Executive Development Program

In a tough and uncertain environment, leadership is more important than ever in giving your company a competitive edge. Organizational restructuring and globalization place managers in more demanding roles, requiring skills beyond their areas of disciplinary training or expertise.

Wharton's Executive Development Program uses a multidimensional approach of lectures, small/large group discussion, case study, role playing, a leadership workshop, and a strategy simulation to provide new insights and give participants opportunities to apply them. A team of faculty, experts in diverse business disciplines, provides in-depth knowledge in core business areas. Participants are encouraged to apply these insights from the program to their own organizations in daily application sessions.

The Executive Development Program class sessions are purposely designed to capture the years of experience in the room. Learning groups provide opportunities for exploring issues across business and cultural boundaries, and social activities promote a spirited camaraderie that leads to deep and lasting connections.

Session Topics for the Executive Development Program

Please note that these are core faculty and may not be in every program.

• Finance
• • Creating Shareholder Value – Michael Roberts
    
  • Value-Driven Decision Making – John Percival
    
• Marketing
• • Marketing Strategy – Barbara Kahn
  • Branding– Barbara Kahn
• Globalization
• • Managing Global Policy & Risks - Witold Henisz
  • Operations Management & Link to Financial Performance - Christian Terwiesch
    
  • Faces of Globalization – Kenwyn Smith
• Strategy
• • Creating Sustainable Competitive Advantage - Nicolaj Siggelkow
  • Mergers & Acquisitions – Harbir Singh
  • Business Strategy Simulation - Todd Norris
    
• Leadership and Organization Dynamics
• • Executive Negotiations Workshop – Richard Shell
  • Decision Making and Leadership – Mike Useem
  • Leadership Workshop - Kenwyn Smith
  • Politics of Intergroup Relations – Kenwyn Smith

Related articles

• “Managing Risk” Tom Price, Public Affairs and Enterprise Risk Management (PDF, 610KB)

Wharton@Work:E-Buzz

• Condensed, Intense, Business School Experiences Open Eyes and Expand Horizons(November 2009)
• Earning the Right to Lead (June 2009)
• Breaking the Recession Mind: Simulation Encourages Strategic Innovation (March 2009)
• Making the Leap: Rising to the Leadership Challenge of a "Structural Break" (February 2009)

represent many cultures, regions, and industries. They include leaders from across all disciplines including: marketing and sales, research and development, accounting and finance, supply chain and logistics, manufacturing and engineering, human resources, and information technology. Likewise, they come from a variety of industry vertical groups such as: pharmaceuticals and health care, financial services, manufacturing, aerospace and defense, high-technology firms, etc. More than half of the participants are typically from outside the United States.

We encourage companies to send cross-functional teams of executives to leverage the application and value of the program. Additional group benefits are available when four or more participants attend a program.

The Executive Development Program is designed to increase the business skills and leadership capabilities of managers who lead key parts of the business and form the pool of future top leadership of the organization. You will:

• Advance your strategic decision making capabilities to think faster and more creatively about current competitive strategies and solutions.
• Deepen understanding of organizational dynamics to improve the design and implementation of new initiatives and avoid destructive conflicts.
• Build capabilities for leading cross-border teams across functions and countries.
• Develop knowledge in core areas of business, including finance, marketing, management, and strategy based on current research and best practice.
• Develop a global network of peers and experts

Faculty: A Concentration of Knowledge

PETER FADER, PhD

Faculty Director

Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor
Professor of Marketing
The Wharton School

Professor Fader's expertise centers around the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities. He works with a wide range of data sources from industries such as consumer packaged goods, e-commerce, and music (online and offline). His research focuses on using data generated by such new technologies as retail scanners to understand customer preferences and to help companies fine tune their marketing strategies. His work has been published in (and he serves on the editorial boards of) a number of leading journals in marketing, statistics, and the management sciences. His latest book is entitled Wharton Executive Education Customer Centricity Essentials: What It Is, What It Isn't, and Why It Matters .

TOM DONALDSON, PhD

Mark O. Winkelman Professor
Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics
The Wharton School

Thomas Donaldson has consulted and lectured at many organizations, including the Business Roundtable, Goldman Sachs, Walt Disney, the United Nations, Microsoft, The Tata Group, Exelon, Motorola, AT&T, JP Morgan, Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Los Alamos National Laboratory, ConocoPhillips, Shell, IBM, Western Mining-Australia, Pfizer, the AMA, the IMF, Bankers Trust, and the World Bank. He served from 2004-2009 as an appointed member of the National Adjudicatory Council of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA, formerly the NASD). He was named the most influential "thought leader" in Ethisphere Magazine's 2007 ranking of the 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics. In 2009 he won the Aspen Institute's Pioneer Award for lifetime achievement.

Tom Donaldson has written broadly in the area of business ethics, values, and leadership. His books include: Ethical Issues in Business, 8th Edition (Prentice-Hall Inc., 2007), with P. Werhane and Ethics in International Business (Oxford University Press, 1989).

ADAM M. GRANT, PhD

Associate Professor of Management
The Wharton School

Prof. Grant has consulted and taught executive education for a wide range of clients, including Medco, Borders Group, Time-Warner Cable, Grant-Thornton, Duke Energy, Asahi Glass, the American Financial Services Association, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy.

Before joining the Wharton faculty, he taught at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, where he won UNC’s two most prestigious teaching awards: the university-wide Tanner Award for Excellence and the business school’s Weatherspoon Award for Excellence.

Prof. Grant earned his PhD and MS degrees in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan, and his BA from Harvard University with Phi Beta Kappa and highest honors.

WITOLD J. HENISZ

Associate Professor of Management
The Wharton School

Dr. Witold J. Henisz is an Associate Professor of Management at the Wharton School. His research examines the impact of political hazards on international investment strategy. He analyzes the political and economic determinants of government attempts to redistribute investor returns to the broader polity, the strategic responses by organizations to such pressure, and the determinants of the success of individual organizations in withstanding such pressure.

Professor Henisz has served as a consultant for the World Bank, The Inter-American Development Bank, The Conference Board, and Eurasia Group. He previously worked for The International Monetary Fund. He is currently a principal in the political risk management consultancy PRIMA LLC.

BARBARA KAHN, PhD

Patty and Jay H. Baker Professor,
Professor of Marketing
Director, Jay H. Baker Retailing Center
The Wharton School

Professor Kahn is the co-author of The Grocery Revolution: The New Focus on the Consumer (Addison-Wesley, 1997), a look inside the packaged goods industry and study of consumer behavior. She is an internationally recognized scholar whose research areas include consumer choice, variety seeking, brand loyalty, retail assortment, price promotions, and decisions under uncertainty/ambiguity (including medical and financial decision-making).

TODD NORRIS

Consultant

During the past 20 years, Todd Norris has designed, produced, and facilitated over 40 business strategy simulations for use in executive education for organizations including Hewlett Packard, Boeing, Sunoco, General Foods, Schering Plough, and Federated Stores. He is the designer of the business simulations in the Executive Development Program and has facilitated them since 1996. A graduate of the Wharton School with a background in strategy, systems dynamics, and computer science engineering, Todd was formerly the CTO and Vice President of Customer Operations for SMG Strategic Management Group, a firm specializing in business acumen simulations for education. He currently advises organizations on the use of simulation through a partnership with Simulations International, LLC.

JOHN R. PERCIVAL, PhD

Adjunct Professor of Finance,
The Wharton School

John Percival is active in the development and teaching of various Executive Education programs. At Wharton since 1971, he is the lead faculty on several open-enrollment programs: Integrating Finance and Strategy for Value Creation and The CFO: Becoming a Strategic Partner. He has also developed customized programs for companies such as GE Capital, Pitney Bowes, IBM, Fiat, Chubb, Hartford, American Skandia, Sun Life, Siam Cement, Scientific Atlanta, Ford, and Bankers Trust. He consults to organizations in both the public and private sectors, has authored or co-authored articles in numerous publications, and was recently the recipient of the WEMBA Program Core Teaching Award for Financial Analysis.

MICHAEL R ROBERTS, PhD

Associate Professor of Finance, The Wharton School

Michael R. Roberts is a tenured Associate Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Roberts earned his B.A. in Economics from the University of California at San Diego, and his M.A. in Statistics and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to his experience at the Wharton School, he has taught at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. His primary research is in the area of corporate finance and in particular: capital structure, investment policy, financial contracting, and payout policy. Recent work has examined issues including the design of debt securities and the role of control rights in influencing financial and investment policy. His research has received several awards including the Brattle Prize for Distinguished Paper published in the Journal of Finance, and Best Paper awards at the Financial Management Association and Southwestern Finance Association annual conferences.

G. RICHARD SHELL, JD

Thomas Gerrity Professor
Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics and Management
The Wharton School

An internationally recognized expert in law, dispute resolution, and negotiations, he is the author of several books: The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas; the award-winning Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People, a work which has been published in more than 14 language editions and appeared in 2006 in a revised and updated Second Edition; and Make the Rules or Your Rivals Will, a work on competitive strategy and law.

Professor Shell is the academic director of Wharton's Executive Negotiation Workshop and Strategic Persuasion Workshop: The Art and Science of Selling Ideas. He teaches in a variety of open-enrollment and customized programs. A partial list of his consulting clients includes the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett-Packard, Merck & Co., Citibank, Bank of America, and several of the largest labor unions in the United States.

NICOLAJ SIGGELKOW, PhD

David M. Knott Professor
Professor of Management
Chairperson, Wharton Management Department
The Wharton School

Nicolaj Siggelkow’s current research focuses on the strategic and organizational implications of interactions among a firm’s choices of activities and resources. His research has been published in the leading management journals, including Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Industrial Economics, Management Science, Organization Science, and Strategic Organization. In 2008,he received the Administrative Science Quarterly Scholarly Contribution Award for the most significant paper published in ASQ five years earlier. Nicolaj is a member of the Editorial Review Boards of Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Strategic Organization, and Academy of Management Perspectives. Over the last several years, Professor Siggelkow has been a multiple recipient of the Wharton School’s MBA Excellence in Teaching Award.

HARBIR SINGH, PhD

The Mack Professor
Professor of Management
Vice Dean for Global Initiatives
Co-Director, Mack Center for Technological Innovation
The Wharton School

Harbir Singh is a leading researcher on strategic alliances and strategies for corporate renewal, including path-breaking projects on managing acquisitions and alliances and post-acquisition management. He has consulted for companies such as Bell Atlantic, IBM, Merck, and AT&T. His current research includes strategies for corporate alliances and acquisitions, corporate governance, joint ventures, management buyouts, and corporate restructuring. He serves on the editorial boards of several prestigious publications and has extensive experience in working with senior executive audiences in the United States and India.

KENWYN K. SMITH, PhD

Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior
The School of Social Policy & Practice, University of Pennsylvania

Kenwyn Smith, a member of the University of Pennsylvania faculty for more than 17 years, has also taught at Wharton and at Penn's Fels School of Government. He designed the Social Systems Workshop and is known for his research on group dynamics, managing organizational conflict, and the impact of organizational dynamics on the health of employees.

CHRISTIAN TERWIESCH, PhD

Professor of Operations and Information Management
The Wharton School

Christian Terwiesch’s research on Operations Management and on R&D and Innovation Management appears in many leading academic journals, including Management Science, Operations Research, Marketing Science, and Organization Science. He is a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics and is active on a number of editorial boards for journals including Management Science and Production and Operations Management.

Professor Terwiesch has researched with and consulted for various organizations, including a project on concurrent engineering for BMW, supply chain management for Intel and Medtronic, R&D pipeline management for Merck, product customization for Dell, and operations improvements for several large hospitals. He is the co-author of Matching Supply with Demand, a widely used textbook in Operations Management. His latest book, Innovation Tournaments, was published in 2009.

MIKE USEEM, PhD

The William and Jacalyn Egan Professor
Professor of Management
The Wharton School

Mike Useem offers courses on management, leadership, and corporate governance to MBA and senior executive audiences in the United States, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. He has worked extensively on leadership development and governance with many organizations in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. He is the author of The Leader's Checklist: 15 Mission-Critical Principles; The Go Point: When It's Time to Decide; Leading Up: How to Lead Your Boss So You Both Win; The Leadership Moment: Nine True Stories of Triumph and Disaster and Their Lessons for Us All; Investor Capitalism: How Money Managers Are Changing the Face of Corporate America; and Executive Defense: Shareholder Power and Corporate Reorganization. From the slopes of Mount Everest to the battlefields of Gettysburg, Dr. Useem has gone to great lengths to present leadership lessons to executives.

Mike works with the World Economic Forum on several initiatives to identify ways of preventing, mitigating, and responding to significant enterprise risks. He serves with the WEF Global Council on Catastrophic Risks.

"The learning we experienced during the two intense weeks of EDP was immense. The program was well defined, covering all major facets of management in an industry context, and supported with case studies. One especially outstanding facet of the program was the opportunity to form a 'virtual company' and to play the role of an expert from a specific discipline, contributing the appropriate strategy to the company’s success. Thanks for the superb hospitality and for memories that I will cherish for years to come."
—Vijay Batra
Managing Director, Teva API India, Ltd

"The program was a great experience! As a senior executive, I don’t usually get the time to reflect on my role or receive the kind of feedback that I got from my peers in this program. I greatly appreciated having real-world professors and speakers — people like us who are living in the business world, not just basing their insights on theoretical or book knowledge."
—Hong (Margaret) Chen
Director, Asia, Telefonica

"The Wharton EDP experience exceeded my expectations. The instructors, team simulation, programming, and facilities were all — world-class and at the leading edge of business education. Importantly, the truly international and cross-industry make-up of the class enriched the diversity of thinking, requiring a global approach to problem solving. I was able to implement the new learning on day one when I returned to my job."
—Matthew V. Petronio
EVP and Chief Operating Officer, Just Born, Inc., Bethlehem, PA - US