Cam Pegg
Fordham University, Gabelli School of Business
Age: 49
“Australian living in NYC, strategist, lifelong learner. Obsessed with complex problems and clear thinking.”
Hometown: Brisbane, Queensland
Family Members: Belinda (spouse)
Fun fact about yourself: I’ve received more than 40 stitches in my lower lip due to two different mishaps playing cricket.
Undergraduate School and Degree: Queensland University of Technology; Bachelor of Business
Where are you currently working? Critical Mass; Senior Vice President, Strategy
Extracurricular Activities, Community Work and Leadership Roles: Gabelli School of Business Dean’s List Award (4.0 GPA); Gabelli School of Business Executive MBA Excellence Award; Gabelli Executive Leadership Club (Secretary); Gabelli Toastmasters Club.
Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? By maintaining a 4.0 while holding down a senior professional role and keeping a functioning home life, I learned that what I’d thought of as full capacity had more slack in it than I could see. The EMBA sharpened how I used my time at work, at home, and in class. As I found out, capacity tends to expand under pressure rather than collapse. This has changed how I think about my own performance and how I coach the people I lead.
What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? In 2016, my wife and I left stable jobs in Melbourne and moved to New York to see if we could push our careers further in the United States. With ninety days to find an employer willing to sponsor me – and a network I could count on one hand – it was, in hindsight, probably a little imprudent. However, it quickly got me focused on what I wanted, what I was good at, and how to make the case for myself to people who’d never heard of me. I made the move before I knew it would work out, and I’m proud of having taken that risk and made it happen.
Who was your favorite MBA professor? Sertan Kabadayi, who taught our first-semester marketing course and later supervised our capstone in Tokyo. His course was grounded in his own work on service design, and his introduction of frameworks like Porter’s work on shared value helped coalesce my thinking around what the role of business in society actually is. His teaching style also helped: the mix of Socratic-style dialogue paired with examples chosen to illuminate the underlying concepts rather than the standard “what happened and what can we learn from it” set of case studies made the course content much more impactful. He was a steady sounding board in Tokyo too, with feedback that helped us strengthen and clarify our final presentation.
Why did you choose this school’s executive MBA program? Fordham’s emphasis on purpose-driven leadership lined up with my belief that running an organization is as much an ethical practice as a commercial one. Joining a program designed for senior practitioners rather than early-career students mattered to me as well, and my cohort certainly delivered on that. Everyone brought a breadth of experience to the classroom, and that made the discussions and lessons deeper than they would have been otherwise.
What is the biggest lesson you gained during your MBA and how did you apply it at work? Adding a demanding academic program to a full professional and personal life forced me to make a clearer assessment of (and be much more intentional about) how I use my time. That shift in how I think about allocating time and attention is something that will stick with me long after graduation. It also taught me that what I had thought of as operating at full capacity in the past was a long way short of what I could actually take on.
Give us a story during your time as an executive MBA on how you were able to juggle work, family and education? I tried to adhere to a rule that Friday and Saturday nights were set aside for family/social time, and mostly did. It sounds easy in theory, but in practice, keeping it up when assignments were due, exams were looming, and client work was demanding was harder than I expected. There were many stretches where I was writing papers on planes and trains, jumping on Zoom calls for group projects from hotel rooms after hours, and compressing a week’s worth of work into whatever windows I could find – just so that those two evenings stayed clear.
What advice would you give to a student looking to enter an executive MBA program? Make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons and have set realistic expectations for what you want from the program. But once you’ve made the decision, get involved in everything you can. The stuff that really sticks with you comes from the cohort: the conversations before and after class, the case discussions where someone’s lived experience brings an abstract framework or concept to life, and involvement with the broader school community.
What was your biggest regret in business school? No real regrets, but if I had to pick something, I’d say I maybe engaged with the broader Gabelli community a little later than I could have. I was focused on the program itself and didn’t spend the time getting involved in the wider school network as much as I could have.
What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? AI showed up to some extent in all elements of the program, which wasn’t especially surprising. The key insight for me is that it’s most useful as a means for pressure-testing my arguments by asking a model to find the weakest claim or logical gaps in something I’d written. It can also serve as a sparring partner that argues an opposing case as forcefully as possible. This helped me catch things that I probably wouldn’t have by myself.
What was the main reason you chose an executive MBA program over part-time or online alternatives? I wanted a program that would challenge how I was thinking, in rooms with people who’d push back on ideas from their own experience. That requires in-person interaction, and it requires classmates who’ve done enough to have something worth pushing back with, so the on-campus EMBA was the only real option for me.
How did you finance your EMBA and what did you do to make tuition and associated costs more affordable? I financed my EMBA independently using a combination of Federal student loans, personal savings, and scholarships. It wasn’t a question of making it more affordable so much as making sure I realized as much value from the investment of time and money as I could.
What is your ultimate long-term professional goal? There’s a quote from Ed Catmull’s book, Creativity, Inc, that has stuck with me and shaped how I want to build my career:
“What interests me is the number of people who believe that they have the ability to drive the train and who think that this is the power position—that driving the train is the way to shape their companies’ futures. The truth is, it’s not. Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track. interests me is the number of people who believe that they have the ability to drive the train and who think that this is the power position—that driving the train is the way to shape their companies’ futures. The truth is, it’s not. Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.”
I want to build on my professional and academic experience to move into a senior corporate strategy or advisory role, helping executives set the course for their organizations and solve their most important and difficult challenges. I don’t want to drive the train, I want to lay the tracks. That’s the work I find most interesting, and where I think my combination of strategy practice and operational experience is most useful.
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