Removing Barriers to Change in Organizations
Wharton Executive Education
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, founded in 1881, holds the distinction of being the first collegiate business school in the United States. Located on Penn's Ivy League campus in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, it is a university-affiliated institution with deep roots in rigorous, evidence-based inquiry — a tradition established by its founder, industrialist Joseph Wharton, who believed business education should be a serious academic pursuit, not vocational training. That founding conviction still shapes the school today: Wharton faculty are expected to publish in the most demanding academic journals while remaining engaged with the real problems of practice. The result is a school that treats management as a discipline as serious as medicine or law.Accreditations and RankingsAccreditations:AACSB accreditedEQUIS accreditedAMBA accredited(Triple Crown accredited)Rankings:#1 Best Business School — U.S. News & World Report (2024)#1 MBA Program Globally — Financial Times Global MBA Ranking (2024)#3 Global MBA — QS World University Rankings: Business Masters & MBA (2024)Consistently ranked among the top three business schools globally across major rankings over the past decadeExecutive Education at a GlanceWharton Executive Education is one of the largest executive education operations in the world, serving more than 10,000 participants annually across open-enrollment and custom programs. The open-enrollment catalogue runs to over 70 programs covering finance, leadership, strategy, marketing, business analytics, and general management — with named flagship offerings including the Advanced Management Program (AMP), the General Management Program (GMP), and the CFO: Becoming a Complete Financial Leader program. Custom programs, developed exclusively for corporate clients, represent a significant share of total activity and have been delivered for organisations including Google, KPMG, and Siemens.Programs range from two-day intensives to multi-month blended journeys, and Wharton has invested heavily in live online delivery since 2020, with many programs now offered in-person at the Philadelphia campus, virtually, or in hybrid format. Open-enrollment program fees typically range from approximately $4,000 for shorter online programs to over $60,000 for the flagship Advanced Management Program. A small number of need-based and merit-based support options exist for eligible participants.Campus and FacilitiesWharton's executive education programs are anchored in Huntsman Hall, a striking glass-and-steel structure completed in 2002 and designed specifically for collaborative learning, with tiered seminar rooms, breakout spaces, and abundant natural light across its 325,000 square feet. Participants in residential programs stay and work within the broader University of Pennsylvania campus — one of the most architecturally cohesive Ivy League environments in the country, where Gothic collegiate buildings sit alongside modern research facilities. Philadelphia itself is an underappreciated asset: the city is home to a dense concentration of healthcare systems, asset managers, law firms, and manufacturing conglomerates, making it an unusually rich backdrop for case discussions that require real industry texture. The campus is also 95 minutes from New York City by train, and many programs incorporate site visits or speaker engagements that draw on that proximity.Faculty and ResearchWharton's full-time faculty numbers over 235 across ten academic departments, with particular depth in finance, operations, statistics, and management — departments that have produced Nobel laureates and some of the most-cited scholars in their fields. Research centres directly relevant to executive participants include the Wharton Financial Institutions Center, the Mack Institute for Innovation Management, the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative, and the People Analytics Institute, which has effectively built a new discipline around data-driven HR and organisational behaviour. Faculty teaching in executive programs are active researchers, not emeriti or adjuncts: participants frequently find themselves in the room with the person who wrote the paper that influenced their industry. This proximity between knowledge creation and knowledge delivery is genuinely rare and difficult to replicate.Student Body, Alumni, and Career OutcomesWharton's executive education cohorts draw participants from over 75 countries in any given year, with particularly strong representation from North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, spanning industries from financial services and technology to government and healthcare. The broader Wharton alumni network encompasses more than 100,000 graduates globally, including a disproportionate concentration in senior finance roles — Wharton alumni are notably well-represented among CFOs, CIOs, and private equity partners at major institutions. Notable alumni across degree and executive programs include Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, and former U.S. President Donald Trump, though the executive education network is defined less by individual celebrity and more by a remarkably dense web of senior operators across industries. For participants in programs such as the AMP or GMP, the peer network formed during the program — cohorts of 40 to 80 senior professionals — is frequently cited as the most durable and valuable outcome.
Next Available Cohort
Choose your preferred start date
All-inclusive program fee
Duration
Anytime
Format
online
Topic
Leadership
Language
English
About This Program
Why Wharton Executive Education?
When Fortune 500 boards, sovereign wealth funds, and serial founders want their senior teams sharpened on finance, strategy, or leadership, they repeatedly arrive at the same address in West Philadelphia. Wharton's executive programs are built on the same faculty who define the academic disciplines themselves — not practitioners brought in to translate research, but the researchers writing it.
Your Profile
- Managers and leaders responsible for driving change within their organizations
- Change agents seeking practical strategies to overcome resistance and foster transformation
- Professionals interested in minimizing resistance by involving stakeholders and offering choices
- Decision-makers aiming to surface the hidden costs of maintaining the status quo and demonstrate the benefits of change
- Individuals tasked with implementing large-scale changes who want to make them manageable through incremental steps and pilot programs
- Team leaders and project managers looking to apply the REDUCE framework to address organizational challenges
- Executives focused on creating an environment conducive to sustainable transformation
- Anyone interested in gaining insights into psychological and structural barriers to change and learning how to overcome them effectively
Benefits
- Improve their persuasion skills using the REDUCE framework
- Help people change by easing endowment and surfacing the cost of inaction
- Ease change’s uncertainty by demonstrating its value
- Assess the amount of evidence, time, and resources a change will require
What You'll Learn
- Module 1: This module begins by addressing the challenge of change and defining the status quo bias. You’ll understand the importance of weighing and framing the potential advantages and disadvantages of change to overcome loss aversion. You’ll also learn about the REDUCE framework and why people tend to ignore us or rebel when we push them to change. By the end of this module, you’ll better understand how to be a catalyst for change by identifying barriers to organizational change and implementing change agents that inspire minds and affect behavior. — Module Overview: The Challenge of Change Getting People to Change The REDUCE Framework
- Module 2: In this module, you’ll examine case studies about Procter & Gamble’s Tide Pods and the Arden House Experiments to understand why warnings backfire. You’ll learn change strategies that empower people’s desire for freedom and autonomy, like providing choices. You’ll also study the endowment effect, how it deters people from changing, and how you can ease its impact. By the end of this module, you’ll know effective ways to surface the cost of inaction and frame new things as old so you can help others embrace change. — Module Overview: Reactance — How Warnings Become Recommendations Need for Freedom and Autonomy Provide a Menu Ask, Don’t Tell Highlight a Gap Endowment — Staying Put Feels Costless Surface the Cost of Inaction Burn the Ships Frame New Things as Old
- Module 3: This module delves into how distance and uncertainty contribute to barriers to change. You’ll learn examples of confirmation bias and political polarization so you can identify the moving middle and unsticking points where people agree rather than disagree. You’ll also analyze examples from Zappos, Acura, and Kia to understand how you can harness freemium and lower upfront costs to facilitate organizational change. By the end of this module, you’ll have multiple strategies that ease uncertainty and help people experience the value of change. — Module Overview: Distance — Too Far from Their Backyard, People Tend to Disregard Confirmation Bias The Movable Middle Ask for Less Switch the Field to Find an Unsticking Point Uncertainty — Easier to Try, More Likely to Buy Harness Freemium Shrink Upfront Costs Drive Discovery Make It Reversible
- Module 4: This module distinguishes between weakly and strongly held attitudes to demonstrate why some behaviors require more information, evidence, or proof before changing. You’ll learn about the translation problem and importance of corroborating evidence that reinforces change. By analyzing many examples, you’ll understand how much evidence, and thus resources, a change requires. By the end of this module and change-management course, you’ll have a grasp on the elements of barriers to change and be able to enact strategies that enable change within your organization and self. — Module Overview: Corroborating Evidence — Some Things Need More Proof Who Else to Involve When to Space Corroborating Evidence Over Time How to Best Deploy Scarce Resources When Trying to Change Minds on a Larger Scale Course Conclusion
Frequently Asked Questions
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