Guy Beatson
General Manager, Institute of Directors
Class of 2022
“If you feel like there’s something missing… take naMBA.”
Guy is an experienced senior leader who’s worked in public, private and not-for-profit entities in New Zealand, Fiji, Mongolia, Australia and the United States. His previous senior roles include Deputy Chief Executive, Strategy and Organisation Performance at Te Puni Kōkiri; Deputy Secretary Natural Resources Policy at Ministry for the Environment.
He’s run his own freelance consultancy practice supporting public sector senior executives and their teams to deliver high quality decision-making, advice and policy implementation. He’s even completed an MBA!
At a critical transition point in his career, he felt he needed something more. He enrolled in Not An MBA, and after finding a new sense of confidence and conviction in his leadership, he urges others to do the same.
“If you're feeling like there's something missing, like there’s some ways of thinking about the world that you may not have heard of, that you want to try something different and meet up with a group of like-minded people, then you’d take naMBA.”
For Guy, it was the combination of strategy tools, practical assignments, and the focus on individual development, that boosted his confidence and conviction.
“We got challenged in terms of how we thought about strategy, how we thought about ourselves - and our own self-worth to some extent - and the way in which we gave our own service and generosity to other people.
It’s moved me in the last eight weeks. There’s just a level of confidence and an ability to know that I can serve people.”
Guy laughs as he recalls the moment that the unique Not An MBA learning approach started to come together in his life:
“All of a sudden the things you're being asked to do and the assignments actually become part of the real world and real life! And all of a sudden you find yourself bringing that level of confidence that you don't realise you've gotten, until you're actually in that situation.
There's an element in this of being more up for the challenge, having more courage to take on those things and say: ‘come on, yeah! What’s the worst that can happen?!’”