How Yale SOM’s EMBA Program Transformed My Career

When I began the Yale SOM EMBA program, I didn’t know I would eventually create an entirely new role at CBRE, the global commercial real estate firm where I’ve worked for five years. I also didn’t fully understand the internal drive that was pushing me, or why my vision felt bigger than the role I was in prior to SOM. What I did know was that something in me had outgrown the purely operational version of sustainability I’d been practicing for over a decade. I had moved major levers at Amazon, WeWork, and CBRE, but I kept running into the same ceiling: sustainability was always interpreted as a cost center. I wanted to show the world, and myself, that it could be something entirely different.

SOM’s MBA for Executives (EMBA) program provided the intellectual spark, the confidence, the vocabulary, and the business architecture that allowed me to turn that instinct into something real.

That change didn’t happen immediately. In my first months as an EMBA student in 2023, I kept approaching problems the same way I always had: by outworking them. But something wasn’t connecting. I was performing well, but inside I still felt like I needed to “earn my way” into every room. I had the capability and the ambition of a founder, but I was still behaving like a high-performing advisor.

Two things shifted this. First, Professor David Tate’s Leadership Practicum helped me to understand that this mindset was limiting my growth. Second, the conversations with my classmates, especially those in finance, confronted me with an uncomfortable truth: I had been solving the wrong problem. Sustainability wasn’t broken because the ideas were weak; it was broken because the incentives, financial framing, and capital-allocation logic behind it were incomplete.

What ultimately enabled me to reorient my thinking was SOM’s unique curriculum, which helped me develop a truly interdisciplinary understanding of my work:

• Modeling Managerial Decisions gave me the analytical language to think about incentives, uncertainty, and decision frameworks in a way sustainability practitioners rarely do.
• Game Theory and Market Design reshaped how I view negotiations between utilities, markets, and clients, and how to spot value that others miss.
• Negotiations gave me a new approach to engaging with clients, internal stakeholders, and utilities, teaching me that value creation often starts with understanding asymmetries of information and preferences.
• Operations Engine helped me scale my efforts, accomplishing what I needed to accomplish better and faster than before.
• The Workforce, The Customer, and Leading Small & Medium Enterprises gave me the tools to talk credibly about organizational design, customer acquisition, and value proposition.
• ESG Controller and Investment Management were the tipping point. ESG Controller helped me understand the decades-long struggle to bridge sustainability and conventional finance. Investment Management, which I actually audited without being formally enrolled, allowed me to understand sustainability through the lens of capital allocation and risk-adjusted return.

About halfway through the program, during a long plane ride home from a class weekend, I realized that all the threads were converging. I remember thinking that I was now capable of integrating capital allocation, risk management, utility rate structures, regulatory pressure, and operational performance into one unified solution model. In that moment, it felt like my entire career experiences up to that point condensed into a single solution the world needed, and that I was uniquely positioned to solve. That was the moment I drafted the first version of the proposal that would eventually make its way to CBRE’s C-suite.

This proposal didn’t look like a sustainability plan. It looked like a financial operating system for energy. And without SOM’s curriculum, I would not have been able to write it. I didn’t just borrow ideas from classes; I built the entire model out of them.

One of the deepest shifts I experienced at Yale wasn’t academic; it was personal. Managing work, family, and school revealed how much of my ambition I had been hiding behind being “useful.” My classmates saw abilities in me that I hadn’t fully owned yet. Over time, that changed. I stopped trying to “earn” my way into the rooms where decisions are made, and instead started acting like someone who belonged there. The most meaningful part? My kids got to watch me work, study, push, and grow. They saw their dad build something new, not just for a company, but for the next chapter of his life.

By the time I presented the final version of my strategy to CBRE’s C-suite, I wasn’t pitching an initiative. I was presenting a vision for an entirely new function—financial intelligence, energy, and utilities—which I ended up leading.

That function wasn’t created for me; I created it because the idea was compelling enough to need an owner. SOM gave me the ability to articulate the business case, build the financial logic, identify the operational gaps, and connect all the pieces into a strategic blueprint that an executive team could say yes to.

Ultimately, the EMBA program didn’t just get me a new job. It gave me a new lens, a new level of confidence, a new strategic vocabulary, and a new understanding of what I am capable of building. It taught me how to integrate disciplines, navigate complexity, and design systems that create economic and social value simultaneously. More than anything, SOM helped me step fully into the leadership position I had already been growing into, and gave me the platform and community to turn that into something real.

For prospective students who want to transform not just what they do but how they think, SOM is the difference between incremental change and a complete redefinition of trajectory.