Three Melbourne Business School alumni share key takeaways from their MBA study.

Deploy powerful strategic frameworks

Rob Clayton, managing director of agriculture company Nutrien Ag Solutions, says two of the strategic frameworks from the Senior Executive MBA, which he completed this year, quickly became instrumental to the way he leads. “One is where you write a media release of what ‘good’ will look like in five years’ time. From there, you work backwards to make it true.”

He is currently using it as Nutrien Ag Solutions builds the sustainability side of the company. “We’re not trying to copy something, we’re trying to build something that hasn’t been built and that’s challenging.”

The second SEMBA framework that Clayton often employs is to write a “pre-mortem” failure scenario before starting a project. “We ask, ‘What could go wrong? What should we be thinking about if this doesn’t work and why would that be?’ We use those right across the business to get the vision and the purpose across to our 4000 staff.”

Learn to embrace ambiguity

“Vague, uncertain and complex situations can be embraced by leaning into the uncertainty,” says Jenny Selway, group manager, Victorian Connections, with the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), who completed her Executive MBA this year. “The EMBA provided me with principles and frameworks to navigate through ambiguity. It also taught me how to build ambiguity into strategy through scenario planning and construction of pivot points.”

Selway, who had an engineering background before joining AEMO this year, was used to considering uncertainties in scenario planning but the EMBA “pulled it all together. It’s about accepting and expecting the ambiguity versus making a guess about which outcome is the most likely and then planning for that. We learnt how to communicate the ambiguity and be honest about what we know and what we don’t – while being firm on a vision and mission – essential to bringing people along on the journey and leading when faced with the unknown.”

Build an innovation culture

“The course was a game changer for me when it comes to innovation and thinking more outwardly,” says Simon Hupfeld, CEO of AMES Australasia, who completed his Senior Executive MBA in 2018. AMES is a US gardenware conglomerate and Hupfeld oversees numerous Australian brands, including Nylex and Hills. “It led me to think more about our customers’ needs and what problems we could solve for them. It’s a real trap for organisations to get caught up in their own ideas.”

Hupfeld says that after the SEMBA, he accelerated investment in the company’s innovation and design department and implemented some “terrific frameworks, strategies and tools” from the US study module. It led to a project around the famous Hills Hoist. “We embarked on market research to understand what customers cared most about and ranked every care factor. We designed different componentry to make hanging laundry easier and it resulted in a whole new range.”