Institute for Leadership and Business Growth Are your strategies for growing your business the right ones in today’s rapidly changing business environment? Have you taken the necessary steps to ensure the viability of your business as it is passed on to the next generation of owners or leaders? Are you adequately prepared to take advantage of the latest technology breakthroughs to create competitive advantage for your business? The Institute for Leadership and Business Growth can provide you with the answers to these and other critical business management questions. The Institute is a partnership among leaders of the Association of Rug Care Specialists, National Wood Flooring Association, North American Association of Floor Covering Distributors, and World Floor Covering Association and faculty and staff at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Sciences and the Wharton School. They have developed a customized learning program for association members who own, manage, or are being groomed to manage small to medium-sized flooring businesses, including family owned and/or operated enterprises. The program will provide you with the concepts, tools, and proven strategies to more efficiently and effectively drive business growth and help you to successfully transfer management of the business to the next generation of leaders. It will combine traditional classroom work and on-line instruction, reducing the amount of time you spend away from your businesses.
Participants in this unique program will take advantage of a broad-based curriculum that includes: Entrepreneurial Accounting
Communication and Branding
This session will help you understand or reinforce your knowledge of the core concepts of finance and accounting. Content will include terminology and principles, financial statements, distinctions between income and cash flow, and valuation. Learn how financial data can be critical in assessing your business’s performance and making profitable business decisions.
Learn successful strategies for building awareness of your brand and communicating your brand’s value to your customers. The session will illustrate the most effective ways to communicate with your customers, including social media, and prepare you to take advantage of future technology advances to successfully market your business. Operations Management
Customer-Centric Innovation
This is your opportunity to identify, understand, and learn the practical skills and tools necessary to circumvent the roadblocks to business growth and how to apply innovative new strategies to successfully compete in existing and new markets. Navigating Family Business Issues
Managing family-owned businesses is often a unique, complicated, and challenging experience. Learn from real case studies how to avoid barriers to effective succession planning and efficiently and effectively transition the management of your business to the next generation of leaders. Negotiation and Dispute Resolution
Can you accurately assess the pluses and minuses of your personal negotiating style? How do others view you as a negotiator? The lessons learned in this session will enable you to build on your negotiating strengths and diagnose and address problems as a means to developing your repertoire of negotiating skills.
Is the operation of your business as efficient and effective as it can be? Do you understand the strengths and limitations of your workflow processes, control systems, supplychain management, and quality controls? This session will examine successful models that can be applied to fine-tune the operations of your business. Human Resource Management: Recruitment and Retention Strategies
There is a direct relationship between the quality of a business and the quality of its people. Learn practical tools for attracting the right employees, developing their skills through training, and motivating them to succeed in their roles and remain loyal to you and your business. Leadership and Organizational Culture
The ability of owners and managers to diagnose and optimize the well-being and culture of their organizations is critical. This session will teach critical skills in cultivating leaders, fine-tuning their leadership styles, and creating organizational cultures that promote high performance. Leadership Development
Financial Management: Theory and Practice
Are you confident that you understand the true cost of running your business and how that can affect your decision making? This session is designed to clarify the critical elements of financial management including cash flow analysis, net present value, cost of capital, diversification, mix of debt, and valuation and prepare you to apply them to strengthen your business. Entrepreneurial Marketing
The right marketing strategies can add tremendous value to your business. Learn how effective customer segmentation, positioning, pricing, and branding can create a competitive advantage for your business. These skills will enable you to understand the real needs of your customers and use this information to separate your business from the rest of the pack.
Are developing future leaders and crafting a leadership succession plan important to the on-going success of your business? Learn ways to assess, develop, and maximize the potential of key employees as they move into roles that require more leadership, responsibility, and accountability. Leading Organizational Change
Implementing the changes that can make your business more efficient, effective, and profitable is as difficult as it is important. This session is an opportunity to learn both the factors that trip up promising organizational transformations and proven strategies that can make organizational change a success.
Faculty
is an adjunct assistant professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and president of the I-Space Institute, a research and consulting company. He is interested in the strategic and entrepreneurial management of knowledge and heads a research initiative that explores this topic at Wharton’s Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center. He has helped develop strategy tools for numerous corporate and public-sector decision makers.
Martin Ihrig
Mori Taheripour is an adjunct faculty member in the Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches Negotiations and Dispute Resolution and is a faculty member and mentor for the NFL/NFL Players Association Business Management and Entrepreneurship Program. She also consults in the areas of negotiations, business development, marketing, branding, organizational development, and change management.
is the founder and principal of Applied Consulting, a firm specializing in family business consulting, organizational development, and executive coaching. Her clients include closely-held businesses, non-profits, and large multinational corporations. She has served as a facilitator in the Executive Development Program at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and has served as the associate director of the Rutgers Family Business Forum. She has extensive experience coaching owners of family businesses.
Michele Ballet
is adjunct professor of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He teaches extensively in Wharton’s Executive Education programs. A member of the American Finance Association and the Financial Management Association, he has authored many articles that have appeared in publications such as the Journal of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Risk and Insurance. John Percival
Anne Pauker Kreitzberg is a leadership and team effectiveness advisor to private and public companies, non-profits, and government agencies. She has extensive experience in human resource management. The firm she leads, Cognetics Corporation, provides consulting services in organizational and leadership effectiveness and social media. She teaches in Wharton’s Program for Working Professionals. Ginny Vanderslice , is president and founding principal of Praxis, where she consults with executives and executive teams on leadership development, strategic planning, change management, and organizational structure. She also advises companies interested in making employee ownership a significant factor in driving company performance. In addition, she is as a faculty member of the graduate program in Organization Dynamics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the academic director for the University of Pennsylvania /Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) executive education program for owners held once a year at the University of Pennsylvania. Keith Niedermeier is an adjunct assistant professor and director of the Undergraduate Marketing Program at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He teaches Introductory Marketing and has taught Consumer Behavior at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
is a senior consultant and director of Executive Education for Decision Strategies International, a management consulting firm focused on strategic planning and decision-making. She has also served as an adjunct associate professor in the Operations and Information Management Department at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught graduate-level operations management courses.
Kathy Pearson
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is eligible to take advantage of this learning opportunity? Members in good standing of the Association of Rug Care Specialists, National Wood Flooring Association, North American Association of Floor Covering Distributors, and the World Floor Covering Association. Participants must be business owners, senior managers, or managers being groomed to lead a business in some capacity. What is the timetable for the program? The program will officially begin on January 13, 2013 with a three-day session on the University of Pennsylvania campus. This will be followed by a 5-week on-line learning program. The learning platform will offer real-time classroom lectures and discussions with faculty and allow participants to join from any location using a web interface. On April 22, 2013 participants will return to the Penn campus for two-days of focused in-classroom learning. What is the tuition and what does it include? Tuition for the educational program will be $7,800 per participant. It will include five-days of in-class instruction on the University of Pennsylvania campus; 5 weeks of on-line learning; coaching by faculty during execution of projects; the opening and closing dinners, and lunches during on-campus sessions. What about housing during the on-campus sessions? We have arranged a discounted price for participants at the Sheraton Philadelphia University City, where we will be holding the on-campus portion of this Institute. Participants are responsible for booking their rooms and paying the Sheraton directly. You can make your reservation for the January portion of the program and receive the discounted rates by booking on this website: https://www.starwoodmeeting.com/Book/TheInstituteforLeadershipandBusinessGrowth You can make your reservation for the April portion of the program and receive the discounted rates by booking on this website: https://www.starwoodmeeting.com/Book/TheInstituteforLeadershipandBusinessGrowthApril How can I enroll? Enrollment can be done on-line at http://www.regonline.com/pennleadershipandbusinessgrowth A non-refundable deposit will be required at the time of enrollment. Additional information is available by contacting Rita McGlone at mcgloner@sas.upenn.edu.
University of Pennsylvania by the Numbers
The University of Pennsylvania, including the Wharton School, has earned a worldwide reputation for academic excellence. The University is:
Here’s how the University’s business programs are currently ranked among U.S. colleges and universities by U.S. News and World Report:
• Ranked as one of the top 10 schools in the world
• Undergraduate Business: First
• America’s first university
• Entrepreneurship: First
• America’s first business school
• Finance: First
• Home to 12 graduate and four undergraduate schools
• Accounting: Third
• Widely recognized for its world-class faculty, which has included four Nobel Prize and five Pulitzer Prize recipients over the past two decades.
• Marketing: Second • MBA: Third • Management: Third