EMBA and Black Swans

In his famous book, “Black Swans”, Taleb analyzes those types of events that are “unexpected and of large magnitude”. So, contrary to what people usually think, they are not only negative or dramatic events. A Black Swan can be positive. One way to thrive following a black swan event is to broaden our horizons, to start looking at the bigger picture that is very often hidden. From some people’s point of view, inflation may appear to be a surprising event, a sort of black swan. But by considering the events which happened in the last decades (or even longer) and by connecting the dots on a broader scale, signals of the future trends can be seen.

The same reasoning is applicable to the rise of the importance of NFTs, to the pandemic and to all the other big trends that can shake the world and change our life.

That’s one of the reasons why I am doing the EMBA, to broaden my horizons, to start considering new variables and, in so doing, taking another step towards better understanding reality.

This leads to the second “why”: to learn how to take advantage of reality, to learn how to create value (not just for me, but for society), using the big trends rather than being overwhelmed by them. It’s not by chance that I started the enrolment process during the first wave of the pandemic, when the whole world discovered the word “resilience”. The third reason is to learn new skills in a solid way and thus to take some big, official steps towards being a better manager and a better leader. That’s how the willingness to broaden my horizons, the ambition to learn how to create value and be resilient despite the changes, and the need to improve myself in a solid way, led me to start my EMBA path.

I can say that is exactly what I found from day one of this journey.

I chose the International Flex EMBA, which is for the main part undertaken remotely and with international candidates; it was appropriate for 2020 and the global reach adds a lot of diversity to the class. I would make the same choice today.

Gaining an EMBA is a demanding goal: it requires a lot of energy and pushes self-discipline to a new level. The fun part is that the path is shared with an interesting, intelligent, helpful, diverse, and humbling group of classmates! I now have many new friends; we spend time together because of our study commitments and we spend time together thinking, sharing our impressions about reality and pushing each other. This sense of belonging to a group of people willing to improve themselves is making the entire path joyful and the bonding between us is stronger each day.

For us it’s not over yet  ̶  we have just had our “in-person” international week (mine was in London), and we are now working on the capstone project. There are still lot of things to do but the energy and the will to squeeze every drop out of this path have never been so high.