High-Potential Leaders: Accelerating Your Impact

This program gives participants a deep awareness of their unique leadership styles, and a solid grounding in the strategic business skills that make or break the success of global leaders. The program begins with a benchmark from a globally normed leadership assessment. Then, with the guidance of Wharton's renowned management faculty, executive coaches, and a cohort of other accomplished high-potential leaders, participants enhance their strategic business skills and translate that knowledge into a clearly articulated action plan that defines where they — and their teams — are going, and how they will get there.

Leadership experts such as Ram Charan, Tal Ben-Shahar, and Nick Craig lead participants in exploring their crucible moments — make-or-break tests of skill and character — help them to build strategic business acumen, clarify leadership vision, design effective execution plans, and engage the hearts and minds of the people they lead. (Please note that Tal Ben-Shahar will be teaching in the September 2009 program and in future dates for the program; due to personal commitments, he is unable to join the faculty for the March 2009 offering.)

Related Articles

Wharton@Work: June 2008

• "In the Crucible: Trials Reveal Strengths of High-Potential Executives"

This program is designed to meet the needs of leaders who have at least 10 years of experience and whose fast-track career in leadership has involved consistently moving up to increased levels of responsibility.

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.

Designed to optimize your impact, this program helps you to:

• Build a solid leadership foundation based on your own strengths and values.
• Master the strategic business skills that global leaders most need.
• Optimize potential and accelerate career progression — for you and your team.
• Make strategic decisions, lead change, and motivate people to achieve results.
• Design action plans that achieve both short- and long-term results.

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DAFNA EYLON, PhD

Academic Director

Senior Fellow, The Wharton School
Associate Professor of Management & Psychology, The F. Carlyle Tiller Chair in Business, Robins School of Business, University of Richmond

Eylon has extensive experience in executive and organizational consulting, working with a wide range of organizations from Fortune 500 companies to nonprofits in areas such as leadership, organizational culture, communication, commitment, and workplace empowerment. She has researched and written articles on a number of business topics, with her work appearing in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Current Research in Social Psychology, Journal of Business and Entrepreneurship, and Group & Organization Management.

TAL BEN-SHAHAR, PhD

An author and lecturer at Harvard University, Ben-Shahar teaches Positive Psychology and The Psychology of Leadership, the largest and third largest courses at the school. He is also a consultant to executives in multinational corporations, and offers a number of business workshops on topics such as leadership, resilience, and goal setting. He teaches leaders how to fulfill their potential as they learn about research and practices from the world of "appreciative inquiry" and about the "strengths-based approach" to organizational development.
(Please note that Tal Ben-Sharar will be teaching in the September 2009 program and in future dates for the program; due to personal commitments, he is unable to join the faculty for the March 2009 offering.)

ED BETOF

Academic Director, University of Pennsylvania's Executive Program in Work-Based Learning Leadership
Former Vice President, Talent Management, and CLO, BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company)

As Academic Director for the Executive Program in Work-Based Learning Leadership, Ed Betof provides Chief Learning Officers other professional educators with proven strategies for accelerating the careers of their high-potential leaders. Formerly, Betof served as vice president, talent management and chief learning officer at Becton, Dickinson and Company, and from 2004-2006, he served a three-year term as a member of the American Society of Training and Development's Board of Directors. Currently, Ed chairs the Conference Board's Council on Learning, Development and Organizational Performance. In 1992, Ed was the "Executive on Loan" to the New Jersey Governor's Commission on Quality Education, which was charged with making recommendations to improve public education in the state. He has held adjunct faculty appointments at several colleges and spent the first 10 years of his professional life as a teacher. He is the lead author of Just Promoted (McGraw-Hill), numerous articles and manual chapters. Ed received his interdisciplinary doctoral degree from Temple University.

RAM CHARAN

Charan is a leading expert on business strategy, profitable growth and leadership excellence, as well as a Distinguished Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources. He is a consultant to companies such as GE, Bank of America, DuPont, Novartis, EMC, Home Depot, and Verizon, and has coached some of the world's most successful CEOs. Among the many popular business books Charan has authored are Leaders at All Levels, What the CEO Wants You to Know, Every Business Is a Growth Business (with Noel Tichy), and the best-seller Execution (with Larry Bossidy and Charles Burck).

NICK CRAIG

President, Authentic Leadership Institute (ALI)

Nick Craig is the founder and director of the Authentic Leadership Institute (ALI), a training and consulting firm specializing in Authentic Leadership-based programs, coaching, and executive team alignment. As a consultant, he has over 20 years of experience helping leaders create a strong culture of execution balanced with high integrity, congruency, and authenticity. Craig has designed and delivered leadership programs across the globe for many Fortune 500 companies (BP, GE, Siemens, etc.). Currently, he delivers the leadership module for GE's High Potential Program. Craig's approach is based on his work with Bill George applying the latest research on authentic leaders, experience applying the Distributed Leadership Model at MIT's Sloan School, sports physiology, and the latest breakthrough research on neuroscience. Craig's collaboration with Bill George will be published in the book Finding Your True North (May 2008). Craig worked for many years with Mike Beer, Director Emeritus of Harvard Business School's Organizational Change practice, helping top teams have honest dialogues about their underlying issues that drive competitive advantage.

KATHY PEARSON, PhD

Adjunct Associate Professor, Operations and Information Management Department
The Wharton School

Kathy Pearson, PhD serves as an adjunct associate professor in the Operations and Information Management Department at the Wharton School. She has taught operations management courses in the MBA program and Executive Master’s of Technology Management program as well as probability and statistics, simulation modeling, and other courses for the department and the University of Pennsylvania. In 2006, Dr. Pearson was honored with the "Goes Above and Beyond the Call of Duty" award by the 2007 Wharton MBA class. In addition, Dr. Pearson is a senior consultant and director, Executive Education, for Decision Strategies International (DSI), a management consulting firm focused on scenario-based strategic planning and decision making.

Dr. Pearson is heavily involved in Executive Education at the Wharton School and DSI, teaching on a variety of topics such as Critical Thinking, Scenario Planning, Strategic Decision Making, Project Management, and Stakeholder Analysis. As academic director for many programs, she is responsible for the design of the academic curriculum, the integration of the material, and the overall educational quality of the program. Specifically, Dr. Pearson has served as the academic director for the Wharton Executive Management Program for Academic Surgery Leaders, the Patient Safety Leadership Academy Executive Program, the Wharton Nursing Leaders Program, and the GlaxoSmithKline Executive Management Program for Pharmacy Leaders. Many of her participants are clinician executives, but she has also worked with executives from a wide variety of industries and has taught at CEDEP at INSEAD in Fountainebleau, France.

Dr. Pearson's industrial experience includes analytical support for the pharmaceutical industry, various hospital groups, the Department of Defense, and several manufacturing companies. Most recently, she has served on a number of quality management and best practice teams for a major health care company, has been heavily involved in developing computer simulation models for the health care industry, and has worked with several professional organizations in developing long-term strategic business plans. In addition, she has worked with hospital clinicians in the area of patient safety.

Dr. Pearson received her BS degree in Theoretical Mathematics from Auburn University, her MS degree in Decision Sciences from Georgia State University, and her PhD in Industrial Engineering (concentration in Statistics) from Northwestern University.

"The Wharton High-Potential Leaders program is THE BEST executive development program that I have had the opportunity to participate in over the last five years (rated against other programs that I have attended at [several leading business schools]).

Every session is highly customized and carefully thought through to address THE most important leadership issues that managers face today that span: leadership authenticity, negotiation, organizational management, strategy planning, and execution. The combination of lectures by a who's who in the industry along with one-to-one coaching, management tools, leadership assessments, and team exercises with peers across industries/geography make this a truly special and unique world class program.

This is a must attend program for any executive on a fast track management and leadership path in their organizations. It is a great investment of individual time and corporate sponsorship."

— Don Bulmer, Vice President of Global Communications, SAP AG