Essentials of Management

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Dates Location Tuition
Dec 8, 2008 - Dec 12, 2008 Philadelphia $18,750
Jan 19, 2009 - Jan 23, 2009 Philadelphia
Apr 20, 2009 - Apr 24, 2009 Philadelphia $18,750
Jun 1, 2009 - Jun 5, 2009 Philadelphia

This program takes place over two nonconsecutive weeks. Both weeks are required for completion

You need a broader view. Perhaps you are at the top of your profession in technical or scientific knowledge, but the next step in your career is management. Or you are an entrepreneur with a specialized technical or medical background but aren't sure how to read financial statements.

Today, managers have to meet more challenges with fewer resources. Doing so successfully means quickly adapting to shifting circumstances, utilizing your skill sets, and effectively managing your resources. You need to quickly increase your understanding of business fundamentals and extend your knowledge of management.

Essentials of Management teaches the core concepts of business to those who need to broaden their managerial and strategic perspectives, enhance their business instincts, and sharpen their ability to tackle management challenges.

Drawing on faculty and content from Wharton's top-ranked MBA program, this program introduces the essentials every successful manager needs in marketing, finance, operations, strategy, negotiations, and leadership. Past participants have nicknamed the program a "mini-MBA."

Faculty also share their research on topics that include:
  • Challenges of creating a "lean" corporate structure
  • The increased focus on stakeholder issues
  • Strategic and operational issues associated with globalization
  • Implications of the continuing shift to network relationships
  • The impact of societal and business trends

Tuition for Philadelphia programs includes lodging and meals. Prices are subject to change. Program Consultants are available to provide more information on course specifics and discuss how this program might meet your needs. Please contact them by telephone at +1.215.898.1776 or by e-mail.


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The program is structured to deliver valuable knowledge in an integrated format. You are introduced to concepts in the first session, apply them back at work, and revisit them in the second session. The experience is enhanced with a secured "Web Café" connection that encourages further interaction between faculty and classmates.

Essentials of Management Session Topics

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

Managing People

  • The Strategic Perspective – Peter Cappelli
  • Strategic Persuasion – Mario Moussa

Fundamentals of Marketing

  • Market Segmentation – Jagmohan Raju
  • Developing a Marketing Plan – Jagmohan Raju

Essentials of Finance

  • The Relationship Between Finance and Strategy – John Percival
  • Financial Measures of Business Performance – John Percival
  • Measuring Risk and Return and the Opportunity Cost of Capital
    – David Wessels

Negotiation

  • Executive Negotiation Workshop – Richard Shell

Strategic Thinking

  • The Strategic Framework – Larry Hrebiniak
  • Thinking Organizations – Mario Moussa
  • Implementing Strategy – Larry Hrebiniak

Leadership

  • Leading with Emotional Intelligence – Sigal Barsade

Related articles

Wharton@Work:E-Buzz

About the Book

Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change

Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change
Formulating strategy is one thing. Executing it throughout the entire organization... well, that's the really hard part. Without effective execution, no business strategy can succeed. Unfortunately, most managers know far more about developing strategy than about executing it — and overcoming the difficult political and organizational obstacles that stand in their way. In this book, Wharton Professor Larry Hrebiniak offers a comprehensive, disciplined process model for making strategy work in the real world. Hrebiniak shows why execution is even more important than many senior executives realize and sheds powerful new light on why businesses fail to deliver on even their most promising strategies.

Click here to download the introduction and chapter one.

This program is designed for functional and general managers, including those with clinical, research, or technical backgrounds, who may not have formal business training; managers of family-run businesses; and entrepreneurs who need to extend their core business knowledge. Managers considering pursuing an MBA can gain a sense of the framework of such a program. Past participants have included those with technical or line management backgrounds, representing such industries as manufacturing and technology, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and telecom.

Those that have taken the program include:

  • General Managers
  • National Account Managers
  • Regional Sales Managers
  • Controllers
  • Directors
  • Managers

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.

Develop knowledge in core areas of business, including finance, marketing, management, and strategy based on current research and best practices. Understand how operational and financial decisions impact strategic and marketing efforts.

You will gain a broader view of business and will be able to:

  • Develop a business vocabulary that will foster communication and collaboration across organizational boundaries.
  • Incorporate best practices by immediately applying classroom knowledge to real-world situations during the month-long interval between the two weeks.
  • Know how to approach different managerial problems using value-driven decision making.
  • Learn how to manage change and conflict effectively.

Faculty: A Concentration of Knowledge

The program is delivered by a diverse and talented team of senior faculty in management, finance, operations, marketing, and other disciplines. All of our faculty are active researchers and consultants, who are able to bridge theory and practice.

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

Sigal Barsade , PhD  SIGAL BARSADE, PhD
Associate Professor of Management
The Wharton School

Sigal Barsade, area coordinator of the organizational behavior area at Wharton, has consulted to many diverse organizations, including Hewlett Packard, Merrill Lynch, The Jewish Home and Hospital Lifecare System, and the NBA, as well as to smaller entrepreneurial organizations. The focus of her consulting has been on assessing or changing organizational culture, organizational change, leadership, program evaluation, and emotional intelligence. She actively integrates her research on organizational culture, emotions in the workplace, group dynamics, top management teams, emotional intelligence, and other areas into her practice. Dr. Barsade serves on the editorial boards of two of the leading organizational behavior journals, Administrative Science Quarterly and Academy of Management Review.
Lawrence G. Hrebiniak, PhD LAWRENCE G. HREBINIAK, PhD
Associate Professor of Management
The Wharton School

Larry Hrebiniak's courses focus on competitive strategy and strategy implementation. His extensive research has encompassed competitive strategy, the fit between strategy and structure, methods of achieving coordination in geographically dispersed firms, controls in the strategy implementation process, and strategic adaptation as organizations change over time to remain competitive. Larry has consulted with leading companies around the world, including AT&T, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Chase Manhattan, DuPont, General Electric, General Motors, Isuzu, and Johnson & Johnson. He is the author of Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change (Wharton School Publishing, 2005), Implementing Strategy (New York: MacMillan, 1984) and The We-Force in Management: How To Build and Sustain Cooperation (New York: Lexington Books, 1994).
Mario Moussa, PhD MARIO MOUSSA, PhD
Principal, CFAR (Center for Applied Research), Inc.
Senior Fellow, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Care Economics
University of Pennsylvania

Co-author of The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas, Mario Moussa directs and teaches programs for hospital leaders and physicians, corporate security managers, and energy and banking executives. He teaches negotiation, influence, strategy, change, and corporate culture and is co-director of Wharton's Essentials of Management program. He is also a principal at CFAR, Inc., a management consulting firm that began as a Wharton research center. A specialist in large-scale organizational change initiatives, he has consulted to many of the world's leading corporations, universities, and foundations, including United Health Group, PNC Bank, the Georgetown University Medical Center, and State Farm Insurance. He has published widely in the field of organizational dynamics, power, and influence.
G. Richard Shell, JD 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.
Peter Cappelli , DPhil  PETER CAPPELLI, DPhil
George W. Taylor Professor of Management
Director, Center for Human Resources
The Wharton School

Peter Cappelli's areas of research are human resource practices and talent and performance management. Dr. Cappelli is the author of The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market-Driven Workforce (Harvard Business School Press, 1999), which describes the challenges associated with managing the new, more mobile workforce. His article "A Market-Driven Approach to Retaining Talent" focuses specifically on the challenges of retaining employees. Dr. Cappelli was recently named one of the 25 most influential people in the field of human capital by Vault.com.
John Hershey, PhD JOHN C. HERSHEY, PhD
Daniel H. Silberberg Professor
Professor of Operations and Information Management
The Wharton School

Jack Hershey is a leader in the decision sciences field. His research focuses on normative and behavioral aspects of decision making, with special emphasis on the health care and insurance industries and on operations research applications to the service sector. He teaches courses in management science, operations management, service operations, behavioral decision research, and negotiations. He has consulted to numerous public agencies and private firms, including the National Institutes of Health, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
John Percival, PhD JOHN R. PERCIVAL, PhD
Adjunct Professor of Finance,
The Wharton School
CEO, JRP Associates

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: Creating Value Through Financial Management 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.
Jagmohan Raju, PhD JAGMOHAN S. RAJU, PhD
Joseph J. Aresty Professor
Professor of Marketing
Chairperson, Wharton Marketing Department
The Wharton School

Professor Raju is a leading authority on competitive strategy and pricing. His research interests include pricing, strategic alliances, new-product introduction strategy, retailing, private labels, and corporate advertising. He teaches marketing management to the MBAs, pricing strategy to the Executive MBA students, and mathematical models in marketing to the PhD students. He is the academic director of Wharton's Essentials of Marketing, Competitive Marketing Strategy, and Pricing Strategies Executive Education programs and is the marketing editor of Management Science. He holds a PhD in business, an MS in operations research, and an MA in economics from Stanford University. He also has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and a BTech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
undefined DAVID WESSELS, PhD
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Finance
The Wharton School

Professor David Wessels is a director of Executive Education at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Named by BusinessWeek as one of the nation's top business school instructors, David teaches courses on corporate valuation, investment banking, and venture capital to undergraduates, MBAs, and executives in Philadelphia and San Francisco. He has been recognized by his students with the school's top MBA teaching award and recognized nationally for his research on organizational structure and financial performance. His book, Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies, co-authored with McKinsey & Company partners Tim Koller and Marc Goedhart, is a standard text for corporate valuation.

In addition to his teaching on campus, Professor Wessels serves on the executive development and training faculties at Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Lockheed Martin, McKinsey & Company, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Siemens, and UPS.

Before joining Wharton, David served on finance faculty of the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. Prior to Emory, he was a management consultant with McKinsey & Company and a technology analyst for Boston-based Harbourvest Venture Partners. David holds a PhD in finance from the Anderson School at UCLA, a BS in economics and a BAS in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania.

James Hardie Building Products Company:

"We had a directive from the company president to develop high-potential managers to help keep our fast growth on track," says Allison Baughman, training and organizational development manager for James Hardie Building Products Company.

With corporate growth averaging 20 percent a year for more than a decade, this worldwide leader in the competitive business supplies industry works to ensure that its managers are well equipped to handle the challenges presented by a rapidly changing global environment. With the president's directive in mind, the company started a trial initiative in early 2001 to enroll selected managers in Wharton's Essentials of Management (EOM) program.

"While these are all experienced people with degrees in various fields, the company wanted to give them a broader perspective in finance, management, and other areas of learning. We had high expectations, and the Wharton program not only met them, but also exceeded them. We're very pleased with the return on our investment of funds and human capital.”

Initially, 12 people from purchasing, sales and other departments were enrolled in the two-week program. Since then, the James Hardie Company has sent more than 40 people — including controllers and R&D, plant, and other managers — through the course. Now, says Baughman, the Wharton curriculum is an integral part of the company's management development program.

"Participants report that it is an intensive, enlightening experience," she says. "Besides the knowledge they're gaining, the program develops teamwork as managers from departments across the company and across the country learn and work together. This concept fits well with our international corporate culture."

Baughman notes that the positive results were very evident and made an impact very quickly.

"Our goal was to increase participants' business knowledge without going through an entire MBA program," she explains. "Watching them in action and observing the results, we've seen a dramatic, positive difference in the way these managers operate. They are much more aware of the cross-functional effect of their departments and are much more sensitive to the roles played by other departments and divisions. In turn, their increased efficiency flows through to the company's bottom line."

In the wake of the experience, Baughman says the James Hardie Company is now looking to expand the Wharton EOM program to other areas.

"We may ask Wharton to develop custom programs for our higher-level executives from the company's national and international sites," she reports. "In today's high-stakes environment, we are very interested in programs that offer a competitive advantage that enhances our leadership position. This has definitely been a success, and we look forward to continuing to work with the University."

Participant Comments

"Imagine a boot camp where you get to jump into a time machine that has the ability to take you through the professional lives of yesterday and today's captains of industry. Now, combine that experience with the world's best business professors serving as tour guides and teaching you the essentials of management. That is what the EOM experience was like for me — a world-class, high-intensity, mini-MBA boot camp on steroids!"
— Wes Co, Corporate Product Manager, Therma-Tru Corporation

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