TRIUM Sailors Put Their Skills to Work
They successfully navigated an international MBA regatta
Adam Rogers (2008) returned home to Geneva from the Global MBA Trophy sailing regatta this spring with a nine-stitch gash across his forehead, a respectable sixth-place finish, and an ambition to capture the cup for TRIUM next year.
For Rogers and his five other TRIUM crewmates, pulling together for a common goal was familiar territory– except this time, the effort was conducted on a pitching sailboat rather than in offices or classrooms. As teammate Miguel de Almeida (2011), a Lisbon-based entrepreneur and partner at Blue Buffalo Enterprises, points out, sailing races and term projects “are very similar. You’re thrust together in TRIUM and you have to do group work, with each person focusing on a specific task. If you don’t perform individually, you let the whole team down. In sailing you lose positions; in business, you lose money.”
Business men and women from across the world, alumni of the world’s leading business schools, participate in the Global MBA Trophy, an international sailing event hosted by London Business School since 2006. Sixteen boats, including crews from Wharton, Bocconi, Insead, and Chicago Booth, competed in this year’s regatta, held April 29 and 30 off the island of Rhodes, Greece.
Rogers, the strategic communications adviser for the Geneva Liaison Office of the United Nations Development Program, signed onto the race after meeting with Elias Gagas (2008) in Athens last year. The idea quickly materialized, and, following a recruitment message, others answered the call, with John Palmer (2011), Erick Blanck (2009), and Todd Wade (2009) making up the rest of the team. In classic TRIUM fashion, everyone fell into a separate role, adding value in critical ways, to make the event happen. HEC, one of the three partner schools in TRIUM, sponsored half the entry fee, while both LSE and NYU Stern, the other two partner schools, contributed with caps and sailing shirts. As for a skipper, says Rogers, “We recognized our capacity gap and hired a local yacht club member.”
Team spirit
The teammates first came together as a group on the eve of the regatta, at the Offshore Sailing Yacht Club of Rhodes. On both race days, the winds were fresh under perfect Aegean skies as the TRIUM team’s 39-foot First-designed craft, Final Decision, successfully navigated four of the five required courses—especially impressive considering the crew had not previously met, much less sailed together. That’s where the TRIUM bond came in, declares Rogers: “Even though we were from three different cohorts, there was an immediate team spirit and pride to be wearing the TRIUM logo.”
Their common EMBA training proved invaluable throughout the race. Says Rogers: “The strategic planning and risk assessment skills I picked up in TRIUM definitely prepared me to function more effectively in both the workplace environment and in sailing – in fact in many aspects of life.”
Experience counts in both types of endeavors. “I was the most inexperienced of the crew,” Rogers reports, “and in true TRIUM fashion, my teammates were quick at teaching me the ropes.” Rogers was injured on day two, when he lost his footing helping to move the mainsail boom as a swell hit the boat. At that point, the seasoned skipper handled the emergency, calling harbor medics and reassigning tasks to the rest of the crew. “It’s the same thing in corporate life,” observes de Almeida, an experienced sailor and all-round sportsman. “If you’re experienced in a particular sector, it becomes part of what you’re doing; you’re more comfortable and know when to jump on opportunities and how to handle crises.”
A useful ice-breaker
Networking at the offshore receptions and dinners was nearly as much a goal for participants as the winning the trophy. Not surprisingly, Rogers’s bandaged forehead served as a particularly effective ice-breaker once the post-race festivities were under way. “We wanted to meet the different cliques from other MBA programs,” Rogers says, “and we ended up as a tight group. I will definitely be keeping up with the contacts I made.”
De Almeida agrees: “This was networking at its most effective. These kinds of initiatives are important for the MBA community as a whole to take part in, and they bring out how singular these courses are. You can share and network, and there’s always a special bond. In our particular case, the fact that we had been in TRIUM also allowed us to gel as a team. That is an extremely powerful tool in a global corporate environment.”
TRIUM will be permitted to enter two boats in next spring’s Global MBA Trophy regatta, and Rogers is already working to obtain his skipper’s license. “Whether it be sailing or running a business, you just need to know the ropes, the external environment, and be part of a good team. If all those fit together with the proper portions of passion, patience, and perseverance,” he says alliteratively, “then success is sure – even if you don’t manage to end up in first place.” Though, he allows, that would be nice.
