9 Lessons learned on Business and Life from my Two-Year MBA at London Business School

My initial reason for pursuing my MBA, as I turn back today to the application essays I wrote, was to continue my path to become one of the business leaders at the forefront of innovation who are building and investing in technology ventures. I had already co-founded a startup at 21 where we made every mistake in the book, and then worked for a bit less than 3 years on growing Anghami, one of today’s hottest startup in MENA, disrupting the music industry. But at some point I started to love looking at different technology trends and reading on futuristic visions of a better society, and thought that I want to be part of more and more startups. First I essentially needed to complete my operational and investment skill set. Second, I wanted to learn how to methodically turn visions into reality using effective leadership and management skills from a top business school.

LBS was the top choice, and it was a good one. What I’ll do here is talk about what my time in London taught me and how it brought me closer to my career objectives. After all, my MBA adventure was really a risk that I took so that I could learn as many new things as possible.

Lesson #1: If you can’t be smarter than the rest, then have something unique that will give you an edge. Being surrounded with hundreds of smart people in a place like LBS (or in any ambitious company) isn’t an easy place to be in, so how do you stand out? The answer that I found was simply to find a unique personal edge. To un-become everything that you’re not and to un-become everything that someone else is aiming for will help in being who you truly are. I actually remember the three-part working definition of leadership that we learned in our first week of the MBA. One part of it was this: “Leadership is about having the courage to be yourself”. My whole MBA after that turned into a journey of self-discovery, learning day after day how to become more of myself. How? In effect, I worked on finding out what my unique personal strengths, on building the “brand of me” and on knowing what values I embody and what theses I believe in. This is critical to understand as you go after your vision because you will meet smarter people everyday, and you will feel like a small fish in a big pond. But values make you different, and courage trumps every other skill. American Investor Peter Thiel wrote: “We live in a world in which courage is in far shorter supply than genius.” And while the MBA itself gave every one of us students the same frameworks and insights into business-building, I had to connect everything I learned to my own experience, my own readings and my own abilities to find the edge. Then it’s by communicating this edge on a daily basis that you give people something to remember you by, leaving you in a better position to have the business impact I want to have. This exercise also becomes a stepping stone to actualizing the vision of any business I will be working in. Seeing things differently, learning what other people are not learning and having unique insights into value (as Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital puts it) is what leads to superior business results.

Lesson #2: Business is about both creating value and capturing it. Business starts with creating something valuable that customers will pay for. New startup opportunities appear either when demand patterns/behaviours change or when a new technology can answer an existing need in better ways. The latter is all about reducing friction and increasing access to value. This sounds easy until you 1) you’re inside the business and worry more about the product or technology more than worrying about what the customers outside the building want and 2) you actually talk to your customers or launch the product, then you realize the irrational complexities behind human to human interaction and human-machine interaction, as well as all the edge cases in your market. Marketing Guru Seth Godin says that “Empathy is the hard part. We’re not wired to walk in someone else’s shoes”. Understanding where real customer value is created is what makes both a good investor and a good operator. In the world of venture and startups, where everyone is looking for 10–100x outcomes, this typically that a new business should either expand markets or creating totally new markets by building new kinds of value that were unimaginable before their existence. Yet it is totally possible for a business to generate value without capturing any of it. The beauty of technology is that it removes from the business the need for any other tangible assets, thus creating leverage. A networked business, for example, can come into existence and grow by collaborating with existing businesses that are willing to offer their services digitally. It becomes the owner of scalable software that coordinates the moves of all other players in the real world and that can be distributed to customers with near-zero marginal costs. But to answer the questions “Can we win with the resources we have?” and “can we capture a share of the value in the ecosystem?” without the risk of this value getting competed away (ie. with true defensibility) are tough questions that make or a break any startup.

Lesson #3: In the same way, when you help other people create value is how you capture part of it on a personal level. It’s almost impossible to understand the complexity of our economical system, but being in a place like LBS helps you meet every kind of player in it. Slowly, you start seeing how all the dots connect and it’s all around what people are offering each other. The advisor is helping the founder make money, the founder is helping the VC make money, the VC is helping the pension fund make money, the pension fund manager is helping teachers with their financial retirement plan. Everything connects, and we are all together in this dance. By understanding how the whole machine works, you start to think of where your place is and might be. But the real insight is that the more value you help someone create, the more you’ll get compensated for it. “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want” as Zig Ziglar says. Taking responsibility for creating wealth for others is probably the best way to create it for yourself. Instead of renting out your time in the form of salary, switch your focus on attaining actual business results for another person and have skin in the game. On one hand, make sure your incentive is something you look forward to. On the other hand, make sure there are consequences to your behaviour. This gives you the motivation to go after that goal in whatever way possible, and to give it your all. The most concrete example of this is sharing the upside with someone in the form of equity ownership — which also preserves mutual respect and unity.

Lesson #4: Work with similar-minded people who are invested in the same mission. It’s definitely true what they say that being around smart people exposes you to different aspects of leadership and execution, and that can in some way help you become a better person. Yet when you have ambitious goals you need to involve people who share your mindset, your passions and most importantly your thesis about the world. It will be very difficult to move forward if the values of the people you work with don’t match yours — you certainly won’t be inspired to go interact with them on a daily basis. During the two years of my MBA, I’ve spoken to countless people in the program and with working professionals around London when I was working, but the problem I faced with building many of those relationships is that others either do not have the same will to “build a better future” or do not agree with how I believe business decisions should be taken. So I also learned that most of what leadership is to have values that guide every commitment and decision, and that is exactly what our first management course of our program taught us. This should work both ways also, which means that you should take the time to understand the other’s goal and make sure that your unique set of skills can help them advance towards it. At the end of the day, know it’s about building relationships not about transactions. Most startups fail, most businesses fail, but what you want to know is that the people you work with today will want to work with you again, even if you failed, because they respect you and the way you work.

Lesson #5: Find the bright spots, and then double down. This was an important lesson for me, because it’s a total change in perspective that has worked for me again and again. In our Managing Change elective course, I read the book “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard”. In it, Dan & Chip Heath wrote that “ To pursue bright spots is to ask the question “What’s working, and how can we do more of it?” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: “What’s broken, and how do we fix it?” So the thing is that people spend too much time trying to solve problems and/or repeating the same mistakes expecting different results. The better way is to stop and think about that time when things were working the way you want them to be then rework the context and steps that got you there. Or maybe try small nudges in different directions and see if any stick, then scale those successes. Think in small forward steps, because each step bring with it a deeper understanding and tells you what the next step should be. Andy Hertzfeld, the architect of the original Macintosh, puts it this way: “I think the essential way to do anything great, you have to have some incremental development philosophy because you’re just going to be wrong with your grand design that you don’t iterate on.”

Lesson #6: Increasing optionality is key for achieving superior investment returns. In many cases, an MBA itself is pursued to increase options and increase the upside of one’s career. Venture capital itself is all having a big upside potential and diversifying risk. At LBS, I used my time and resources to try and integrate an investor mindset and all the mental models that come with it. Optionality was the biggest learning. Optionality, as Nassim Taleb describes it, is “the property of asymmetric upside (preferably unlimited) with correspondingly limited downside (preferably tiny).” So I took some time to dig into what optionality means for the venture world and how other founders and VCs think about it, and here are my findings:

• Strong founders and executives with learning and growth mindsets can iterate and navigate through alternative strategic options until one’s right (Always keep the ability to pivot because team is not fixated on one idea)
• Some VCs like Marc Andreesen & Josh Wolfe prefer to invest in things that look like they are just nuts because of the big outcome they can get
• As an investor you should learn as much as you can about as many things and follow your curiosity
• Have alternatives and bet big only when you know the odds are in your favor (either you have the resources to affect outcome, or you know the industry inside-out)
• Huge markets and macro trends are major factors that gives startups tailwind for rapid growth
• Focus on the ability to constantly create new opportunities and new growth potential from adjacent markets
• Brands and platforms create optionality, because once you have a strong equity you can use it to cross-sell products/services
• Software itself is an optionality tool because of rapid iteration and adaption to customer needs

Lesson #7: Business is a platform for societal change. Last year, I was fortunate enough to go to India and visit rural areas in the Himalayan mountains as part of my “MBA Global Business Experience”. What was very insightful to see is that many businesses there are deeply rooted in society. The organizations we visited, like Pratham and Dharma Life, go all around the country and work from inside these areas. The insight I got from our trip was that societal change can never be planned by centralized state authority but emerges from smaller acts of millions of businesses and individuals at the community level. Going back to our western part of the world, we increasingly notice that “every successful company has become a meaning-making machine”, as Tiago Forte says. The mission narrative matters more and more. Customer-centricity, innovation and experiences are the name of the game. The reason why business is increasingly about disruption of traditional models is that the narrative of how innovation will change the world has captured the attention of business leaders. In the same manner, the story of how business should be conducted today is switching to increasing the human potential, removing friction and making customer’s lives better. At the same time, the profit motive can be set aside on the basis of narratives of building a long-term, high-growth organization with sustainable strategies — Uber and Amazon being the typical case studies. That’s only the first step, in my opinion. The ultimate goal is to create, in parallel, economic mechanisms for achieving social objectives. When we know that technologies are 1) abundant, 2) exponential and 3) cost-cutting, then the profit motive will be less and less important today. If you can build a company that solves some of the world’s biggest problems over a 10–15 year period, investors should be readily available to back you in that mission and not ask you for the amount of profit improvement you’re doing this quarter.

Lesson #8: Don’t just repeat stories you hear, but think for yourself. I see people around me getting sucked into narratives everyday, without questioning what they’re told. Most people in the MBA fall into groupthink because it is a place where people yearn for belonging. This also applies to the wider society. People easily fall prey to false ideologies and false dichotomies. But just ask “why” and “so what” a few times and you’ll either find that things you hear are complete bullshit or that they can have a totally different perspective than the standard narrative. You should not be cornered, labeled and lied to. Try not to fit in and you get all the freedom in the world. At the end, freedom is what your soul is craving for. The news system where grand narrative are born is not better. The de-facto state of the media today is noise over quality. It is mostly salience and availability. There is no authenticity and no reality. Most of it is really just hype, and this is especially true in technology news! The best way to counter is to remove yourself from that, to focus on the not-so-obvious, to think deeper about the issues you can directly control and on building a better future for yourself. We are in an era of non-stop digital distraction and the platforms keep optimizing for hacking your attention further and further. So fight back — and instead of filling your brain with screen junk in your down time, make some space for your existing thoughts to play out. Learn to get into flow state by building the right habits around it and designing your space as an enabler of it. Go deeper into the rabbit hole of intellectuality and try to continuously understand things in greater depth. Because it’s in those states where the magic of creativity and progress happens.

Lesson #9: Fortune favors the prepared mind. I actually saw this quote on the slide deck on our first entrepreneurship class, and this can’t be more true. You can never actualize everything that is inside your head, because stuff get in the way. Life throws things at you from every possible angle, testing you and asking you to overcome them. During my MBA I had to face a lack of internship opportunities in my field, I had to face a lack of cash on hand for the first 6 months and the last 6 months of this two year expensive gig, I had to face anxiety and loneliness and most importantly I had to face an 8-month long physical illness. So to be mentally prepared to overcome challenges life throws at you is the only thing you can do. I didn’t overcome any of these instantly — I had to be a chess grandmaster constantly searching for solutions and constantly planning my next move, without seeing the end of the tunnel. But now I’m on the other side of all this “evil” that happened to me, and I have no clue how I made it. In the middle of evil was a lot of good. I found solutions, and I was prepared for every meeting and every conversation I had. I know now that overcoming obstacles makes you happy, makes you feel stronger. Bad things butt in to give fire to your soul and make you feel uncomfortable enough to re-assess and wake up! I have, since, rebuilt myself, become resourceful, and grown stronger. Opportunities will always come, and so will challenges — and you have to be completely ready for both. Know the upside, manage the risks and move towards your goals with both an unbreakable attitude and open-mindedness. This is not a dichotomy. Finally, I will leave you with this Jordan Peterson quote, because I listened to him a lot in the last two years — “Life is very difficult. It will challenge you to your core. You need to be able to withstand that challenge or you’ll warp and deteriorate. How do you develop yourself to withstand that challenge? You take on responsibilities and challenges voluntarily and strengthen yourself. How else could you possibly do it? You could hide, but there’s no hiding. You can’t hide from illness and death. You can’t hide from loneliness or pain. It’s not possible. If you retreat, then the things that chase you just grow larger. You have to put yourself together, and you do that by seeing what’s right in front of you, regardless of whether or not you like it, and encouraging yourself to master what you see voluntarily and to extend yourself and to stretch yourself out constantly.” I really believe today that if I am not always prepared to face life with this mindset, I will not be able to achieve any vision or any real success.