Experience Wharton

News and Events

Facts at a Glance

Wharton History

Senior Leadership

Services and Administration

Wharton leaders combine broad-based knowledge, effective team skills, ethical decision-making, and "on the ground" expertise. Wharton faculty lead by advancing scholarly research, creating innovative learning methods, and furthering business education and practice around the world. In all programs, from undergraduate to executive education, Wharton students are immersed in experiences that challenge them to develop into creative, flexible leaders who can work across diverse business disciplines, environments, and cultures to achieve results.

Leading projects, teams, departments, and institutions, our alumni make an impact across the world. Alumni leaders head corporations, manage hedge funds, develop software products, found medical clinics, govern not-for-profits, and make news.

• Building Leaders
• Leading Beyond the Classroom
• Advancing Education and Research

Building Leaders
Students learn leadership by doing. The Wharton School provides a unique opportunity for students to develop leadership through not only classroom learning, but also experiential learning and opportunities to take action. Says Dean Patrick Harker: "Leadership is not a skill that is bound within the walls of a classroom or a firm. We need to lift the discussions up to the point where we reinforce a set of principles to develop leadership in all of our students in their own style."

Undergraduate: Leadership and Communication in Groups
This course, required for Wharton freshmen, forms the foundation of the leadership experience, concentrating on developing written and oral communication skills and provides training in leadership and group dynamics. The focal point of this experience is a group project in which students work with community service agencies to design and complete a project that benefits the community, from offering tax preparation assistance to teaching local school children about the economy.

MBA: Foundations of Leadership and Teamwork
The soft skill of leadership is one of the hardest to learn, but also the most crucial for being effective at any level in an organization. This required first-year course gives students an opportunity to increase their capacity to lead by teaching how to continually learn from experience through the disciplined integration of action and reflection.

Learning Teams
At the center of the MBA curriculum is the learning team, a group of five or six Wharton students assigned to collaborate on assignments throughout the first year. The teams are designed to bringing together participants from different backgrounds, careers, and interests. As the group explores varied projects and subject material, it draws on the strengths and experiences of each team member and allows each to learn their own leadership style.

Executive Education Leadership Programs
True leaders never stop learning. Wharton has offered executive education courses for more than 50 years and continues to be a leader in the field. With a mix of more than 200 programs and a world-class faculty, Wharton offers leading-edge solutions to more than 10,000 executives annually at modern academic facilities in Philadelphia and San Francisco.

Ethics Program
Leadership and ethics are inseparable concepts, and Wharton business education teaches the precepts of ethical business decision-making. Since 1991 the Ethics Program has expanded on the lessons of the required ethics course by integrating the material across the curriculum. The program's core faculty have advanced research through the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research while continually strengthening students' understanding of the ethical issues they may confront in business.

Lecture Series on Leadership
Today's national and international business leaders provide models for leadership, offering students and executives perspective on their careers and the challenges of their industries through Wharton's lecture series. With the Musser-Schoemaker Leadership Lecture Series, undergraduate students have a chance to learn the inside story of key business events and decisions directly from the men and women involved, while Wharton Leadership Lectures are organized by MBA students, who invite influential business and political leaders to share insight into the characteristics and motivations of successful leaders.

Leadership Opportunities
Wharton students call leadership skills into action through student-run clubs for undergraduates and MBA students and activities such as the conference series, including the Whitney M. Young Conference, Wharton Global Business Forum, the Private Equity Conference, Health Care Business Conferences, among others.

Leadership Ventures
The Center for Leadership and Change Management offers acclaimed leadership ventures that take students and executives out of the ordinary academic environment and give them hands-on experiences for exploring and mastering their capabilities for effective individual and team leadership in business and beyond. Whether participating in leadership boot camp in Quantico, VA, mountaineering on Mount Everest, or learning about firefighting strategies in Montana, students challenge themselves and learn how individual and team decision making and leadership shape the course of events.

Global Consulting Practicum (GCP)
Through the GCP, a one-credit, crossfunctional course, MBA students apply the concepts, tools, and paradigms they learn in their classes to develop a strategic plan that is grounded in market research and a detailed implementation plan for international clients. Wharton MBA students put leadership skills into practice working on global teams with MBA students from another leading international business schools, including the Indian School of Business, Tel Aviv University, York University, Monterrey Institute of Technology, and Universidad Adolfo Ibanez.

Center for Leadership and Change Management
In 1997, Wharton became the first business school to establish a research center devoted to understanding organizational leadership and change management. Directed by Michael Useem, the William and Jacalyn Egan Professor of Management, the center publishes a monthly research digest and co-hosts an annual conference, among other activities.

Wharton INSEAD Alliance
The Wharton School and INSEAD have formed a unique Alliance in the global development and delivery of management education. The Alliance combines the resources of two world leaders in management education to deliver top quality business education to postgraduate candidates and executives across four dedicated campuses: Wharton's U.S. campuses in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and those of INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore.

LEAD Program
Wharton's long-standing commitment to educating community leaders is reflected in the Leadership, Education, and Development (LEAD) program in business, first established at Wharton in 1980. The program fosters leadership in minority high school students by exposing them to real-world business environments, as well as introducing them to key areas of business, including economics, finance, marketing, management, leadership, diversity, globalization, business ethics, and communications. Today, the LEAD program is a nationwide initiative with 11 other sites.