July 2026 | Leadership

Accelerated Growth, on Her Own Terms: The GMP

Taria Avery wasn’t looking to start over. She had built a career on her terms, spending nearly eight years at Accenture and more than 12 years running a digital platform startup, which served about 60,000 clients across three states. She had no plans to slow down. But Avery saw clearly that the business environment around her was accelerating at a record rate, and she intended to lead through it. “I had built the playbook. What I wanted was the latest thinking layered on top of it,” she says.

Wharton’s General Management Program (GMP) offered exactly what was needed. The GMP consists of six open-enrollment programs taught by the same faculty who teach in Wharton’s MBA, completed at the participant’s own pace within two years. Four core programs cover the major functional business areas; two electives let participants explore their areas of interest. For Avery, that format was the draw. She could get targeted content one week at a time and earn Wharton alumni status at the end, all while continuing to work and raising two young children.

When Avery applied, Wharton paired her with a content director who helped her build the sequence. “She really challenged me to think about what I hadn’t considered about my future," Avery says. Together, they mapped a path through leadership, finance, marketing, and strategy. Her electives let her go deeper in AI and influence, two areas of great interest. Business Model Innovation in the Age of AI, led by Professor Serguei Netessine, showed her that “you can’t implement new technologies on a process that’s broken. AI doesn’t fix a weak strategy. It accelerates whatever you already have, whether good or bad,” she says. Her second elective was Executive Influence: Increasing Your Impact with Persuasion and Power. “The title alone sold me, and it really delivered,” Avery explains.

Learning What Leadership Actually Takes

The first program she took, High-Potential Leaders: Accelerating Your Impact, set the tone for everything that followed.

One of the program’s instructors was John Kanengieter, an executive coach whose teaching throughout the week centered on the aspects of leadership that don’t appear in a technical manual: trust, presence, and how to be a person your team can rely on when everything is on the line. On the final day, he told a story about his work with the crew of the Columbia Space Shuttle. He had spent months coaching them, beginning with a wilderness expedition in the Wyoming backcountry and continuing through the long arc of their mission training.

Weeks after the crew died on re-entry in February 2003, he came back to his office and found a voicemail they had recorded for him together, thanking him for what he had helped them achieve. He played it for the room. “We were all in tears,” Avery recalls. “That was the moment I knew I was in the right place. Wharton doesn’t just teach frameworks. We were learning what it actually takes to lead.”

Putting Knowledge to Work

The programs that followed differed in emphasis, but each reinforced the same core: personal leadership grounded in current, practical knowledge. Wharton Finance for Executives sharpened her ability to read the financial logic behind strategic decisions. Strategy and Management for Competitive Advantage introduced her to professor Nicolaj Siggelkow, one of the professors who developed the concept of connected strategy. “It’s the idea that customer data and AI-enabled systems can let a company anticipate what a customer needs and respond in real time, rather than waiting for a survey to come back,” Avery explains.

The application to her day job came faster than she expected. One GMP case study on operational efficiency gave Avery an idea she is now pursuing as a patent. As global senior project manager and strategic lead, medical affairs, at a women’s health care company, she works across roughly 140 countries, navigating the FDA, the European Medicines Agency, and dozens of other regulators. Every piece of marketing and medical content her company produces has to be reviewed and approved against the rules of each of those markets, and that review process is one of the most fragmented, time-consuming parts of the operation. The case study gave her a new way to see it. “It didn't teach me anything I didn’t already know about my industry," she says. "It taught me how to look at it differently. Once I did, the opportunity was right there.”

The Cohort Effect

Sitting in classrooms with founders, CEOs, military officers, chiefs of staff, and corporate executives from around the world, Avery was able to compare notes with people operating at her level in adjacent industries. The conversations validated what she already knew and gave her cleaner language to communicate that value to clients and colleagues.

The network has stuck too. Avery is part of two groups that continue to meet since the program ended. One holds monthly accountability calls where members share current challenges and what they’re learning and check in on the goals they set during the program. “We’re from all walks of life, and hold very different roles in different industries,” she says. “At the end of the day, we’re all trying to be the best we can be. It’s great to be able to support and learn from each other.” And that support will only deepen as Avery takes advantage of another key benefit of the GMP: alumni status. She now has full access to Wharton Alumni Clubs and Global Alumni Forums.

For anyone weighing a program like the GMP, whether they are running their own company, building a career inside a large organization, or thinking about a move, Avery’s experience makes the case. She got a personal learning path, the faculty who could teach her what she came for, and the peers she didn’t know she needed. “I came in already knowing how to run a business and drive business value and revenue for corporations,” she says. “I left with the language, the tools, and the network to go after what’s next in this unprecedented time and age of AI.”

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