Finance, basic accounting, economics, and strategy. A lot of it boils down to thinking about cost/benefits all the time. A lot of these concepts are common on this HN board because it is entrepreneurship themed. Examples:

"Is it okay to build a cheap thing today, knowing the engineering sucks and it will be expensive to fix later?"

"Technology X is cool, what is the cost to switch? Short term, long term? Support costs? People costs? Are there savings? Are there strategic advantages?"

Core marketing, accounting, finance, and microeconomics. In more or less that order. Others include behavioral economics/decision theory--or at least read Ariely or Thaler's book. Other possibilities include organizational behavior, negotiation, pricing, business strategy. One general comment is that, if you're just looking at a few courses, you'll probably get more out of in-person courses that have case studies and/or group discussions, role playing, etc. and just read a book to cover more lecture-oriented material (like microeconomics usually is).

Finance was a big one for me.

Understanding the fundamental concepts of, for instance, CAPM and free cash flow have been useful in my career. You also pick up some useful personal investing lessons.

In general, this class gives you insights into the decisions a CFO (and supporting team) is faced with -- e.g. is it better to invest in tech A or tech B or neither?

In my own personal career, I've had to make a case to Finance in order to build out a program and being able to talk-the-talk was helpful.

I would rank the classes in order:

1. Accounting - It's the language of business. Like learning English before you become a pilot. This class helped me start asking deeper questions when meeting with business people.

2. Finance - Holy cow, the ability to put a value on cashflows and understand the cost of capital really opened my eyes to the big picture. I also use my Finance classes to help when deciding to take Job X or Job Y...

3. Strategy - My FAVORITE class of my MBA. It's helped me when a complex situation arises--I can objectively measure the different components of the problem and look for solutions.

4. Economics - Really impacted me to ignore the hype of the news. "CHINA WILL OVERTAKE THE US ECONOMY IN X YEARS" So what, it isn't a zero-sum game.

That's going to be heavily weighted based on your personal background and the quality of the specific class.

Thanks for your reply.

> That's going to be heavily weighted based on your personal background

Could you elaborate?

Accounting is really important, but if you have the basics getting to the point you can see though accounting tricks has limited value and takes a lot of work.

It's like an extreme version of the 80:20 rule. You can get some basic c functions to compile in a few hours, but seeing though the winner of an obfuscated c contest on your own might take years.

Just remember, your not a specialist and becoming one takes a lot more effort than a few MBA classes.