Last month, on the radio program Isabelle, which airs on FM 98.5, Serge Postigo (EMBA 2015), actor, director and producer, was interviewed by Marie-Claude Lavallée. During the interview, she asked him a number of questions about his recent experience as a McGill-HEC Montréal EMBA participant.
Listen to the interview (in French).
In a nutshell, they discussed the relevance of going back to school at 47 years of age, when you are already well-established and have a great career. Serge explained how lucky he felt to have gone back to school. He felt it was important to feel incompetent again – that it’s a feeling we rarely have when we are in our 40’s. He explained how insecure he felt, surrounded by CFOs, engineers, CEOs, and other very accomplished people as classmates, how he considers himself extremely lucky to have had this experience and that it did him a lot of good.
He also spoke about how the challenge of going back to school, at a graduate degree level. What helped him were the people around him: the program team and their rigorous but human approach, and the diverse people he met as classmate, from who he learned a lot and with whom he shared a lot. One of the learnings that he stays front and center for him is that people “Manage as they are” (On gère comme on est.) This wisdom, shared by Laurent Lapierre, the patron of Serge’s EMBA class and a renowned management thinker, was eye-opening for Serge since. As he said, “we don’t manage companies, we don’t manage schedules, we don’t manage money, we only manage one thing; people. It’s people that impact the money and all the other elements of business.”
