Taking a step up with the EMBA

In life, one sometimes needs to disrupt and break out of one’s comfort zone before reaping the rewards. That is exactly what happened to Peter Jorgensen.

The Singapore-based Chief Financial Officer of Asia for Damco, a global logistics solutions company, has worked in finance for nearly two decades, and already holds a Graduate Diploma in Business Administration (Finance) from the Copenhagen Business School. Yet something was amiss at that point in his career for this high achiever.

“I realised that it’s not enough to have just a finance background if I wanted to explore a different role within my company. If I were to understand and contribute better and more to the overall business, I needed to develop beyond a finance professional,” Peter explains.

And so, he took a leap of faith and decided to further his studies beyond finance. In 2017, he embarked on an Executive Master of Business Administration (EMBA) at the Singapore Management University (SMU) Lee Kong Chian School of Business (LKCSB). A general business master’s programme that includes topics outside of finance like marketing and negotiation.

The SMU EMBA not only ticked all the boxes for Peter’s appetite for an education beyond finance, one of his biggest takeaways was the invaluable experience of working on the Strategic Initiative Project (SIP). This project lasts throughout the duration of the entire programme and gives EMBA candidates the opportunity to work with a selected company on solving a real-life strategic challenge.

Assigned to a headhunting and recruitment company, Peter, alongside his teammates, were tasked to help develop a strategy to grow the company sustainably in the long run. But there were obstacles to surmount. These range from old-fashioned operations to uncertainty over whether the company should change strategic direction, build their own software or simply do things differently.

For Peter, finding ways to resolve these real-life issues and problems via the SIP was a priceless experience. Crucially, it presented him with opportunities to put into practice the new skills he had acquired in class such as assessing risks, opportunities, and predicting industry developments, to solve an issue. More importantly, it also prepares him to undertake a bigger role in his company. “Looking forward, if I ever become CEO or CFO, these are potentially the strategic challenges that I would have to address one way or another,” he explains.

Apart from the SIP, another highlight of the SMU EMBA for Peter was the opportunity to travel on educational trips to campuses outside of Singapore, such as the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad and the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University. In particular, a week-long visit to The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (USA) stood out for him, partly because of the provenance of the school and the topics covered, which happened to be some of his favorites.

The end of Peter’s EMBA programme in mid-2018 saw the cherry on the cake: His name took pride of place on the Dean’s List. For Peter – currently the Head of Financial Planning and Analysis, Commercial at Maersk, this was the validation that he had sought, a personal triumph made more special since he had successfully graduated from the programme despite having a full-time job.

“That’s the challenge. You cannot go into this thinking you don’t need to prepare or participate, or it’s ok to miss deadlines. You must have the drive and pride to seek the most out of it,” he explains. “When I was on the programme, I travelled a fair bit with my job, and I ended up spending a lot of time at airports and hotels studying.”.

While the effort and hard work Peter put in for the SMU EMBA programme cannot be quantified in simple terms, he believes it was what he had always wanted. “I’m coming out of this feeling better equipped to do my job across a number of fields. It’s not quite tangible all the time but I believe it’s about the sum of all the parts.” he concludes.