General Managers

Program Capstone

Immersion Program

The General Managers Program Capstone is the on-campus component that results in the completion of this program. It takes place twice annually: in January and in June at the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, NY, at the renowned Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration. The next two sets of program dates are June 15 - 20, 2025 and January 11 - 16, 2026 (choose one option).

Over five intensive days, you will tackle hotel management issues and collaborate with a network of peers to expand the foundation of your hospitality knowledge. You'll hone your strategic thinking skills to take on today's most urgent business challenges and opportunities.

SCHEDULE

• Day 1 (6:00pm - 9:00pm) 
  • Opening Reception and Orientation Dinner
  • Statler Hotel, Cornell School of Hotel Administration
• Day 2 (8:30am - 5:00pm)
  • Strategizing for Your Success: A Focus on Your Leadership (Kate Walsh)
    • In this session, you'll strategically plan for your success as a leader. Through experiential activities, personal assessments, and interactive feedback, you'll enhance your understanding of your individualized leadership approach and strengthen your ability to lead, inspire, and build success with others in your hospitality organization. This includes the key role you play in shaping a high-performance culture for your team. You'll also review ways to inspire your service-level staff through developing the leadership skills of your direct reports. Finally, you'll explore ways to leave your mark as the leader.
    • TOPICS INCLUDE
      • Truths and myths about leadership
      • The role of emotional intelligence
      • How to motivate both outstanding and challenging employees to higher levels of performance
      • How to turn work groups into inspired teams
      • The power of organizational culture
      • Creating your leadership brand
    • WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
      • Assess the strengths that are key to your personalized approach as a leader
      • Define and practice applying motivational concepts and techniques to draw exceptional performances from others
      • Strengthen your ability to lead all types of employees at the individual, group, and team levels
      • Explore how to use work values and the organization's culture to create sustained, enhanced levels of performance
• DAY 3 (8:30am - 5:00pm) 
  • Creating Customized HR Solutions (J. Bruce Tracey)
    • This session will provide you with an opportunity to develop customized, property-specific solutions to address top HR challenges. Based on information generated from a comprehensive pre-session HR audit, you will engage in hands-on development activities that can be used to refine and/or create new HR policies, practices, and procedures that can be implemented immediately. The development process will incorporate industry best practices and thought leadership, and utilize peer-based feedback and assessment to ensure that the solutions are strategically aligned and operationally actionable.
    • TOPICS INCLUDE
      • HR value creation
      • Major functional HR roles
      • HR best practices
      • Strategic and operational HR assessment
    • WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
      • Discuss current challenges facing hospitality HR
      • Develop context-specific solutions for HR challenges
      • Design a process for guiding continuous HR improvement
      • Create an action plan for implementation of new ideas
• DAY 4 (8:30am - 5:00pm) 
  • Co-Creating Value Through Customer-Centered Brand Marketing (Robert Kwortnik)
    • Marketing — more than any other business function — creates value by driving demand to connect consumers to hospitality companies. Marketing identifies profitable target markets. Marketing crafts competitive positioning strategies and articulates the brand promise. Marketing listens to the voice of the customer to guide service experience design, value co-creation with customers, and measurement of key customer outcomes such as satisfaction, engagement, and advocacy. It is therefore critical to understand how customer-centered brand marketing integrates the activities of hospitality organizations to create value for guests — and for the business.
    • TOPICS INCLUDE
      • Brand-Based Strategic Marketing
        • Identifying, understanding, and targeting profitable market segments
        • Mining marketing information from customers, competitors, and the marketing environment
        • Driving visible value through service innovation
        • Building experiential brands that align the people, processes, and physical evidence strategies of the hospitality organization
      • Communicating Brand Value Through Digital Marketing
        • Articulating brand promises through integrated marketing communications
        • Driving demand and conversions with website optimization
        • Co-creating content that builds customer engagement
        • Monitoring the return on digital marketing investments
    • WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
      • Adopt a customer-centered, strategic branding orientation
      • Develop a keen sense for how brand marketing influences nearly every aspect of hospitality experience production
      • Acquire a new lens for seeing how guests perceive the hospitality experience
      • Enhance guest loyalty by communicating the guest experience through digital media channels such as dynamic websites, content-fueled social media, and branded video
• Day 5 (8:30am - 5:00pm) 
  • Financial Management for Value Creation (Steven A. Carvell)
    • To be successful, general managers must maintain positive working relationships with owners and the owners' representatives. In this session, you'll learn how to understand the hotel and its management from the owner's perspective. The first step in this process is to understand value creation from the standpoint of the various stakeholders in a hotel. You'll then explore specifically how owner objectives within the framework of value creation differ from those of the brand, the guest, and the associates, among others. You'll define and identify how to maximize the value of a hotel for the owner by understanding the interplay between the operating and real estate investment within a risk-return environment as well as how PIP and other property-level investment plans should be viewed when considering the owner's perspective. You'll discuss various owner/manager structural relationships and learn about the pros and cons of each from the owner's perspective. You'll examine conceptual and specific examples of measuring and creating value for the owner using operational benchmarking, space utilization, and the interplay of pricing and frequent-stay programs. You'll explore how an individual hotel's value can be impacted from the owner's perspective and how to reallocate resources within a hotel company to maximize the property's ability to create value.
    • TOPICS INCLUDE
      • Defining value from a stakeholder perspective
      • The owner's perspective of value creation
      • Agency conflict issues within the hotel
      • Value measurement and creation from the owner's perspective
      • How the hotel can create value for the owner
      • Owner's investments in a competitive capital environment
      • The owner's view of operations and real estate returns
      • Measuring hotel performance through operational benchmarking
      • Space utilization and value creation for the owner
      • Value to owner (VTO) analysis
      • Benchmarking to improve VTO
    • WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
      • Explore the competing interests within a hotel to understand the concept of value creation from each stakeholder's perspective
      • Measure the creation of value for a hotel as well as how to enhance the hotel's ability to create value
      • Discover how the hotel's operations and real estate interact to enhance the value proposition within the hotel
      • Examine the hotel from the perspective of a stand-alone investment as well as from a portfolio perspective
• Day 6
  • 8:30am - 3:00pm
    • Leading through Change: A Focus on Artificial Intelligence in Hospitality (Chris Anderson and Andrew Quagliata)
      • Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most talked-about technologies today, and it's poised to have a significant impact on the hospitality industry. As hotel professionals, you operate in a field that's both highly data-driven and people-centric—making it uniquely suited for AI-driven innovation. But understanding how AI fits into your daily operations and long-term strategy can feel overwhelming.
      • This session is designed specifically for hotel general managers who want to gain clarity on AI's practical applications within hospitality. You'll explore current AI trends, opportunities, and challenges through real-world examples of successes and missteps within the industry. By the end of the session, you'll take the GMP concepts you've discussed throughout the week, and leveraging the power of AI, weave them into actionable strategies—empowering you to start implementing small but impactful changes that can make a difference when you return to your property.
      • TOPICS INCLUDE
        • Dive into the basics of AI and what it means for the hospitality industry
        • Explore areas where AI can drive value and/or make your operation more efficient
        • Apply GMP course concepts to your unique set of goals and challenges
        • Communicate your leadership vision with clarity and impact
      • WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
        • Build a solid understanding of AI concepts relevant to hotel management
        • Communication strategies for turning insight into action
        • Hands-on practice using AI tools to craft compelling leadership messages
        • Explore areas where AI can drive value and efficiency
  • 3:30pm - 5:00pm
    • Action Planning for the Future (Rob Kwortnik)
      • In this final session of the General Managers Program, you will synthesize the tools, concepts, best practices, and common challenges shared throughout the week with professors and peers, and develop a concrete action plan to bring the Cornell experience back to your organization. You'll identify specific opportunities to apply your learning to create both immediate and long-lasting positive impact for your enterprise, and your leadership. You will discuss the importance of lifelong connections with your GMP colleagues and identify networking opportunities to keep the conversations going.
      • TOPICS INCLUDE
        • Applying GMP course concepts to your unique set of goals and challenges
        • Crafting your own career fulfillment and future success
      • WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
        • Reflection of integrated course concepts for your leadership
        • Vision refinement for your enterprise
        • Action-planning and outcomes-based decision-making
  • 6:30pm - 9:00pm Reception and Celebration Dinner