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

TIME MANAGEMENT IS NOT A HABIT. IT IS ESSENTIAL FOR YOUR PEACE OF MIND

It is worth being precise about what a Global EMBA demands in terms of time, because the specificity changes the nature of the challenge entirely.

The LBS program is not an evening program. There are no Thursday sessions that can be rescheduled in the event of a crisis. Every month, my cohort attends a full-block week (7 days) of intensive sessions in London and New York, and during elective periods on campuses in other cities such as Dubai, Singapore, Cape Town, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Riyadh (as well as in other countries). You are physically absent and jetlagged. Fully. For a week. Every month. Often across time zones that put you eight to twelve hours from your team and your family simultaneously.

A payment approval process that normally takes 48 hours can become a crisis that halts shipments if no one has the authority to expedite it in your absence. A cash-strapped supplier waiting on a remittance to release goods does not care that you are in a discounted cash-flow session or debating on sustainability and carbon credits. The constraints in your schedule create downstream constraints in your supply chain unless you have designed around them in advance.

The block week format enforces discipline that open-schedule programs rarely achieve. The constraint is immovable, which means your preparation tightens, delegation sharpens, and the absence of free time forces you to clarify priorities.

What I have developed is a framework for operational discipline. Before each block week, the team is briefed, front-loadable decisions are made, payment approvals and supplier communications are accelerated, and leadership is aligned on who holds authority on what. During the block week, I deliberately use time zone windows to connect with Asia before class, reach Europe during breaks, and engage the Americas in the evening. My phone stays on. But it is a strategic instrument, not a panic button. After the block week, I re-enter with intention: a rapid pulse check with direct reports, a structured review of what moved and what did not, and a deliberate return to operational rhythm without the system having faltered in my absence.

This is not time management as a personal habit. It is time management as a designed system built, tested, and refined month after month. The EMBA will not wait for you to get organized. Arrive organized, and keep sharpening throughout.

GIVE 100% TO WORK AND 100% TO SCHOOL, AND A LITTLE MORE

There is something that no framework fully prepares you for, and that most EMBA articles are reluctant to say plainly: you have to give one hundred percent to your work and one hundred percent to your studies – and a little more for unplanned life events. Not ninety and ninety. Not a measured, sustainable blend. One hundred and one hundred and some.

That is not a motivational flourish. It is a structural reality. The organizations that admit you to a Global EMBA are among the most selective in the world. The companies that employ you at this level have expectations that do not adjust for your academic schedule. Both institutions, the school and the employer, are investing in you. Treating either as secondary is not a sustainable strategy. It is a reputational risk, and it will surface faster than you expect.

Organizations are not static; they are adaptive systems that respond to the inputs and behaviors of the people within them. When you bring the intellectual rigor of business school into your professional decisions and the operational complexity of your role into the classroom, both systems benefit. The EMBA and the job are not competing for the same finite resource. They are feeding each other. But only if you commit to both fully.

The honest trade-off is social. Your personal time will shrink. Weekends that once belonged to leisure become cycles of assignments and group study sessions. Evenings that were unstructured become reading blocks. Your social life, in the conventional sense, diminishes and it is important to acknowledge that directly rather than gloss over it. Your friends will notice your absence.

What I did not fully anticipate is how completely the cohort fills that space. The people you study alongside in a Global EMBA are not classmates in the conventional sense. They are CEOs, senior executives, founders, and functional leaders from across industries and geographies. They are all carrying the same weight you are, all showing up each week fully prepared. The friendships that form under that shared pressure are among the most genuine professional relationships I have built. The network is global, the trust is real, and the social life you trade is replaced by something that compounds far beyond the program itself.

Give everything to both. Accept the trade-off honestly. And let the cohort become the community you did not know you needed.

THE FOUNDATION THAT MAKES EVERYTHING STRUCTURALLY POSSIBLE

In Supply Chain Management, we study the critical path, the chain of dependencies that determines whether the entire system holds. Remove a load-bearing element, and the structure does not merely weaken. It fails.

The same logic applies to sustaining a Global EMBA alongside a demanding global function. Most of the advice you will encounter focuses on professional strategies: team empowerment, leadership alignment, and time management systems. All of it is necessary. But there is a dependency beneath all of those that is rarely named in professional discourse — because it belongs to a domain, we are not always comfortable treating it with strategic rigor.

That dependency, for me, is my family.

My wife, my parents, and my young son carry a real and significant burden when I am away on block weeks or deep in pre-readings and assignments when home. My 3-year-old son does not yet have the language to understand the trade-off, only to feel my absence. I do not carry that lightly. But my family supports me willingly, because we made this a shared decision from the very beginning, not a unilateral one.

Maslow’s hierarchy is easy to accept in theory and harder to honor in practice: sustained high performance is only possible when the foundational layers – security, love, and belonging – are intact. You cannot self-actualize on an unstable base. Over the years, I have seen people attempt EMBA programs while their personal foundations were cracking beneath them. The academic workload alone is formidable. The professional pressure is relentless. Without a stable, supportive home to return to – being able to call from a hotel room at midnight after a long module day – the whole structure becomes fragile.

The practical counsel I would offer anyone considering this path: Before you stress-test your calendar, stress-test your home foundation. Before you map your professional stakeholders, have the real conversation with your partner. Bring your family into the why, the long arc of it, the sacrifice it will require of them, and the shared benefit that lies on the other side. Treat them with the same intentionality and transparency you would bring to your most critical professional relationships. Because in every meaningful sense, they are exactly that.

CONCLUSION

The more precise question is not whether you can do a Global EMBA while managing a complex function. It is whether you have built the architecture around you that makes success structurally possible.

That architecture rests on a specific set of load-bearing elements:

* A team built before the journey begins, with the right people empowered to act when a container is lost at sea, a payment stalls, or a supplier calls in crisis.

* A leadership relationship built on transparency and shared investment.

* A delegation model that develops your team rather than simply covering your absence.

* An operational time management system designed around the immovable constraint of the block week.

* A continuous commitment to sharpening tools in a cohort that demands the same standard.

* A personal foundation – family, trust, shared sacrifice – without which none of the professional structures hold.

None of these is a soft consideration. Each maps directly onto the frameworks taught by the world’s leading business schools, because the same principles that govern high-performing organizations also govern the individuals who lead them.

The EMBA does not pause your career. Used correctly, it accelerates it. The frameworks you encounter on Tuesday are the decisions you make on Wednesday. The theory does not live in the case study. It lives in the moment your phone will not stop vibrating, your classroom is electric with debate, and you have to trust – fully and without hesitation – that the architecture you built will hold.

Mine does. Build yours.

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Mohammad Saim is a TEDx speaker, global supply chain leader, and dual Executive MBA candidate at Columbia Business School and London Business School. With nearly two decades of experience across three industries and a career that has taken him across continents, he brings deep expertise in supply chain, procurement, and operations, grounded in a master’s in electrical engineering and a rare command of both technical and human complexities. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

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