I’m currently pursuing the Executive MBA at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.
I didn’t come here for inspiration. I came here for the pressure. And I got plenty of it.
The pace of the program is intense. Deliberately so. There is no space to polish ideas or make them sound elegant. If something doesn’t survive contact with numbers, processes, and consequences, it doesn’t survive at all.
The environment is strong. I am surrounded by executives and entrepreneurs who operate at the top level of global business — people responsible for real scale and real consequences.
In my group are leaders from BNY Mellon, HSBC, Procter & Gamble, UBS, Verizon, and Pfizer — environments where scale is massive, standards are unforgiving, and mistakes are costly.
Accountability here is not abstract. It is measured in revenue, margins, operational constraints, risk, and execution. In this group, any hypothesis has a short life. That atmosphere defines how discussions work — no one cares about a nice-sounding idea.
This also strips management of any remaining romance. What stays is discipline: the habit of thinking in constraints, trade-offs, and consequences. It becomes clear that success is not something you arrive at through vision, but something you earn by peeling off unnecessary flare until only what works remains.
If at the start it already feels this intense, I can only imagine what lies ahead.
What becomes obvious very quickly is how decisive the environment itself is.
The people around you, the standards they operate by, the questions they ask — this is what shapes how you think and what you accept as normal.
An environment either pulls you down to its level, or forces you to grow.
I am glad to be among those that do the latter.