Eighteen years ago, after the summer of 2002, I started a very exciting journey into the world of Artificial Intelligence. It was August the 19th, a Monday in the year 2002 when at 07:00 I started taking my first class in the Faculty of Physics and Artificial Intelligence of the University of Veracruz.
Last week, on September 24th, I concluded my Executive MBA at Handelshøyskolen BI. A Bachelor in Science, a Master in Science, a Doctoral degree, and an executive master later, I can tell you that learning is a never ending journey.
Perhaps you are considering taking an (E)MBA?
You set a large part of your life on pause, you don’t have as much time to see your friends, you sacrifice some of the time you could spend with your family but it is so worth it, I would do it all over again!
If you are considering taking an EMBA at BI, go for it! You won’t regret the sacrifices!
A first warning about time management
During the admission interview, I was asked about the way I managed my time and stress. I don’t remember exactly what I replied but I remember very well that they told me that one of the learnings after the MBA was going to be how to better manage and optimize my time and the way I handled stress.
During the welcome ceremony, they told us about the immediate impact that the EMBA program was going to have in our available time and the way we distribute it. They drew a graphic similar to the one below, which in this case is adapted to my time distribution before starting the program.
The warning was that, as we suspected, the EMBA was going to take a large chunk of our time! And indeed it did… The chart below shows how much of my free time was taken by the EMBA. In my life, as in the figure, it was evident that my family was affected the most.
Of course, the distribution illustrated in the chart represents an average over the duration of the program. Sometimes, I didn’t use as much time on it, while other times it actually used 100% of my free time. During my stay in Berkeley, I worked every night from 01:30 to 09:30 and went to school from 09:30 to 17:00 to «die» in bed every day after school.
The results of learning how to better work
After leaving one of the most intense periods of work in my life, after putting my system under so much stress, I have to say I am super happy with the results of learning how to better manage my time. After the program is done, one of the immediate differences I see in my time management is that as a friend from the program pointed out, it really feels like my «time pie» is larger!
The Executive MBA at Handelshøyskolen BI
A german friend in the program referred to the EMBA at BI as a hidden gem (in the context of education for a German). I believe that the EMBA at BI is definitely a gem.
The program that I followed had a specialization in Leading and Developing Digital Enterprises. The program hascomponents related to the «traditional MBA» program with topics such as,
- Accounting
- Corporate finance
- Economy
- Managerial accounting
- Strategy
- Marketing
- Ethics
- Final consultancy project
However, for me, the topics that made the program extra interesting were those related to the digitalization part:
- Digital marketing
- Design thinking
- Big data and machine learning for executives
- Entre/intra-preneurship program
- Leadership program (in the digital context)
- Digital business models
And it was not only a list of great topics that made the learning incredible…
We were a program composed of a group of professionals from 14 different countries! Our experience put together made up somewhere in the order of 100s of man-years of experience combined!
The learning experience, the discussions that we shared during class, and during our work was one of the greatest learning experiences in my life.
Learn who you are to become who you truly are… Leadership and mentorship
The EMBA program includes a great leadership program. As part of this, we took a series of personality tests, in addition to asking previous bosses (sometimes leaders, sometimes bosses), co-workers, and people I’ve managed, to fill a survey about the way we perform as leaders at work.
After gathering a lot of data, BI facilitated a session with a leadership specialist at BI- During this meeting, that felt a lot like therapy! the leadership specialist provided us feedback that helped us understand ourselves better, and to learn how we could exponentiate our leadership skills.
A very, very valuable component of this leadership program was the facilitation of a mentor to helped us in our path to become better leaders. My mentor was a super nice person with a lot of experience in managerial and CxO level positions. If he reads this, thanks a lot for your awesome guidance!
A well-accredited program
Handelshøyskolen BI is the best business school in Norway according to the Fiancial Times.
Handelshøyskolen BI has a triple crown accreditation.
Part of the program was taught at the Hasson Plattner institute, the powerhouse for design thinking globally.
The entre/intra-preneurship program was teached at the Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley.
Berkeley’s leadership principles
There is something magical about California, San Francisco, Berkeley, and the silicon valley. I went around constantly getting the «nerd chills». The Berkeley trip was one of the best experiences in my life.
We got two very intense weeks of lectures from John Danner and Mark Coopersmith. We learned a lot about entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship and about the «Other F word: How Smart Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work«.
Something that marked me for life after my experience at Berkeley, was their four leadership principles. As extracted from their statement, these principles are:
- Question the status quo. We thrive at the epicenter of innovation. We make progress by speaking our minds even when it challenges convention. We lead by championing bold ideas and taking intelligent risks.
- Confidence without attitude. We make decisions based on evidence and analysis, giving us the confidence to act with humility. We foster collaboration by building a foundation of empathy, inclusion, and trust.
- Student always. We are a community designed to support curiosity. We actively seek out diverse perspectives as part of our lifelong pursuit of personal and intellectual growth. There is always more to learn.
- Beyond yourself. We shape our world by leading ethically and responsibly. As stewards of our enterprises, we take the longer view in our decisions and actions. This often means putting the collective good above our own interests.
Learning design thinking from the design thinking powerhouse
My journey with Design Thinking started during my work at Telenor. The core of my responsibilities involved the creation of a new (digital-) service and because of this, I was part of the «first wave» receiving training from professor Nathan Furr on design thinking. After this, we have been using the tool with different customers in the projects I have had the chance to work with. I have been doing design thinking for a while… or so I thought…
Learning design thinking from the design thinking power house is a totally different story. We were immersed into a full-day, hands-on workshop on design thinking. We interviewed strangers on the campus hallways, we built prototypes, and we tested them, we iterated… we used post-it’s … lots of them!
Working with wonderful people from «other world» – The value of true diversity
During our design thinking module at Potsdam, we had the great chance to work together with the EMBA students from BI-Fudan.
During our work with our Chinese friends, I learned the value of working with a group of people very different from oneself. And the thing that stroke me the hardest was a phrase said by one of my Chinese friends when we were wrapping up the module
«I didn’t want to share my ideas because I thought they were so silly»
This was SO WRONG! The ideas that my Chinese friends brought to the table were so insanely innovative and different from anything we could think of! Luckily, we created an environment of trust that allowed us to share our ideas with people that were, at least in the beginning, practically strangers.
«Concluding» the program with a consultancy project
The most important part of the program, and the part that is also given the most weight in credits, is the final project: a consultancy project. This is a project that takes several months to be completed. In this project, we combine our experiences to solve a real-life business problem that a (sponsor) company is facing.
In the case of my team, we worked on creating new digital business models in one of the most conservatives industries in Norway (perhaps globally). We used a combination of frameworks (design thinking, agile, and lean) to understand the industry, the customers in the industry, and the macro-tendencies. This allowed us to create digital business model prototypes and a business plan explaining how to come, disrupt this conservative industry, and take all the money from the industry’s inefficiencies (oh, big dreamer!).
I want to thank all the professors I had the chance to meet and from which I had the great opportunity of learning during the program. And I want to give a special mention and thanks to Professor Hanno Roberts who was the supervisor for our consultancy project. He was always engaged, help us with his insanely great knowledge in so many areas. He was not shy when pushing us to work hard 🙂
What is next?
As the title of this post says, learning is, I believe, the never ending journey. Now, I am looking for ways to apply all the new commercial/business knowledge that I have acquired from BI and my friends in the EMBA. I will definitely keep you posted here on both my journey and ways in which we can combine business plus technology knowledge to create value!
digitalemerge.ai 