Mr Hadley, who grew up in the UK and South Africa, moved to Dubai in 2007 ahead of the opening of the Mediclinic City Hospital. Despite a heavy workload, he embarked on an MBA and found it influenced his immediate business decisions – notably, adding a maternity ward to the under-construction hospital. Here he describes the gruelling schedule of doing an MBA while working full-time – and how it paid off in the form of his 2009 promotion.
Why was it important for you to do an MBA?
How did the course help your business?
You do tens of business plans when you're doing an MBA, and I revisited the business plan that we bought into when we came to Dubai to build the City Hospital. The City Hospital would have been built with no maternity and no neonatal unit, I realised that Dubai is a very young population with lots of child-bearing-age expatriates. So we added a maternity unit to the business while we were still building it. And that accounts for 30 per cent of that hospital's revenue. If we hadn't done that I don't think that hospital would still be existing.
The Arab entrepreneur Fadi Ghandour has advised against budding entrepreneurs attending business school. What do you make of that?
How did you manage to schedule your MBA while working at Mediclinic?
I was working full-time, and then after work I'd just start studying. I'd basically finish work at 5 or 6pm, and then I'd start studying until midnight, – I did that five days a week. And on the weekends I did it for 12 hours. So it was about an extra 40 to 50 hours a week of studying, and you had to find that time from somewhere. So it put a lot of pressure on my family, it was tough. But it was worth it.
You studied for your MBA online. What are the pros and cons of that?
I preferred it. I'm quite a forthright, straightforward-speaking person. But many people are not. In a classroom setting people don't always give their views. But in an online setting people can challenge you regardless of who or what you are, because they feel safe in their own home. The downside is the lack of personal interaction with people, but I found that made me more productive. So I didn't sit and chitchat about how their weekends were, we just went straight to the job, which is necessary when you're working full-time.
How broad are the skills you learnt on the MBA? Could you turn around now and do something completely different such as launch a construction company?
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