ThePowerMBA: Tools for Leadership, Sustainability and Innovation
Many opportunities have been popping up recently, and I’m sadly needing to say no to most of them. But recently, I’ve said yes to one: ThePowerMBA.
In this season of balancing work and parenthood, it can be challenging to know how to invest my time wisely. However, when I was invited to join the first global cohort of ThePowerMBA — the new ed tech making business education accessible and affordable to anyone who wants to learn — I decided to take the plunge. So: why this? And why now?
For most people who want a thorough grounding in business education, a traditional MBA is one of the options they look at. Without doubt, this can be a really valuable investment, especially if the school is well-connected. It can open lots of doors. But what if you don’t have two years of your life to commit to more education, or you’re unable to take out high levels of student debt?
ThePowerMBA was founded in order to democratise business education for anyone who wanted to thrive in business or entrepreneurship. It launched in Europe two years ago, and — 40,000 students later — is about to launch globally. As well as the thousands of students who are working through its program, many big brands (including Google, Microsoft, and Coca-Cola) are relying on it to teach their staff core business skills.
The curriculum consists of 250+ bite-sized (15-minute) lessons, which are drip-fed on weekdays over ten months. It’s delivered in part by the founders and executives of companies like Tesla, Air BnB, YouTube and Shazam, and complemented by local networking hubs run by Ambassadors.
Given my work with entrepreneurs and startups, I’ve been given the chance to enrol in ThePowerMBA, and to share what I’ll be learning as I go through the programme.
I believe this progamme will help me achieve three things:
1. It will deepen my understanding of effective, impactful leadership in business
ThePowerMBA curriculum is designed to provide a grounding in the core business tools – including strategy, business models, marketing, and finance – while also covering leadership and management. As such, it will widen my exposure to business case studies, and the impact of different leadership approaches.
I’m especially interested in hearing the personal stories of the founders and executives who are contributing to this programme. I’d like to learn more about how they approached problems, responded to challenges, and overcame obstacles on the way to business success (and — really importantly — their mindset in the volatile and fast-changing Coronavirus context).
I think there’s real potential for me to learn more about how to equip people with practical tools to solve social and environmental problems (see below), while meanwhile deepening my understanding of effective leadership in uncertain times. This, in turn, will help me speak to my clients’ leadership and personal development.
2. It will help me better serve people working to create big change
I believe that many of our toughest social and environmental problems can be solved through entrepreneurial thinking. However, often many of the people who are best placed to create change can lack a business background.
For example, for two years running, I’ve coached at The Journey: the world’s biggest climate innovation summer school, run by the EU. I worked with 80 smart and passionate twenty-somethings — most of them Master’s students — helping them think entrepreneurially in service of tackling climate change. I also co-designed and -coached the social innovation incubator, Good Ideas at The Melting Pot, for ambitious people who were committed to making social change but mostly lacked a business education.
In both these examples, we focused on adapting business tools to a social/environmental context: helping people verify that their service/product was actually wanted, and to design a financially sustainable business model.
It’s been so rewarding to have partnered with such creative, passionate, committed people, and to bear witness to the start-ups, social enterprises and non-profits that they’ve imagined and developed.
I already know and use a lot of the best design thinking tools out there, but there are definite gaps in my knowledge (especially around Finance and Marketing). I think that ThePowerMBA will broaden my education and teach me new tools and techniques. In turn, I’ll be better placed to help social innovators tackle the problems that keep them awake at night.
3. It feels like a workable way to commit to ongoing learning as a new parent
This one’s short, but important ☺
I haven’t switched off my love of learning just because my days now revolve around a little person. However, I’ve needed to switch up how I learn. I don’t have long chunks of time to devour a book in one sitting, and I’m not able to travel to all-day courses without childcare (especially in Corona times, with limited support).
However, 15 mins a day does feel doable. Over the course of ten months, ThePowerMBA amounts to 62 hours of learning. I can put our son to bed and watch a video with a glass of wine, or spend an hour at the weekend watching lessons I’ve missed. I know that for this to work for me in this busy season of life, it will need to be accessible, fun and sustainable.
To help me reflect on my main takeaways, I’ll be posting every month on this site once we kick things off in September 2020 Join me to find out what I’m learning!