Intense!

This week was our first intensive week at Lagos Business School’s Executive MBA 28 class. Two classes, four sessions daily for one week. Tons of materials to read, group meetings, case evaluations.

During our orientation sessions, we were told about the weekly classes and a quarterly intensive week – one week of all day classes. I thought to myself, “ok, it cannot be that bad. I can definitely coast that. I have been through worse and come out the other side.” If only I had known. The name should have given it away. Why did I think that something so obviously named to be anything but what it has been called?

The intensity started building from the week before. Given our regular classes are Friday and Saturday, preparation in the previous week was focused on the class for the week, including case evaluations and studying copious documents on confusing subjects. Meanwhile, I had put away preparation for the intensive week for the weekend, after the classes. What was I thinking?

The weekend arrived and I was exhausted, could not do much more than keep checking time and again the study materials and required reading for the week. Each time, not having the mental strength to study – the feeling when the “spirit is willing, but the body is weak.” I was only able to muster some discipline and determination to look through requirements for the first day or two on Sunday evening.

And so I was grossly underprepared when the week rolled by. The intensity of the week caught me completely off guard. There was little time to do much else between end of classes, catching up on work load, preparing for the next day and catching up with group meetings. I typically do not like the expression, but it well seemed ’24 hours was not enough’. I usually take more than my fair share of coffee, but I do not think I have ever had as much coffee as I had this week in a similar time period. I essentially ran on caffeine the whole week.

“Always work hard. Intensity clarifies. It creates not only momentum, but also the pressure you need to feel either friction, or fulfilment” remarked Marcus Wilfrid Buckingham, an English author, motivational speaker and business consultant. After the week we have had, I think he should have said “…friction [and] fulfilment”. I certainly felt friction at the beginning of the week. It came to a head on Wednesday night when we had to evaluate and submit two cases ahead of the classes later on Thursday. I was exhausted at that point. But when it was all done, after the classes on Thursday, I felt a relief, a feeling that it was all worth it… a feeling of fulfilment. I felt both friction and fulfilment during this intensive week.

But I am not dismayed, in fact I am reinvigorated after this intense week. As the famed American investor, Warren Buffet aptly said, “intensity is the price of excellence.”

The LBS EMBA intensive week is one week investment towards excellence!