MBA Voices: Can You Do A Global EMBA While Managing A Complex Function?

My phone vibrates. Then again. Then it does not stop.

I am in a state-of-the-art classroom at London Business School, its curved walls holding the kind of intellectual pressure that is hard to convey from the outside. Three case studies that requires 6 hours of pre-reading. Professors who will find every thread you left bare and pull it to the front of the room. At this moment, my cohort is mid-debate over a multi-million-dollar strategic decision.

And somewhere between London and a few time zones away, a supply chain crisis is accelerating.

A shipment is held at the Port of Los Angeles due to a mismatch between the goods our supplier shipped and what is on the packing list. Customs will not release until it’s correct and resubmitted. The broker is waiting for my team to authorize it, and the point-of-contact had to take a sudden bereavement leave. The parts are needed to run production on our high-volume line. If it isn’t, the line will be down. That means idle workers and millions in losses for each shift that doesn’t run. My Teams notifications are blowing up my phone. Stakeholders are escalating, wanting live minute-by-minute updates on who is driving the resolution.

Both worlds – work and school – are calling. Simultaneously. Urgently. Without apology.

That is not a moment I describe for dramatic effect. That is a Tuesday during a block week at London Business School. This moment perfectly captures what it means to pursue a Global full-time Executive MBA while leading a complex function like supply chain and operations.

The tension between work and business school is real, especially when you are managing a complex function. Can you complete an MBA in this environment? YES! It is possible. Not because of the resilience or stamina, though you will need both, but because of something more deliberate. It requires a solid team architecture around you before you even open your textbook; your leadership relationship converted from tolerance to sponsorship; your delegation model that develops the people you leave behind; and the personal foundation that makes all this structurally viable.

What follows is not a motivational account. It is a practical guide on how this is actually done. It’s grounded in frameworks from the world’s leading business schools and in the reality of living them, in real time, with real consequences.

BUILD THE FOUNDATION BEFORE YOU BUILD THE STUDY SCHEDULE

Before I enrolled in business school, the single most important action I took had nothing to do with coursework or reading lists. I lead a global supply chain organization spanning multiple geographies, vendors, and time-critical lanes. I knew, even before applying to an EMBA program, that week-after-week, continent-after-continent, I needed the right talent in the right seats before the first module began.

Consider what can unfold in any given block week. A key supplier, operating on tight cash flow, cannot suddenly release a shipment because the route payment is stalled in an approval queue. The goods are sitting in a warehouse. The customer is waiting. Every hour that passes is an escalation waiting to happen, and if the right person is not empowered to act, that hour becomes a day, and a day becomes a crisis.

This is not a hypothetical scenario. This is Supply Chain Management.

And it is exactly why Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy and Barney’s Resource-Based View converge on the same fundamental truths: people, placed correctly and fully trusted, are the most defensible asset any organization can hold – and these people are what give companies the true competitive advantage. Before I stepped into the classroom, I asked myself some hard questions: what if a container carrying our goods fell off a vessel at sea? This happens more often than we realize. Containers are not designed to be submerged, and the saltwater will damage the goods inside. Who on my team knows exactly what to do, who to call, how to manage stakeholder relationships, and how to keep the field service representative and customers informed while I am unreachable?

If you cannot answer questions like that confidently, in my eyes, you are not ready to start a full-time MBA while working full-time. Build the team first. The EMBA will expose every gap in your organization’s foundation, without warning and without mercy.

MAKE YOUR LEADERSHIP SPONSORS, NOT JUST SUPPORTERS

There is a meaningful difference between a leader who tolerates your EMBA and one who is genuinely invested in it. The former creates friction at exactly the wrong moments. The latter creates the organizational culture that allows you to be fully present in the classroom when everything is escalating back home.

I was transparent with my leadership from the outset about the commitment. It involved block week schedules from 8:00 am to 7:30 pm, seven straight days, almost once every month. On top of that, there is the travel between Chicago, London, and New York. Of course, there is the cognitive load of carrying both simultaneously.

In return, I made the return on investment explicit and tangible. When a supplier faced a financial crisis that threatened a critical lane during one of the module weeks, my direct manager and the executive suite already knew who held authority in my absence and why. There was no scramble. There was a clear owner, a clear mandate, and a clear escalation path, because I had built that structure and communicated it in advance.

Freeman’s Stakeholder Theory argues that sustainable value creation requires identifying and genuinely engaging those whose interests align with yours. Your senior leadership is not a passive audience to your development. They are stakeholders with a real interest in the outcomes. Results matter even when you are away. When they understand what you are learning and how it maps onto the organizational challenge, they stop viewing your EMBA and time away as a disruption or threat and start treating it as a long-term strategic asset.

Open communication, consistently and proactively maintained, is what converts passive support into active sponsorship. Do not wait for a conflict to surface. Build that relationship around this investment from day one.

EMPOWER YOUR TEAM. DO NOT SIMPLY REMAIN REACHABLE

I prepared my team well in advance for the 20-month EMBA journey ahead, and made clear what it would mean for their roles and responsibilities. I gave every leader on my global team a direct line to me. WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, WeChat, and Phone. Whatever channel they need. And I told them clearly: message me anytime. But the more impactful message was the one beneath that: you have the authority to make decisions. I trust you to use it. I will back you up.

The distinction matters enormously in practice. Consider the supply partner account executive who called me multiple times during class. They wanted to report a major miscount in a production component, along with a quality issue with the units in their work-in-process. Getting new components would take 16 weeks. Not only would they lack supply, but consequently impact production by putting our line down for at least one quarter. During my break, I got the supplier and my team on the call. A replacement order needed to be sourced, rerouted, and repriced within hours, and we needed to leverage both companies to influence the vendor — the manufacturer of our critical components — to expedite the order and get it to the front of the line.

If my team had needed me to make and authorize each one of those decisions, I would have spent the rest of that week on the phone instead of in the classroom. What made it manageable was not that I was reachable. My team already knew what to do. I was there initially to help build their confidence, and that investment had compounded. They had the mandate, the relationships, the knowledge, the urgency, and the belief to act. I was kept informed. I weighed in where my judgment added value. The function held, not because I was managing it from a distance, but because I had built a team that no longer needed me.

What motivates people at work is not merely the absence of friction, adequate pay, and a stable environment, but the presence of genuine motivators: responsibility, challenge, growth, and the recognition that comes from being trusted with something that matters. Real delegation activates those motivators. The team does not just hold the function together in your absence. They develop because of it. Your EMBA quietly becomes a leadership development program for the people you left behind to steer the ship.

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