Leadership & Strategy

Sharpen your leadership expertise to better analyze your environment, set direction, improve performance, innovate, and drive change. For more than 60 years, we have been developing leaders who can interpret the environment, seek out new opportunities, rally those around them, and reflect the DNA of the organization.

Portfolio

Leadership & Strategy

Overview

Sharpen your leadership expertise to better analyze your environment, set direction, improve performance, innovate, and drive change. For more than 60 years, we have been developing leaders who can interpret the environment, seek out new opportunities, rally those around them, and reflect the DNA of the organization.

Earn a Certificate

We offer short courses in Leadership & Strategy topics that track into two Professional Certificates in Strategy and Organizational Performance.

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Courses

Strategic Leadership

Prepare to lead transformational change in your organization. Develop the perspective to lead strategically by assessing your opportunities in the competitive environment, developing and implementing strategy with a focus on a constantly changing future, and aligning your organization around the fundamental pillars of strategy, leadership, and culture.

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Leading With Analytics: Foundations of Analytic Decision Making

Data analytics is key to long-term viability but requires more than technological investments alone. It demands leaders who can confidently build organizations that embrace and communicate through data. This course helps you emerge from the information overload and help your organization claim ownership of its data. Through in-depth case studies and interactive discussions, you'll learn tools and techniques that strategically capture, analyze, and apply data to decision-making.

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Implementing Strategy for Success

Develop an integrated approach to strategy implementation and change management. Build strategic thinking abilities, decision-making acumen, change management awareness, and influencing skills. Maximize your skills to drive organizational performance and growth.

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Communication Strategy for Leaders

Today’s workplace offers a complex variety of modes through which leaders communicate critical concepts, ideas, and strategic messages. This program offers a unique design that brings together multiple faculty experts who will help you explore effective strategies for communicating strategic vision up, down, and across the organization, with particular focus on channel selection, message authenticity, and communicating across generations.

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Leading for Results: Strategic Financial Management

This program focuses on connecting business decisions with their financial consequences and views finance as an operational element of a successful organization. It is critical for leaders to understand how business decisions impact financial results and how constraints shape business decisions. All too often, operational leaders and strategic decision-makers are siloed from their counterparts in finance. Accounting is the language of business because its terms and concepts translate any business decisions into their economic consequences. As you gain familiarity with the tools and techniques of strategic financial management , you will begin to deploy finance and accounting to empower your business decisions.

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Solving the Execution Challenge: Bridging Strategy and Action

This short course explores the development and application of a comprehensive approach that produces the common understanding of the organization that is needed to align strategic objectives and tactical initiatives. You will explore how value streams and capabilities form the foundation of the business architecture perspective – and how that architecture can either support or inhibit an organization’s ability to achieve strategic goals. This practice has been used effectively in leading organizations to “bridge the gap” between enterprise or business unit strategy and successful execution.

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The Execution Challenge: Turning Strategy Into Action

Creating a strategy is straightforward, but executing it is where many organizations stumble. Learn how to bridge the gap between strategy and execution with a proven framework for success in this companion course to The Execution Challenge: Delivering Great Strategy at Scale. Ideal for those who have read the book and those who have not, this program dives deep into key concepts with hands-on practice, case studies, and real-world examples. Through these activities, you will learn how to effectively use this unique approach to inform, translate, plan, and align strategy execution efforts within your team or organization.

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The faculty balance institutional knowledge and real world experience. Tying this all together is incredibly important. This made all of the difference.
Seth Doman, Director, New Holland Parts & Service Sales, New Holland Corporate of North America
The lobby at Penn State's Business Building looking out onto the grounds of the Arboretum

Our Faculty Directors

This portfolio is designed by faculty directors from the Penn State Smeal College of Business. They are executive faculty whose world-class research and industry involvement has created significant change within the private and public sectors. They have applied their expertise to design Executive Programs that balance visionary strategies and actionable results.