MAIN NEWS HEADLINES

March 1-15, 2004 Edition

PEARSON AND WHARTON SCHOOL

LAUNCH WHARTON SCHOOL PUBLISHING

 

UPPER SADDLE RIVER, NJ/Philadelphia, PA/2/18/04 —Pearson Education, the world’s leading education company, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the world’s premier business schools, has launched Wharton School Publishing, an innovative new player in global business publishing. Wharton School Publishing will provide practical knowledge that can be applied by business leaders to make real change in their professional lives.

Wharton School Publishing will publish a select group of the world’s foremost business thinkers in print, audio, and interactive formats. All titles will receive the Wharton seal of approval, ensuring that each is timely, important, conceptually sound, empirically based and implementable. They will include books, audio books, e-documents, CD-ROMs, and videos. Wharton School Publishing’s editorial focus on applicable knowledge, along with multi-media publishing, will enable readers to gain new insights into the issues shaping the future of business, and plan and take action to achieve their goals.

Through Pearson’s extensive distribution channels, Wharton School Publishing aims to become the world’s leading imprint for applied business knowledge, publishing in multiple languages and reaching all corners of the world.

Wharton School Publishing represents distinguished authors from the world’s leading business schools and corporations, including CK Prahalad, co-author of the breakthrough bestseller, Competing For the Future; management guru Kenichi Ohmae; former Citigroup Chief Technical Officer Colin Crook; leading members of the Wharton School faculty, such as Marketing Professor Jerry Wind; and other academics.

The imprint’s first two titles are Wind and Crook’s The Power of Impossible Thinking: How to Transform the Business of Your Life and the Life of Your Business, and Prahalad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. Other forthcoming titles include Will Your Next Mistake Be Fatal? Avoiding the Mistake Chain That Can Destroy Your Organization; The Enthusiastic Employee: What Workers Want, And Why Employers Should Give It To Them; and Conflict and Consensus: Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes For An Answer.

(Complete author information and title descriptions can be found in the attached document).

Ahead of the imprint’s first release in July 2004, Wharton School Publishing is showcasing book content and other materials free of charge at www.whartonsp.com. Visitors will be able to read and download book excerpts from March 1 through the imprint’s official launch in summer 2004. New texts will appear on a regular basis each month. The first books to be available online will be The Power of Impossible Thinking: How to Transform the Business of Your Life and the Life of Your Business and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits.

Marjorie Scardino, Chief Executive of Pearson, said, “The world’s best companies and business people keep investing in learning throughout their lives. Our partnership with Wharton will turn the latest academic ideas into practical learning that business people can apply to make their companies more valuable.”

Wharton Dean Pat Harker commented, “Wharton School Publishing is really an extension of the School’s long-standing commitment to excellence in business education, thought leadership, and to the creation and dissemination of knowledge. This initiative also reinforces our belief that people learn in multiple ways – whether it be books, audio or interactive tools. Wharton School Publishing’s variety of offerings will meet those needs, and, perhaps most important, will come with the Wharton seal of approval.”

"Today's business readers are bombarded with many new ideas," said Jerry Wind, Wharton Marketing Professor and Co-Editor of Wharton School Publishing, "We are helping to cut through the clutter with ideas that are rigorous, timely and implementable."

Fifteen leading Wharton faculty members sit on the Wharton School Publishing editorial board. The board’s responsibilities include identifying topics for books and ensuring the consistent quality of the imprint’s portfolio. Wharton School Publishing’s co-editors are Jerry Wind and Pearson Education’s Tim Moore.

About The Wharton School

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is recognized around the world for its academic strengths across every major discipline and at every level of business education. Founded in 1881 as the first collegiate business school in the nation, Wharton has approximately 4,600 undergraduate, MBA, and doctoral students, more than 8,000 participants in its executive education programs annually, and an alumni network of more than 77,000 worldwide. It is a leader in the creation and dissemination of business knowledge, through innovative resources such as Knowledge@Wharton, the school's online journal of research and business analysis, which has more than 313,000 registered users in 189 countries.

About Pearson

Pearson Education is part of Pearson (NYSE: PSO), the international media company with market leading businesses in education, business information and consumer publishing. Best-selling titles from Pearson’s Penguin Group include Re-Imagine!, by Tom Peters (DK Publishing); Who Moved My Cheese?, by Spencer Johnson and The One Minute Manager, by Johnson and Kenneth Blanchard (Berkley Books). Titles from Portfolio, Penguin’s business book imprint, include The Smartest Guys In The Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind; and Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, by Seth Godin.

Best-selling business authors from Pearson Prentice Hall, the college imprint, include marketing guru Philip Kotler, who authors every leading book in the field; accounting icon Charles Horngren, one of the most influential teachers of his generation; preeminent economics writers Robin Bade & Michael Parkin; and management experts Stephen Robbins & Mary Coulter. Pearson Education business publishing includes Pearson Prentice Hall (PH-PTR), Financial Times/Prentice Hall and Reuters imprints. Pearson Education’s academic imprints, including Pearson Addison Wesley, are also market share leaders in business, finance and economics disciplines.