PGP MAX curriculum
PGP MAX
Curriculum
- Overview
- Learning Goals
- Learning Themes
- Courses
- Programme Highlights
- Graduate Degree Requirements
- Pedagogies
Overview
PGP MAX propels accomplished executives toward C-suite leadership through a purposeful 15-month journey comprising 24 courses structured around 8 foundational themes. This rigorous programme respects your professional demands through a carefully engineered format—12 transformative campus weeks spaced one week every six weeks, alternating between Hyderabad and Mohali campuses.
Your journey includes ten modules in India and a signature international immersion at Wharton. Each residency combines intensive academics with industry dialogues and collaborative challenges. Your development begins immediately upon admission with preparatory coursework, creating a seamless integration between learning and practice.
Beyond professional advancement, PGP MAX cultivates a fundamental mindset shift—transforming how you approach challenges while enhancing your critical judgment, strategic thinking, and leadership capabilities to drive ethical organisational change and global impact.
Academic Calendar 2025-26
NOTE: This calendar is subject to change based on ISB’s discretion and evolving market conditions.
Learning Goals
The curriculum delivers a comprehensive foundation essential for today's global leadership landscape:
Critical and Integrative Thinking
Master identifying central business challenges, analysing complex data from multiple perspectives. Develop well-reasoned positions that integrate cross-functional insights, enabling comprehensive solutions to multifaceted organisational problems.
Global Awareness
Identify strategic challenges across diverse cultural, economic, legal, and political landscapes. Develop nuanced responses to global competitive dynamics, navigating international markets with confidence and cultural intelligence.
Ethical Responsibility
Identify complex ethical dilemmas, analysing them through multiple stakeholder perspectives. Evaluate critical assumptions and information sources to formulate responsible decisions that balance business imperatives with societal and environmental impact.
Leadership Skills
Enhance capacity to envision and execute transformative initiatives while influencing stakeholders across organisational boundaries. Drive change through inspirational leadership approaches that develop and empower high-performing teams.
Learning Themes
At the heart of PGP MAX are eight interconnected themes that form the architecture of executive leadership. Each theme builds upon foundational business principles while developing your capacity to lead with vision, drive innovation, create sustainable value, and make decisions that balance stakeholder interests in an increasingly interconnected global economy.
Socio-political Economy
Determine how economic and geopolitical contexts will impact your business strategy
Markets and Customers
Gain a sound understanding of long-standing principles of marketing and business strategy customer-centricity.
Money and Profits
Maximise financial performance while creating value, managing risks, and addressing trade-offs in meeting the demands of investors, customers, employees and society.
Organisation and Fulfilment
Establish structures, processes, operations and systems that foster transparency and accountability across the value chain.
Competition and Partnerships
Craft overarching strategies and partnership ecosystems to drive growth and competitive value.
Innovation and Change
Effectively lead innovation and transformation efforts that will make your organisation future-ready.
Leadership and Decision Making
Improve your decision-making skills, and lead your employees and organisation with greater authenticity, empathy and purpose.
Digital Business Transformation
Overcome organisational constraints and challenges to seize opportunities created by the digital economy.
Macro-Economics for Business Executives
Connects individual decisions with broader economic policies, helping executives navigate microeconomic dynamics and national landscapes. Develop a comprehensive understanding of global economic phenomena directly applicable to complex business contexts.
Government, Society and Business
Examines how political, social, and economic institutions shape business decisions. Explores institutional evolution and government-business relationships, teaching executives to balance private gain with public welfare in diverse policy environments.
Corporate Governance, Sustainable Business, and Ethics
Explores corporations as growth engines facing challenges like climate change. Examines stakeholder expectations and governance mechanisms, including boards and sustainability disclosures, developing informed perspectives on corporate purpose and accountability frameworks.
Marketing Management
Develops abilities to create market-driven organisations through analytical frameworks for core strategies: segmentation, positioning, product development, value-based pricing, and distribution channel management—essential for capturing customer value in competitive environments.
Pricing Products and Services for Profitability
Provides frameworks for effective pricing decisions amid complex market factors. Enables methodologies for developing profitable strategies across technology, manufacturing, and services, enabling sophisticated approaches that maximise value while maintaining competitive advantage.
Marketing for Business Markets
Equips executives with frameworks to create value in B2B contexts. Explores strategies for overcoming commoditisation, managing offerings, and building customer relationships through real-world applications, digital transformation, and interaction with industry executives.
Accounting Analysis and Information for Executives
Develops proficiency in financial accounting fundamentals. Teaches interpretation of balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements, building analytical capabilities through key performance ratios for informed strategic decision-making.
Financial Analysis and Decision Making
Provides sophisticated tools for investment evaluation using discounted cash flow methodology. Develops competencies in risk quantification, securities valuation, and capital structure optimisation within a broader capital markets context.
Financial Strategies for Value Creation
Examines advanced strategies driving enterprise value. Explores the intersection between strategic vision and financial execution through frameworks for investments, divestitures, real options valuation, and M&A—enhancing long-term competitive advantage.
Management of Organisations
Optimises organisational performance through evidence-based behavioural science examining motivation, influence, and leadership. Provides frameworks for mobilising human capital, executing change, and building high-performing teams that balance individual satisfaction with organisational effectiveness.
Global Operations Management
Equips executives with principles for optimising production systems across service and manufacturing sectors. Covers supply chain management, project execution, quality improvement, and decision sciences applicable to complex operational challenges in global environments.
Supply Chain Management
Develops capabilities in strategic supply chain design that aligns operational networks with business objectives. Master coordination techniques and analytical tools for optimising both product and service networks to create a sustainable competitive advantage.
Competitive Strategy
Positions executives as strategic decision-makers, creating a sustainable competitive advantage. Analyses industry dynamics, strategic investments, global contexts, and resource allocation frameworks while building distinctive organisational capabilities and implementing effective strategic formulation.
Micro-Economics for Business Executives
Explores consumer and firm decisions within markets, examining strategic firm behaviour and organisational incentive structures. Focuses on pricing strategies, market evolution, and competitive forces at both firm and national levels.
Organisational Growth Strategies
Examines strategic alliance formation across multiple formats. Master negotiation techniques essential for successful collaborations and methodologies for efficient market expansion despite resource constraints, including partner selection criteria and alliance governance.
Accelerate your leadership impact through this intensive experiential component that challenges you to apply classroom learning to real-world business problems through "Build 48" – a 48-hour innovation sprint. You will conduct field research with stakeholders, analyse data, and develop cross-functional solutions before presenting them to industry experts. Through structured reflection, you transform theoretical knowledge into practical leadership capabilities, developing the decisive action skills essential for executive leadership.
Focuses on the principles of knowing, doing, and being. Gain self-awareness through coaching and peer feedback that highlights your strengths and growth areas. Network with diverse business leaders across industries and countries while engaging in experiential learning that prepares you for greater leadership roles. Maintain lifelong ISB community connections for ongoing support throughout your career journey.
This unique immersive learning experience is offered at the Wharton School's San Francisco campus. It goes beyond classroom sessions with renowned faculty, offering guest talks, interactions with Bay Area technologists and entrepreneurs, and insights into the region's culture of innovation, networking, and technological talent.
A total of 24 credits must be obtained to graduate.
Summary of Programme Graduation Requirements:
Note: Successful credit means getting at least a “Fair” grade in that credit.
You must maintain satisfactory academic performance throughout the programme:
- All the individual courses will have grades (Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, Not Pass)
- Not receive a ' NOT PASS ' grade in more than one credit
- Earn the minimum graduation requirements of 24 attempted credits and 23 successful credits. Successful credit means getting at least a “Fair” grade in that credit.
- Students must attempt and complete the total number of required credits to be considered for this policy.
- Students can retake up to four credits under this policy.
For complete details on the ‘Return and Retake’ policy, please consult your student handbook.
Executives forge leadership capabilities through Action Week's "Build 48" innovation sprint, LEAD's personalised coaching framework, and Wharton's Global Immersion—transforming classroom knowledge into decisive action skills amid real-world business challenges.
The programme delivers industry insights through curated speaker series and organised site visits where participants engage with thought leaders on international growth, corporate diversity, ethics, and consumer behaviour. Executives gain direct access to cutting-edge perspectives through events and interactions featuring distinguished business leaders.
Sharpen analytical thinking through immersion in real business dilemmas faced by global organisations, developing the critical reasoning capabilities and judgment essential for leadership in ambiguous, high-stakes situations.
Participants experience real-world business scenarios through advanced simulation software, developing leadership, teamwork, and management capabilities. These simulations bridge academic concepts with practical applications by solving industry-specific problems through theoretical frameworks.
Senior executives undertake personalised leadership development journeys tailored to individual growth needs. The programme incorporates comprehensive 360-degree evaluations with guidance from executive coaches, enhancing both interpersonal competencies and domain-specific expertise.