Center for Leadership
Studies

When he began his MAOL studies, Nick Falkingham was not expecting the readings and residential sessions to be directly applicable to every aspect of his life, professional and personal. He explains that he began to develop a keener sensibility for picking out patterns, which meant that new connections—deeper, more meaningful, and more creative—began to emerge.

“You’re looking at everything you learn and relating it to the business you’re in, and all business in which you’ve worked in the past and might in the future,” Falkingham says. “There’s a massive amount of information you need to absorb and assimilate, and once you do and feel the rhythm of that assimilation, it begins to gel with absolutely everything you’re doing.”

The tools and frameworks with which he was equipped in the MAOL empowered Falkingham to be a key player as part of the European integration team when his company was acquired by IBM. Due to the integration’s success, Falkingham now has a new role of Global Executive in which he continues to use MAOL methodologies with his teams. He also notes that what he learned in MAOL helped him to creatively orchestrate his MAOL initiative and incite breakthrough change.

For his independent initiative Falkingham tackled creating a diversified support renewal model for Cognos. His goal was to streamline the process in order to keep head count below license number so that customers continued to receive dedicated contact, but paperwork would be done in a more centralized region.

By engaging with leaders from many other departments, Finance, Human Resources and Legal alike, Falkingham says that dialogues from which hidden possibilities began to emerge opened up, decamping the status quo and throwing the door open for breakthrough results.

“Because of MAOL you look at things and you see so much more than you saw before,” Falkingham notes. “When I’m looking at a business problem now, I’m able to break that problem down into opportunities. If I was to pick one thing out of the program, it’s that now I see problems as opportunities. The moment you make a mistake there’s huge opportunity—to fix it, to change it, to make something new and great.”

Falkingham says that the residential sessions and contact with faculty and his cohort was an invaluable experience. He explains that granted trust and the ability to have free intellectual and philosophical discourse was available right from the beginning, which affords the opportunity to stop, discuss material, assimilate it into one’s own practices and take back everything learned to one’s own business.

“The unique manner in which this degree program is knitted together—with the guest faculty, alumni, and the cohort’s candidates—provides the kind of knowledge, experience and talent from across industry that is a great addition to my professional and personal life,” Falkingham says. “This program will change you, and it will fundamentally change the way you see yourself as a leader within your organization and the world.”