What changes when the CEO becomes a student again

I did the Oxford Executive Leadership Programme, at Saïd Business School, in 2023. The part that stayed with me wasn't the content — much of it I already practiced day to day. It was the position.

When you're Co-CEO, it's rare to be in a room where you're not expected to have the answer. In the programme, I was a student again, alongside executives from different parts of the world, each with a context completely unlike mine. No one there was impressed by the size of my operation. That forces you to defend your ideas by the argument, not the title — and it quickly exposes the convictions you never actually examined, only repeated.

The real gain of a programme like that, for someone who has led for a while, isn't learning a new technique. It's the distance: stepping out of the operation long enough to look at your own leadership style from the outside and ask what in it is effective and what is just a habit that has worked so far.

[FILL IN before publishing: a concrete, specific thing you took from the programme into your day to day — something you started doing differently afterward. This paragraph is what turns the piece from a report into content.]

I didn't leave there a different person. I left with better questions about how I lead — and with a network of people who see the same problems from places I'd never reach on my own.