MBA Story:

Why MBA? and why London Business School?

After reaching my mid-level career stage, I realized that what got me here will not get me there. Although CMA gave me a very solid technical background in business, to reach the executive level requires a different set of skills, broader exposure, a different way of thinking. After extensive research, MBA started appearing as a suitable solution to my requirement.

The second phase of research was where to do MBA? which business school? My dream was to do MBA from one of the top 10 business schools. So, I got the top 10 schools from Financial Times and started looking at those amazing schools to choose one of them.

Once the decision was made, the next question was where. I had one condition: if I was going to do this, it had to be one of the best business schools in the world. I pulled up the Financial Times global ranking, took the top ten schools, and studied each one carefully.

London Business School stood out for reasons that mattered to me personally. It consistently ranks among the very best in the world. Its classrooms bring together students from all over the globe, which mirrored the multicultural reality I was living and working in every day. And it made it possible to pursue the degree while continuing my finance career in Dubai, which meant I could apply what I learned in the classroom to real business decisions the same week.

The two years from 2015 to 2017 were among the most demanding and most rewarding of my life. I was studying at one of the world’s top business schools while holding a full-time regional finance role. Weekends, late nights, and annual leave days went into assignments, group projects, and exams. It tested my discipline, my time management, and at times my family’s patience. I would do it again without hesitation.

The learning went far beyond finance. Strategy, marketing, organizational behavior, negotiation, entrepreneurship. For someone who had spent his career inside the numbers, being pushed to think like a general manager was exactly the stretch I was looking for.

One highlight I am still proud of: in the Marketing Strategy module, I took the top position in the Harvard Business Publishing online simulation and was named Marketing Simulation Champion, after building a winning go-to-market strategy across pricing, positioning, distribution, and sales force deployment. Not bad for a finance guy in a room full of marketers.

But the real value of London Business School was the people. Classmates from every corner of the world and every industry, each bringing a different lens to the same problem. Some of the best lessons happened in study groups at midnight, not in lecture halls.

I graduated in 2017, and the impact showed up quickly. Within months, Lenovo brought me back to lead finance for the Middle East and Africa, and over the following years I was promoted through roles of expanding scope: regional, multi-regional, and eventually worldwide. In 2023 I was selected for a headquarters assignment in the United States, and today I lead Global Financial Planning and Analysis for Motorola Mobility from Chicago.

I do not credit the degree alone for any of that. But I can draw a straight line between the way I think, communicate, and lead today and the two years I invested at London Business School. The MBA did not just add knowledge. It changed the altitude I operate at.