Adeola Ajayi
London Business School, Executive MBA
Age: 39
“A creative, curious person who loves connecting with different people, listening to and telling others’ stories and finding fun in life.”
Hometown: London, UK
Fun fact about yourself: I love to sing and in a past life have recorded music with a UK chart topping artist!
Undergraduate School and Degree: First Class BSc (Hons) Communications and Media Studies, Brunel University
Where are you currently working? Director, CEO Office at RICS (Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) and member of the RICS Executive Team.
Extracurricular Activities, Community Work and Leadership Roles: I set up and led the Inclusion Group at my organisation to champion a more inclusive workplace. While many of my other extracurricular activities have taken a backseat since I started my Executive MBA, I still try to help as many people as I can, including informally mentoring younger people. I also take on speaking engagements when I can, mostly talking on leadership, strategy and inclusion. I enjoy chairing events as it puts me in a position to ask questions and I love sharing other people’s stories. A recent favourite was an event I chaired for our top 50 senior leaders internally, interviewing CEOs from other organisations on their leadership styles. I also chaired a session for the LBS Marketing and Strategy Club exploring key trends affecting business strategies across a range of sectors.
Before my MBA, I used to spend most of Saturday morning in the gym – spinning, weights, and swimming were my favourite. I’d like to pick the swimming back up and improve my stroke. I’ve also made a commitment to start learning piano once I have free time post-MBA.
Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? Being awarded an A+ for my Managerial Economics elective and an A for my Financial Accounting elective. They say the LBS EMBA is quite quant heavy compared to others – I can tell you now that this is not why I chose it! Pre-EMBA I had spent most of my career working with words rather than numbers, so I was particularly proud of those grades in my first semester.
What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? I developed and led a programme of diversity and inclusion initiatives for the UK insurance industry. As a Black woman, I was initially reluctant to take the project on – it felt like I was an ideal person to ‘tick that box’. But I eventually embraced it, enjoyed it and made a difference. I set up the first industrywide DEI data collection so we could track progress – it continues annually today and represents most of the UK insurance sector. I convened the CEOs of the UK’s largest insurers with only DEI on the agenda and pioneered the insurance industry parental pay disclosure initiative, influencing 75% of the sector to commit to publishing parental pay policies on their public websites. My work was also recognised with an award from FT Adviser.
Why did you choose this school’s executive MBA program? I am a Londoner and was proud to choose London Business School as the place to dedicate my near two years of Exec MBA study. The institution is respected globally, and I was privileged to have it on my doorstep, with the campus being a few stops away from my place of work on the London Underground. I also favoured the Friday/Saturday format – this was the most practical way for me to juggle the demands of the MBA with my work.
What is the biggest lesson you gained during your MBA and how did you apply it at work? I have gained so many! But the most profound is probably not linked to any particular subject area. The Exec MBA experience has taught me that you really should be brave enough to have the audacity to live the life you want. It’s an obvious point that the MBA helps people excel in their careers, but I have been inspired by the challenge put to us to consider the life we want and design our careers to enable it. It sounds idealistic, maybe unrealistic, but the many transformations I have witnessed from LBS alumni is confirmation that it is indeed possible.
Give us a story during your time as an executive MBA on how you were able to juggle work, family and education? The juggle is real and EMBAs bond over war scars of the juggle! It’s been a combination of strategic decisions to enable me to balance work and study and quite frankly flying by the seat of my pants at times!
When I started my MBA, I was happy to be able to promote a colleague to become a manager. This enabled me to delegate the day-to-day management of the team I was leading to someone else who was competent. Working for a global organisation also allowed me to tag on working weeks after the electives I took in Dubai and in the US, which was a valuable way of connecting with colleagues and stakeholders in our different markets. I even combined a business project into an elective, working alongside a member of faculty, which allowed me to progress both work and my MBA simultaneously.
But I also have memories of sprinting from the office at 3:30pm to make a 4pm lecture, waking up at 5:30am on Saturdays to make lectures and attempting to chair a work virtual townhall to our global colleagues from a meeting room at LBS as I had a lecture straight after.
The moment that always reminds me of the extent of my commitment to my studies was being questioned by my 5-year-old daughter about whether I was ‘going to uni’ when leaving the house and her being confused when I told her I was going to work because she didn’t know I worked! For all the efforts I have made over the years to empower women in the workplace it was ironic that my own daughter didn’t even know her mother had a job…
What was your biggest regret in business school? I don’t really have any major regrets, but if pushed I would say I wish I hadn’t worried so much about all the reading and assignment deadlines when I felt that I was lagging behind. I always came through in the end and I consistently impressed myself with the positive feedback on my work from professors. I wouldn’t sweat the small stuff as much.
Which MBA classmate do you most admire? My cohort is one of the best things about my MBA. I was lucky to be among a group of people who were talented, supportive, inspiring, and most importantly always down for having fun! I can choose so many who inspire me, but I will mention Zoe Prothero from my study group. She is open about coming from a humble working-class background and being told by a careers advisor at school that the best she could be was a footballer’s wife…she went on to manage Premier League football talent and chart-topping music talent, as well as leading marketing for some of the world’s most famous brands. And this was all before starting her Executive MBA…
What was the main reason you chose an executive MBA program over part-time or online alternatives? An online MBA would never be for me, and I really feel for people who were forced online during COVID. I get energy from other people and the in-person connections have been some of the best parts of my MBA journey. I was in a leadership role when I was considering my MBA so the part-time version made sense – it meant my career didn’t have to stop, but more importantly, I could apply what I learned in class straight away at work. I saw the value add and so did my colleagues.
What is your ultimate long-term professional goal? With the philosophy that you pick up at LBS that you should have the audacity to live the life you want and design your career around that, I have quite a broad and eclectic view of what professional success looks like for me. Ultimately, I want to use my career to enable new experiences for me and make a positive social impact. During my time doing the MBA, I have pivoted out of communications and into a role focused on strategy, with a birds-eye view of running a global organisation given how closely I work with the CEO. I’ve worked more closely with people in different markets at work and within my MBA cohort, become fascinated by the opportunities for tech to solve our problems through my trip to Silicon Valley, and worked closely with start-ups. I’d like to take aspects of all these experiences forward in my career – I like to focus on the skills and expertise I can bring and the problems I can solve, rather than dream ‘job-titles’.
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