in various sectors. You will interact with local alumni, get to know the particularities of the business context, and understand the geopolitical challenges of operating in the region.
B299: On-Campus Immersion & Capstone Kick-Off
The on-campus immersion provides an incubator experience to kick off the capstone project and build the skills necessary to complete a real-world project. Seminars with Fletcher faculty on problem-solving frameworks, pitch development, and group work serve as a foundation for the project ahead. You will come together to work in groups for the first time and refine your project plan. Additional activities in Boston and at Tufts will be scheduled for networking. The immersion will take place over three days on Tufts’ Boston-area campus.
The Lab is a capstone project that allows you to delve into real-world challenges with real-world organizations. The course builds skills in the classroom as you put them to the test in the lab with your client. Projects sit at the intersection of skill sets—from market sizing to demographic analysis to presentation techniques—and topic areas such as business strategy, government regulation, and technical innovation.
You will work in groups directly with a capstone adviser. The capstone is kicked off at the beginning of the term with the on-campus immersion.
Frequently asked questions
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Yes. Students can fast track their degree by taking more credits at a time. Or if life and work get busy, you can adjust and take more time.
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Yes, many GBA students are employer-sponsored. Reach out to your human resources department to see what kind of support your company offers. An admissions counselor can also advise you on the most effective ways to approach this conversation.
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If you qualify for 100% of the Post-9/11 GI Bill benefit (Chapter 33), you are eligible to participate in the Yellow Ribbon Program. Fletcher is proud to support the program and offers a Yellow Ribbon scholarship award of $5,000 annually.