Coffee, Komi, Rotman: Term Four — How I Learned to Expand the Pie

Grab a chair. The coffee’s already brewed.

Spring came to Toronto like a promise kept.

There is something about the end of March at the Rotman School that nobody warns you about: a particular electricity in the hallways, a lightness in the footsteps of people who have been carrying a lot of weight for a long time. We had a couple of days between terms, and even those felt different. Charged. The city was thawing. The days were stretching. And the realisation was settling in, warm and undeniable: Year One was almost over!

I walked into Term Four carrying two things at once. The first was that good, restless energy that arrives when momentum is finally on your side. The second was something quieter, something I was not quite ready to say out loud: I still did not have an internship offer.

THE BIG FEAR…AND THE BIG CHANGE

Summer was coming. All around me, people were confirming internship placements, announcing roles, moving into the next chapter. And I was still waiting. Still searching. That tension sat in the background of everything Term Four became, and I will not pretend otherwise.

A little sidenote: While I was researching and dreaming of joining an MBA program, I desperately wanted to make that LinkedIn about my internship. The tension was growing and I could not pretend otherwise.

But there was also something genuinely new about this term, something that made it feel different from everything that had come before. Term Four was elective season. For the first time since arriving at Rotman, I had real academic choice. The core curriculum had done its job: it had given me a foundation, a shared language with my cohort and a set of muscles I needed in my “sophisticated business acumen toolkit”. But now, with the final core requirements in sight, I could look at the course catalogue and ask not what am I required to learn, but what I actually wanted to know.

That question, small as it sounds, felt like the first breath of open air in a long time.

SUSTAINABILITY? SIGN ME UP!

Before I tell you about the classes, let me tell you about the motivation for one of the classes I selected.

Back in England, I had worked in climate communications at Greenhouse Communications, one of the UK’s most respected Public Relations and Strategic Communications agencies. I had sat inside rooms where the future of the planet was being negotiated. COP28. The World Economic Forum. New York Climate Week. I watched businesses reckon – or fail to reckon – with what it means to operate in a world of finite resources. That experience had planted something in me that would not stay quiet: I want to work at the intersection of sustainability and business strategy.

So, when I scanned the elective offerings and saw Sustainability Strategy on the list, I did not deliberate. I registered. My academic director, Alyson Waite, helped me map out my classes based on my interests and capacity. Four classes in total: the remaining core requirements in Managerial Accounting and Operations Management, and two electives I had chosen for very specific reasons — Managerial Negotiations and Sustainability Strategy. Each one, as I would discover, offered a different kind of unlocking.

Operations Management was the class I feared most based on stories from past students, and the one that surprised me most profoundly.

I had told myself a comforting story: operations belonged to engineers and supply chain specialists, not to storytellers chasing CMO dreams like me. Professor Gonzalo Romero dismantled that story efficiently. Through his framework of business processes, I began to understand throughput — the rate at which a system produces outputs — and why it sits at the heart of every operational decision a manager makes. I learned to trace flow time, the journey a product takes through a system from start-to-finish, and to identify where capacity constraints quietly strangle performance before anyone thinks to look.

What struck me most was the psychology hidden inside the mathematics. Queuing, for instance, is not merely a logistics problem. It is a human one. Every minute a customer waits is a small story about what a business actually values. And the Bullwhip Effect in supply chains, where small fluctuations in consumer demand ripple into massive swings upstream, taught me that the consequences of poor operational decisions compound in ways that are rarely visible until the damage is done.

I did not expect to enjoy it. I did, genuinely, and without reservation.

SCROOGE WAS MOST LIKELY A MANAGERIAL ACCOUNTANT!

Managerial Accounting arrived next, and with it came the dismantling of an assumption I had been carrying for years.

I had always thought accounting was numbers in boxes: assets, liabilities, and the cold grammar of balance sheets. No disrespect to accountants; it was simply the ceiling of my imagination on the subject. Professor Michael Marin introduced me to a different discipline entirely. Where financial accounting speaks to the world outside a company, managerial accounting speaks to the world inside it. The conversations it enables are – I came to realise – where most of the important decisions actually live.

Activity-based costing changed how I see a business’s cost structure. Instead of averaging overhead across everything a company produces, it traces costs to the specific activities that drive them. The result is a far more honest picture of where value is being created and where it is quietly leaking away. Cost-volume-profit analysis gave me a framework for understanding the relationship between what a business produces, what it charges, and what it actually keeps. And variance analysis, the discipline of comparing what you planned against what actually happened, turned out to be less about accounting and more about accountability.

I left that class with a new muscle: the ability to look at a number and ask not what is this, but what is this telling me.

WINNING DOESN’T ALWAYS MEAN HAVING IT ALL

If Term Four had a centrepiece, it was Managerial Negotiations.

Professor Geoffrey Leonardelli runs the course as a crucible. There are no lectures in the traditional sense; there are simulations, debriefs, and the particular discomfort of having your assumptions about yourself tested in real time. I entered that room the way most people enter a negotiation: certain that the objective was to win. To claim as much value as possible. To be, in the vocabulary of the textbook, a distributive bargainer.

Professor Leonardelli had seen that before. He dismantled it methodically.

The concept he returned to, again-and-again, was integrative bargaining — the discipline of expanding the pie before you divide it. The insight sounds simple until you are sitting across a table from someone with opposing interests and a deadline approaching, at which point it becomes genuinely difficult. The key, he taught us, was moving beyond positions to interests. What does the other party actually need, underneath what they are asking for? And is there a configuration of the deal that satisfies both sets of interests more fully than either side imagined coming in?

We negotiated multi-party deals. We navigated cross-cultural simulations, where the same words carried different weights depending on who was in the room. We practiced under pressure, the kind that makes you want to default to the nearest exit. I panicked. I also learned.

What I carried out of that room was not a tactic but a posture: a way of entering any space where something is being decided and asking first whether there is a version of this where everyone leaves with more than they entered.

That question has already changed how I negotiate a salary. How I navigate family. How I lead. It is, I suspect, the kind of thing that will keep paying dividends long after the final exam is a distant memory.

A BUSINESS CLASS ALL BUSINESS LEADERS SHOULD TAKE

Sustainability Strategy gave language to what I had always felt but could not always articulate.

Professor Gregory Distelhorst built the course around a central, uncomfortable question: as a business leader, which environmental and social impacts are truly material to your firm — and what are you prepared to do about them? Materiality, I learned, is not a philosophical concept. It is a strategic one. The impacts that are material to a business are those that affect its financial performance, its relationships with stakeholders, and its long-term licence to operate.

We worked through ESG reporting frameworks, learning to read and critically evaluate the disclosures that companies make about their sustainability performance. We examined the economics of collective action — why industries often fail to self-regulate even when the costs of inaction are obvious to everyone in the room. We applied concepts like common pool resources and public goods to understand why sustainability problems are, at their core, coordination problems.

One of the course’s most clarifying moments came from examining planetary boundaries: the concept that several of the Earth’s biophysical systems have limits beyond which the consequences become irreversible. The idea that resources could be genuinely finite – not just economically scarce but physically bounded – reframed every business decision I had ever been taught to make.

I left that class more fluent in the language of sustainable business than I had arrived. And more committed than ever to building a career inside that conversation. The fact that I had also taken on the role of Vice President of Communications at Rotman Net Impact, the club with sustainability at its very centre, was not coincidental. It was the whole point.

But the world, as it often does, had other ideas.

NEW ERA: GREENHUSHING

An election happened. Overnight, the sentiment around sustainability in North American boardrooms shifted in ways that were difficult to watch. Conversations I had been nurturing with firms in the clean energy and climate space grew quiet. A contact I respected told me, plainly, that ESG was being reframed in certain rooms, moved from the main stage to the back of the stage.

And underneath all of that was the thing I could not stop thinking about: summer was approaching, and I still did not have an offer.

I want to be honest about what that felt like, because I think it is important. There is a particular kind of pressure that builds when you are watching your cohort move forward while you are still waiting. You do not begrudge anyone their success; these are your people, and their wins feel like proof that the program works. But late at night, over that black coffee with no sugar, the questions come anyway. What if the path I came here for has narrowed? What if I aimed at the wrong target? What if this MBA thing does not work the way I planned?

I sat with those questions, and then I did what Term Three had taught me to do: I asked for help.

The help came, as it often does at Rotman, through a coffee chat. An alumnus, Peter Bello, patient and honest, listened to everything I had just described. The narrowing market. The anxiety. The fear that what I had crossed an ocean for was slipping just out of reach. He did not rush toward reassurance. He let me finish. And then he said something I have since repeated to every first-year who has sat across from me in a similar panic:

“Look within. What do you actually love?”

Sports. Music. Entertainment. Marketing. The places where culture and commerce collide; where a brand is not a logo but a feeling; a campaign not a deliverable but a story. These had always been true about me. The MBA had not changed them. If anything, it had sharpened them.

So, I expanded the search. Wider than I had allowed myself to go before. And I started paying closer attention to what actually made me come alive.

HOW I GOT MY INTERNSHIP

To be honest, the expanded search strategy was annoying, I had to start exploring new roles and industries and it was a complete distortion to my internship search strategy. While slowly spiral into despair surprisingly, one of my classmates, Olakale Lipede, sent a link to a job posting. He knew I loved sports. He knew I loved the energy of a live event, the architecture of a great sports venues, the craft of making a brand feel alive. He sent the link and said, simply: “I think you should apply”.

The job was at Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (MLSE). The Toronto Raptors. The Toronto Maple Leafs. Toronto FC. The largest sports property in Canada and one of the most storied on the continent.

I found the email twenty minutes before the video interview link was set to expire.

There was no time to prepare in the conventional sense. But here is what I have come to understand about preparation: it is not what you do in twenty minutes. It is the accumulation of every coffee chat, every mock interview, every session with my career coach Robert Woon-Fat; without knowing, all these had been baked into my subconscious. So, when I pressed record on that video, I was drawing on all of it.

The call with the managers that followed was even better. I left that conversation energised in the particular way you are when you have spoken with people who are genuinely excellent at what they do. I found myself thinking: I want to be in that room. I want to earn my place there.

Two days later, the offer came.

I am not usually lost for words. But when I saw that email, I sat with it before I told anyone. Not from uncertainty, there was none. I sat with it because I wanted to hold the fullness of it for a moment. The Raptors. The Leafs. The country’s sports identity. It was all offered to me as a stage. A first-generation dreamer from Ibadan, who once held a prime-time microphone on Nigerian radio and dissected stories for a city of eight million, would soon be preparing to craft brand narratives alongside NBA players and world-class athletes.

All the waiting. All the nights with the unanswered questions. All the mornings of pressing forward anyway. It had been leading here.

Somewhere in the building, those words on the wall were no longer just words.

This is where it changes.

THE END OF AN IMPACTFUL YEAR

Term Four closed with goodbyes to the outgoing Class of 2025, the small, meaningful ceremonies that mark the end of one chapter and the quiet beginning of another. I had stepped, by then, into three leadership roles: President of the Rotman African & Caribbean Business Club, President of the Rotman Christian Association, and Vice President of Communications for Rotman Net Impact.

Each one gave me something the classroom alone could not: the experience of being responsible not just for my own performance but for a community’s direction. Of thinking not in terms of what do I need, but what does this require of me as a leader and a team player.

That shift, from individual contributor to builder, is perhaps the most quietly transformative thing Year One gave me. It happened, without announcement, in meeting rooms and WhatsApp threads and small decisions made on behalf of people who trusted me. And I would not trade it for anything.

WHAT’S NEXT

There is more to tell. The summer at MLSE, the partnerships, the campaigns, the brands, the athletes, the moments: I will be unpacking them for years. The leadership lessons from the clubs, failures and wins. It was the proof, accumulated slowly and then suddenly, that the MBA was working, not just in theory, but in the real, demanding, exhilarating world.

I will bring the coffee. You bring the curiosity.

See you on the next one.

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Komi Onipede is a second-year MBA student at the Rotman School of Management and author of the Coffee, Komi, Rotman column. Before Rotman, he led strategic marketing communications at global platforms including COP28, New York Climate Week, and the World Economic Forum. Most recently, he served as a Global Partnership Marketer at Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, working with the Toronto Raptors, Toronto Maple Leafs, and Toronto FC on campaigns for brands including Google, IBM, and Molson.

DON’T MISS:

COFFEE, KOMI, ROTMAN: TERM THREE – THE SEMESTER I WENT LOOKING FOR STRUCTURE

COFFEE, KOMI, ROTMAN: 2ND TERM IN B-SCHOOL — HOW I LEARNED TO STOP PANICKING

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