Wharton offers a full portfolio of executive development programs that are specifically targeted to pharmaceutical industry professionals. These programs attract key executives from around the world, providing participants with a global view and a highly energized, dynamic learning experience.
Learn how pharmaceutical professionals who attend Wharton programs:
- Advance their leadership skills
- Build strategic expertise in change management
- Sharpen marketing and sales strategy
Advance Your Leadership Skills for the Pharmaceuticals Industry
Honing the leadership capability of senior executives and accelerating the development of high-potentials is more important than ever in the pharmaceutical industry. Wharton programs prepare pharmaceutical leaders to guide their organizations through the many challenges of a changing industry landscape, and to make a lasting impact through expert, innovative leadership.
- Advanced Management Program — Wharton Executive Education’s flagship program, AMP, offers top-level pharma executives an intensive and transformational five-week in-residence learning experience. Wharton faculty challenges these executives’ approach to innovating, developing, manufacturing, and marketing new medicines, vaccines, devices, and health care services to ensure they apply research-based rigor and discipline, while emphasizing corporate governance, ethics, financial, political, and social risk management. Through small group work, case study and discussion, class peers share experience from their respective business disciplines and vertical industries to compare and contrast best practices across geographies. AMP addresses which managerial levers directly impact operational results and which metrics serve as the best proxy for value creation. The program deeply explores strategy during times of market clarity and ambiguity, organic growth, joint venture, or merger and acquisition. AMP applies discovery-driven planning, scenario planning, and real options to prepare for the next market turn and financial risk management strategies that enable the possibilities of the future while mitigating downside exposure.
- Executive Development Program — Wharton’s two-week Executive Development Program provides pharmaceutical managers with the organizational understanding to take on broader leadership roles. Faculty cover finance, marketing, leadership, and strategy based on current research and best practices. Executives in the program also gain an appreciation of the complexities of organizational dynamics, effective communication strategies, and leadership. Finally, a hands-on strategy simulation pulls it all together by exploring different management styles and organization-wide strategic approaches.
- Leading and Managing People — This program offers pharmaceutical professionals the opportunity to challenge their assumptions about leadership and how they influence employees. Participants examine their management objectives and leadership style, then experiment with new approaches and behaviors. Faculty and fellow executives provide constructive feedback during applied learning sessions. Pharmaceutical professionals who attend gain specific action steps for resolving current and future management challenges.
- Executive Negotiation Workshop: Bargaining for Advantage® — This workshop offers actionable insights for pharmaceutical executives in bargaining with outside partners and other managers inside the firm. The program provides hard-hitting, practical, intensive, and transformative techniques, based on the best-selling book by academic director G. Richard Shell, Bargaining for Advantage.
Industry Sponsored Programs
- The Wharton Program for Biotech & Pharmaceutical Executives: Vision, Strategy and Global Leadership — This program offers the best of both worlds: the academic insights of health care management faculty and industry analysts with the practical experience of senior drug company executives. Within the context of key industry functions, such as discovery, marketing, finance, and business development, the program addresses the management implications of new techniques in drug discovery, marketing and pricing in the current environment, financial evaluation and deals, and mergers and alliances.
Build Strategic Expertise for Pharmaceutical Change Management
With new technologies and scientific breakthroughs, as well as decreasing returns from the blockbuster model, the pharmaceutical industry is in constant change. Global competition and emerging markets are also creating new challenges. With government regulation, managed care reimbursement, increased regulatory oversight, and talent creating increasing pressure for pharmaceutical firms, it is more difficult than ever to compete successfully in today’s markets. Wharton’s executive development programs prepare pharmaceutical executives to address these challenges and capitalize on the opportunities in the new global marketplace.- Leading Organizational Change — Based on specific challenges or projects that participants bring with them, this hands-on workshop equips pharmaceutical industry professionals with specific action plans for leading change in their organizations. The program addresses the change process, highlights the role of leadership in change, and examines culture and congruence, politics and power, and change implementation. Participants also learn about stakeholder models, work systems models, levers of change, and how to overcome obstacles to change in their organizations.
- Critical Thinking: Real-World, Real-Time Decisions — Making decisions in an atmosphere of market shifts and conflicting expert opinions creates challenges for any pharmaceutical industry professional. Critical Thinking focuses on reframing issues so that the right problems are addressed, distinguishing systematic patterns from random events, and identifying acceptable risks in alternative decisions. This program examines the process of making better decisions within group or department settings, recognizing the more network-oriented and decentralized organizational structures of today's companies.
- Innovation for Growth: Strategies and Best Practices — Innovation is the driving force of pharmaceutical firms. In a workshop format, this program uses group dialogues, and projects from participants to provide a hands-on experience in redesigning the process of innovation within participants’ pharmaceutical organizations. The curriculum showcases best practices in innovation from companies such as P&G, while addressing how to develop a market-driven innovation strategy, understand new-product successes and failures, improve "peripheral vision," and engage in value innovation for capitalizing on new market space.
- Strategic Persuasion Workshop: The Art and Science of Selling Ideas — Recent seismic shifts in health care and pharmaceuticals have triggered mergers and major internal reorganizations. This program provides pharmaceutical professionals with strategies for removing obstacles to alignment, more effectively communicating their ideas, assembling winning coalitions, building credibility, increasing self-awareness, and negotiating win-win deals. The program is complementary to the book The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas (Portfolio/Penguin), co-authored by the two academic directors, Wharton Professor G. Richard Shell and Mario Moussa, senior fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Care Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.
- Mergers and Acquisitions — As new market forces shape the future of the pharmaceutical industry, mergers and acquisitions play a central role in the transformation of the industry. This program draws upon the expertise of an interdisciplinary team of faculty who lead pharmaceutical industry participants in determining the rationale for mergers or acquisitions, selecting the appropriate targets, valuing them, and evaluating the long-term potential of the partnership. Participants learn to identify their acquisition strategies, bring the deal to a close, and address integration issues. In addition to Finance faculty, the program draws on Wharton Management, Legal Studies, and Accounting departments. In case studies, computer simulations, and interactions with high-level industry peers, participants learn to execute M&As from start to finish.
- Strategic Alliances — Alliances between vendors and companies are more critical than ever for success in the pharmaceutical industry; forming alliances can give companies access to new markets, technologies, and other resources. Alliances can also help companies to better manage change and hedge risks. This program looks at the process of building alliances from a global approach. Many of the cases are drawn from international examples. Participants learn how alliances contribute to competitive advantage, and ascertain fit among partners. They examine how to select the right alliance structure, address conflict, and protect their own strategic position while establishing global strategic positions.
Sharpen Pharmaceutical Marketing and Sales Expertise
With complex competition, competitive pricing, and changing regulation, pharmaceutical executives need to be able to think rigorously and flexibly about marketing and sales strategies. Wharton offers marketing programs to address these challenges:
- Competitive Marketing Strategy — In a pharmaceutical environment characterized by extreme rivalry, anticipating competitors’ actions and reactions to your moves may be the key determinant of success for any marketing strategy. One competitor cuts prices, undermining your pricing strategy. Another may decide to offer new products and services, possibly over the Internet, that have the potential to completely undermine your existing strategy. Could you have anticipated such moves? How do you respond? Competitive Marketing Strategy teaches pharmaceutical executives how to anticipate competitors’ moves during the planning stage, and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. By helping anticipate potential competitive responses to actions, this course helps pharmaceutical executives develop effective marketing strategies for the long term.
- Pricing Strategies: Measuring, Capturing, and Retaining Value — Pricing is complex for products such as new drugs, affected by regulation and competition.Pricing Strategies gives pharmaceutical executives a powerful set of strategies for establishing and evolving pricing. Faculty draw upon theoretical and empirical research to help understand your pricing problems. They show how these approaches can be applied to specific challenges in diverse industries, including complex decisions such as pricing new products, products with short lifecycles, dynamic pricing, and bundling products.
- Wharton Marketing Metrics™: Linking Marketing to Financial Consequences — In an environment of scarce resources, measuring the results of marketing investments is critical in making sound decisions. Marketing managers in the pharmaceutical industry increasingly need to demonstrate the ROI of their programs. Finance executives need to assess the payoffs of marketing investments. The Wharton Marketing Metrics™ program provides rigorous approaches to measure the effectiveness of marketing expenditures and get more "bang" for the buck. Faculty offer insights and frameworks to help assess and communicate the returns from marketing spending. An interdisciplinary team of faculty from Wharton’s Marketing, Accounting, and Finance Departments brings knowledge based on research and best practices at leading companies.
- Leading the Effective Sales Force — For pharmaceutical firms, the sales force is central to success. When people and resources are both scarce and expensive, every investment in the sales force must count. The sales force is a major growth engine for a firm, as well as a critical source of market feedback. Yet it is also a substantial investment — and one that can rapidly grow out of control. Stimulating the sales force while simultaneously controlling costs is the balance pharmaceutical executives must achieve. In this course, participants learn how to cut costs while raising sales — by analyzing sales calls, realigning territories, shifting product or market emphasis, reallocating salesperson time, and adjusting sales force size. They explore how to motivate and compensate salespeople and third-party distribution channels through pay systems and organizational structures.
