The distinguishing feature of the program was not its syllabus. It was who was in the room.
Seventeen years on the faculty of the Wharton School, teaching entrepreneurial value creation, private equity, business analytics, innovation, and corporate growth strategy.
Dr. LaPier served on the faculty of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania for seventeen years, from 1996 to 2013. He researched and taught entrepreneurial value creation, private equity, business analytics, innovation, and corporate growth strategy. His courses were consistently among the school’s highest rated, and he was awarded Wharton’s Fifteen-Year Outstanding Entrepreneurship Teaching Award in 2010.
Entrepreneurial Value Creation was built on a simple premise: entrepreneurs and principled executives are the true core assets of any enterprise, and the way to teach that is to put students in sustained working contact with people who have done it. Chief executives and founders did not visit for a guest lecture and leave. They lectured and mentored across multiple years — in several cases five, eight, and ten years running — working directly with students on the platforms those students were building.
The method was a discipline the course called the personal and corporate platform: before evaluating an opportunity, a leader articulates the academic, business, and government platform they actually stand on, then builds deliberately from it. Students were taught to mitigate fear with analysis rather than confidence, to assemble management teams that complemented rather than mirrored their own skills, and to read a wave of opportunity early enough to position ahead of it. Alumni describe the result less as a set of frameworks than as a shift in how they think.
A number of companies were conceived, structured, or first mapped out in that classroom. Some were later sold to strategic acquirers. Others became the platforms their founders still run.
“What a mindset shift! This is the way to think about having the proper ethics and value creation. My eight years of lecturing and mentoring with Terry at Wharton proved to me America has an outstanding future.”
Co-founder of Carlyle Group
“I worked with Terry LaPier for over ten years as a CEO mentor and lecturer in his Wharton classes. It continued to amaze me to see the cutting-edge business development and growth strategies he comes up with — and the level of innovation thinking that he inspires.”
Co-founder of Nextel
“Pierpont and Terry’s teaching and consulting techniques focus on creating a vision, articulating the vision, reviewing the “wave of opportunities positioning” and executing a great strategy. My five years of entrepreneurial value creation mentoring and lecturing with Terry were tremendous.”
Serial Entrepreneur and former CEO of Networks Solutions
“Terry has led his Wharton students by mitigating fear and providing high-level analytical tools to evaluate their risk and develop complementary management team members around them to complement their individual skills.”
Founder of ESP Pharma
“I remember working all night as a doctor in the emergency room and attending Terry’s Wharton class during the morning sessions. I used his course’s concepts to create Executive Health, which I sold to United Health Group. I continue to use the platform that was established during this personal growth development”
former Wharton student and founder of Executive Health (now United Health Group) & founding partner, Devon Hill Partners
“Terry’s ability to innovate and execute within Academic, Business and Government arena is exceptional!”
University of Pennsylvania’ Wharton School, Distinguished Entrepreneurship Professor