Center for Leadership
Studies

Sponsoring somebody through the MAOL is great because you get to see them develop and you have a common language for how you look at things like breakthroughs, how you design breakthroughs, and how you look at the organization.

You'll watch yourself and the journey unfold to a point where you can see it in both yourself and others and register accomplishments along the way. This brings you nothing but opportunity and opens a whole new way of looking at your business.

When you talk about the concept of a leader as a teacher and learner, the MBA can’t begin to cover it. What you get in this program is the opportunity to do and be both—a teacher and a learner, and most of all a skilled leader.

The MAOL arms you with the ability to think about perceptions and see them as that, then go below the surface, and dive a little bit deeper.

When people are aligned with a common goal and vision, the effort spent to keep them heading in a certain direction becomes less and less – they generate that direction themselves.

Sometimes you temporarily have to be the master of the game and sometimes you have to be the one to get it going and let it take care of itself. If it is a positive thing and worthwhile achieving, those you work with will want to support it because it's to their own benefit.

The MAOL invites you to consider how to honor and build on the past, envision a new future, and then design the steps that are going to take you there. It's a way of thinking through what's so today and building a vision for the future.

I think one of my favorite pieces of learning so far is that most organizations fear surprise. If you flip that around and actually engineer your company to not only be comfortable with surprise, but to encourage it, you open up possibilities. That's where true innovation comes from.

Along with presenting an abundance of very unusual and useful models and tools, the program provides an open, caring environment for questioning one’s assumptions about leadership.

I have stepped out of the more management mindset to truly be in the leadership mindset—to be versus to do. To learn to be present and to listen even better, to really hear the people around me, has opened up my world and my organization for greater opportunity.

You find your way through the breakthrough using MAOL materials and by interacting with the faculty and your colleagues. It’s challenging, complex, rewarding, it allows you to try things that you haven’t necessarily seen or done in the organization, and that’s all part of the learning that you take away; it’s very different from learning something from a textbook and walking away with knowledge.

The access to all of the MAOL wisdom and knowledge and expertise is amazing. I would never on my own have that without doing years of work. The relationships and the openness to conversations with people who have such brilliance is what excites me most.

I see leadership as being about succeeding through others and achieving breakthrough through helping others grow.

The biggest notion that struck me was that leadership is not a public thing, it’s a private thing. In large measure, leadership is deciding if you want to commit your name, your resources, if you want to go for it or not.

Achieving breakthrough results is a matter of choice. Success seldom happens by chance; it’s designed purposefully and with deliberate intention.

It pushes your limits in a way that you struggle a little at first, and then you develop. You really have to take it outside what the book said and apply it. I found that to be quite unique and inspirational.

Being in this creative environment allows me to capture and create in a way that I never would have been able to before. If you want to expand, do so into the unknown. If you like to do that with your mind, heart and brain, then that is what the MAOL is all about.

This is a program about developing agency, as opposed to transferring content.