Diego Salama
Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Age: 36
Hometown: Cochabamba, Bolivia
“An idealist masquerading as a cynic who is, secretly, an optimist.”
Fun fact about yourself: I lose my glasses so often that I completed roughly half of the EMBA through educated guessing.
Undergraduate School and Degree:
BA, Liberal Arts, University College Maastricht
MA, International Relations, Leiden University
PhD, History of International Relations, Leiden University
Where are you currently working? Head of Partnerships & Communications at the United Nations University (UNU-MERIT)
Extracurricular Activities, Community Work and Leadership Roles: I serve as a visiting lecturer at Universidad Privada Boliviana in Bolivia, where I teach international relations. It is one of the activities I am most proud of. The university was co-founded by my father, so teaching there carries a meaning that goes beyond the professional. Being able to bring something back to Bolivian students at an institution that is part of my family’s history brings me great joy.
Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? Two things pull in opposite directions.
The first is that I used almost every assignment as an excuse to systematically think through problems I was already facing at work. The modules on strategy, marketing, and system entrepreneurship did not feel like coursework. They felt like structured thinking time on questions that actually mattered. Some of that work fed directly into how I approach my role. That felt like a rare alignment between a degree and a job, and I did not take it for granted.
The second is simpler and more personal. I had never studied business finance, accounting, or analytics. Not once. Sitting in those sessions as someone with three degrees in the humanities and international relations was genuinely uncomfortable. I engaged with the material in earnest, accepted that I was going to struggle, and learned more in those courses than in almost any others. The grade was not the point. Getting to the other side of something genuinely foreign was.
What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? Working inside the United Nations means accepting that most things move slowly, and learning to find meaning in that reality rather than against it. That took time, but I now think incrementalism is not a consolation prize. It is the actual work.
The moments I am most proud of are not dramatic. They are the government training sessions that actually changed how an official thinks about a problem; the partnership agreements that took months to negotiate were then held; and the small decisions that compound into something an institution can stand behind.
More recently, as a member of the UNU Global Communications Group, I have contributed to developing and adopting a global communications strategy across the UN University system. Playing a role in something that reaches beyond my own institution and shapes how a network of research institutes speaks to the world is the kind of work I find genuinely satisfying. It is not because my name is on it, but because it matters and it lasted.
Who was your favourite MBA professor? Choosing one feels like a disservice to three teachers who each changed something in how I think.
Thomas Bourveau made accounting genuinely interesting. I approached the subject with some dread, but he approached it not as a compliance exercise, but rather as a lens on disclosure, incentives, and how organisations signal what they value. That reframing stuck.
Eero Vaara shifted how I think about strategy. His work on narrative and discourse showed me that strategy is not just a plan on a slide. It is an act of communication, and how you tell the story shapes what becomes possible. For someone working in institutional communications, that bridge between theory and practice was unusually direct.
Chris McKenna reminded us that institutions have histories, and that you cannot understand where something is going if you have no idea where it came from. His sessions felt less like business school and more like intellectual archaeology. For someone who works inside a UN institution and thinks about its long-term legitimacy, that framing was more useful than any framework.
Why did you choose Saïd’s executive MBA program? There are three reasons and they are all still true.
The first is Oxford itself. I wanted to study at the best university in the world and to step inside its history and stand on the shoulders of giants. That is not a small thing, and I did not want to pretend otherwise.
The second is the cohort. I work in a mission-driven organisation, and I wanted a program that took that seriously, where people doing similar work would feel at home. But I also wanted to sit next to people whose professional world looks nothing like mine. Saïd offered both. The diversity is real, and so is the sense that there is room for people who are not coming from finance or consulting.
The third is the residential week format. Spending a full week in Oxford for each module is an extraordinary privilege. It is how you build the relationships that last. You have time to engage properly with the faculty, talk past midnight with your cohort, and let the place work on you. That cannot be replicated in a weekend format or online, and I knew that before I arrived.
What is the biggest lesson you gained during your MBA, and how did you apply it at work? That the formal programme, as well designed as it is, is perhaps twenty per cent of the value. The rest are the people.
I arrived knowing that relationships matter. As I begin to look towards the end of the EMBA, I value them even more. There is something that happens when you spend intense weeks in Oxford with people from across sectors and countries, working through hard problems together, that no curriculum can manufacture. Friendships form. Trust builds quickly. And those connections turn out to be genuinely consequential, not in a transactional way, but in the way that having people who understand your work and believe in you changes what you think is possible.
I applied this directly. My network grew, became more diverse and more useful in the real sense of that word. Working in a research institute inside the UN system, where partnerships and external relationships are the lifeblood of the institution, that shift was not abstract. It changed how I approach my role.
Relationships matter more than ever before. The EMBA made that a fact I could evidence, not just something I believed.
Give us a story about how you juggled work, family and education during your EMBA. The honest answer is that the balancing act never fully resolves. You find a rhythm, and then something breaks it.
Travel costs more than people expect. Getting to and from Oxford, and doing it repeatedly across a programme of this length, accumulates. The absences from work accumulate, too. After a while, you are not just managing your own schedule, but managing the perception that you are still present, still reliable, still on top of things.
The moment that captures it best: the day after my accounting exam, a Monday, I had to fly from the UK to the Netherlands at seven in the morning to meet my incoming Director, then fly back the same evening to be in Oxford for the rest of the week. It was logistically absurd and genuinely stressful. Not the kind of stress that feels productive.
But when I came back to Oxford that evening and found my cohort at the pub, asking how it had gone and whether I was alright, that was something else entirely. That warmth was not something I had expected from a business school programme. It reminded me why the whole thing was worth the strain.
The juggling is real. So is the support. Both are part of the story.
What advice would you give to a student looking to enter an executive MBA program? Find a programme that genuinely resonates with you, not one that ranks well on a list someone else made. You will know the difference when you visit, when you meet the people, and when something about the place feels right. Trust that instinct.
And then go for it, even if the timing feels imperfect, because it always will.
The EMBA is one of the most eye-opening experiences available to people who have been out of formal education for years. You will not learn something new in every session. That is not the point. The point is that you will learn about yourself, how you think, where your assumptions sit, and what you actually believe when someone challenges it properly. That is rarer and more valuable than any specific module.
You will also meet some of the most extraordinary people you have ever encountered. That alone is worth every penny and then some.
What is one way your business school has integrated AI into its programming? The honest answer is that integration remains a work in progress. Most of our assessments are written papers, and the assumption, reasonable for now, is that students write them. Some professors have taken the initiative to discuss how AI can be used responsibly and productively. Others have not yet made that leap. Both responses are understandable.
What this revealed to me is a broader tension that universities everywhere are navigating. You cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube. AI is present in every professional environment, including the ones EMBA students return to after every residential week. The question is not whether to engage with it but how to do so in a way that preserves what education is actually for.
For a programme like the EMBA, where students have invested significantly and are genuinely motivated, I do not think the concern is that people want to outsource their thinking. The concern is that the rules have not kept pace with reality. That requires systematic conversation between students and institutions, leading to new norms rather than blanket restrictions or blanket permissiveness.
Universities are custodians of paradigms that have held for centuries. It is entirely normal for them to feel uncertain. But uncertainty is not an excuse to avoid the conversation.
Why did you choose an executive MBA over part-time or online alternatives? Online was never a serious option. I wanted to be in the place, with the people, fully present. That is not a preference about format. It is a preference about what education actually is.
The residential week structure at Saïd gave me something I could not have found in a hybrid or part-time model: genuine immersion in Oxford, in the cohort and the ideas. The relationships that came out of those weeks are the most valuable thing I take from this programme, and they required being physically present, repeatedly, over time. You cannot manufacture that at a distance.
How did you finance your EMBA? I was fortunate to receive the Rewley Scholarship from the University of Oxford, which partially funded my participation. My institution also supported me by giving me the time and the latitude to attend. That kind of institutional trust is nothing. Both made this possible.
What is your ultimate long-term professional goal? I want to continue serving in the United Nations in a role where I can contribute to multilateral work that I believe still matters, even when the institutions themselves are under strain. I also want to remain in the academic world alongside that, publishing, contributing, and eventually teaching. If I were able to teach at Saïd one day, that would feel like something worth having worked toward.
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