08/06/2026
🏎️ What can the motorsport industry teach us about competition and strategy?
That’s what students in our MBA Program for Executives sought to learn during a recent Block Week course in Italy’s famed Motor Valley: https://whr.tn/4yUNtCx
Led by Wharton Prof. Henning Piezunka and King's College London Prof. Paolo Aversa, the course brought students on site visits to legendary organizations such as Ducati, Visa Cash App RB, Lamborghini, Dallara, and Ferrari to examine how elite organizations build and sustain competitive advantage.
Among the week’s company visits, Dallara stood out most to Aksh*t (Ash) Bhatia, CFA (WG ’27), Director at Silicon Valley Bank, as he was struck by the company’s engineering heritage and the culture created by founder Gian Paolo Dallara, who still visits the company daily in his 90s.
“The focus wasn’t just on profits,” Aksh*t said. “It was on people, passion, and building excellence over generations.”
For F1 fan Fong Lin (WG’27), who works as a People Partner at Harvey, the course gave her a better understanding of what happens behind the scenes of elite performance.
“It made me think about how organizations define success,” she said. “When leaders clearly define what winning looks like, every part of the organization from hiring to performance management can align around that goal.”
Marat Shaimardanov, WG ’27, co-CEO of RG Gold in Kazakhstan, enrolled in the course hoping to better understand how elite racing teams coordinate engineering, operations, and teamwork under intense pressure.
“The professors gave us the research and frameworks first,” he said. “Then we went into world-class companies to see those ideas in practice and discussed what we observed with classmates from completely different industries. It created a level of learning that would be very difficult to replicate anywhere else.”
