My Real University Exam
The three-layer degree in microeconomics, corporate fantasy, and multilateral madness
When people ask where I studied, I usually give the polite answer — the university, the degree, the distinction. It keeps conversations tidy. But the truth is that my real university exam didn’t take place in a lecture hall or library.
It happened years later, in a slightly draughty office in Chichester with a dodgy kettle, creaking radiators, and a team of determined people producing the sort of global market intelligence corporations and international organisations used to steer billion-dollar decisions. They believed they were creating clarity for the whole world. Which, as it happens, they were.
There was no professor, no syllabus, and certainly no resits. The exam was continuous, involuntary, and surprisingly geopolitical. Because the moment you run a small company serving global corporations and multilateral organisations, you realise you’re sitting at the intersection of microeconomics, macro strategy, and institutional theatre — all while keeping an eye on next month’s bank balance.
This was my real education.
This was my real degree.
And God help me, I passed - just!
MODULE 1: THE CHICHESTER ENGINE ROOM — MICROECONOMICS WITH TEETH
The first part of my “coursework” was the monthly P&L, which I came to regard as a spiritual discipline. Far more demanding than any exam I’d taken before. One wrong assumption and the whole thing veered into a kind of numerical abyss where VAT, payroll, and supplier invoices converged like the Four Horsemen of the Financial Apocalypse.
Meanwhile, the team around me — clever, grounded, proud of their craft — were producing world-class clarity for clients on every continent. They weren’t mere office staff. They were artisans of precision. They took pride in what they built. And that pride was, in many ways, the engine of the whole operation.
But here’s the truth nobody tells you:
The big picture and the fine detail cannot coexist inside one human skull.
I could hold the strategic arc — the world, the markets, the geopolitical machinery — or I could produce the graphs, tables, and polished words. I couldn’t do both at the same time. Not while managing the P&L, the budgets, the five-year forecast, and the daily existential question of whether the kettle would survive another quarter.
And they, for their part, couldn’t hold the global picture and worry about rent, school fees, deadlines, and the quiet terror of formatting a 63-page report five minutes before a courier arrived.
So we lived in a kind of productive interdependence.
Not by design — by necessity.
In fact, the best explanation for how we functioned isn’t managerial. It’s quantum:
“At Chichester HQ, our organisational model resembled quantum mechanics:
if any one of us stopped believing in the mission for more than 48 hours,
the entire company risked collapsing into a spreadsheet singularity.”
People talk endlessly about alignment. What we had was something more fragile and infinitely more meaningful:
“We didn’t have alignment — we had quantum resonance.
One misaligned ambition and the whole thing would collapse like a badly-timed soufflé.”
This wasn’t leadership theory.
It was physics.
And mostly, we made it work.
MODULE 2: DEALING WITH BIG COMPANIES — THE CORPORATE MACRO FANTASY
The second part of my “degree” involved global corporations — the kind with offices in 50 countries and procurement departments that consider “value” a philosophical concept.
Corporate clients always wanted certainty. Not ordinary certainty — five-year certainty. Preferably wrapped in charts, coloured arrows, and a confidence level the human brain cannot produce without medication.
They wanted intelligence extending to 2030.
Meanwhile, on my end, I was forecasting whether we could afford new office chairs.
It was a glorious contrast.
Their macro-fantasy.
My micro-reality.
And between us, the delicate financial bridge of an invoice.
Then came procurement — a marvellous profession where intelligent people enter a trance-like state and begin speaking in abstract nouns:
“Value optimisation frameworks.”
“Strategic cost-alignment pathways.”
“Deliverables synergies.”
I always wanted to reply:
“Our synergy is that we do the work and you pay for it. Let’s not overcomplicate matters.”
But corporate life has rules, so I nodded politely and pretended their spreadsheets were encoded scriptures rather than the fever dreams of an overworked analyst.
The real comedy was the clarity paradox:
They wanted perfect, objective, uncensored intelligence…
right up until the moment it contradicted their internal politics.
Then they wanted the adjusted version — the one that quietly avoided certain realities.
Our team, too proud for that nonsense, delivered the clarity anyway.
And funnily enough, they always came back.
Somewhat sheepishly.
Often with bigger contracts.
Corporate fantasy, it turns out, relies heavily on small groups of people in provincial offices who actually care.
MODULE 3: THE MULTILATERAL MINEFIELD — UN, WORLD BANK, WTO
If global corporations were demanding, multilateral organisations were something else entirely.
Working with the UN, the World Bank, and the WTO was like stepping into a parallel universe where the laws of physics remained intact but the laws of economics took a long holiday.
This is where my Academic friend became critical.
He taught me how academics think — which is to say, he prevented me from being thrown out of international buildings for using the English language in a direct and comprehensible manner.
He’d quietly whisper:
“Eric, what they mean is that your analysis is too clear.”
“Eric, you need more footnotes.”
“Eric, they’re suspicious because your argument makes sense.”
These places run on performative complexity.
If something is explainable in one sentence, it is immediately distrusted.
If it is shorter than 60 pages, it is dismissed as lacking intellectual vigour.
And if an ordinary human can understand it — well, it must be wrong.
Then we come to the great multilateral paradox:
They wanted global intelligence.
They needed global intelligence.
But for reasons lost to history, they did not want to pay for global intelligence.
So we developed a delicate dance:
give them enough insight to satisfy their committees
provide enough substance to prove value
and subtly demonstrate to paying clients why they should continue paying
A kind of economic aikido.
It worked surprisingly well.
MODULE 4: THE THREE-LAYER ECONOMIC TRIANGLE
At some point I realised I wasn’t running a business.
I was sitting at the centre of a three-layer economic triangle:
My own P&L — merciless, monthly, and utterly real
Global companies — strategic fantasies backed by large budgets
Global organisations — academic idealism backed by someone else’s budget
And I had to bridge all three systems while staying solvent, sane, and at least vaguely civilised.
No MBA teaches this.
And if they tried, nobody would believe them.
MODULE 5: THE REAL CURRICULUM OF MY EXAM
What did I actually learn?
Leadership, as practised by people who don’t have time for leadership books
Diplomacy, in the face of procurement departments and economists
The art of explaining things that ought to be obvious
How to build clarity from noise
How to keep morale alive on a cold Tuesday in February while forecasting Q4 revenues
That people who care will outperform people with large titles every single time
What did my team learn?
Pride matters
Craft matters
Clarity matters
A small group of aligned, sane humans can do more than a hundred committees
And what did global institutions learn?
That clarity often comes from people they’ve never met
In towns they’ve never visited
On budgets they’ve never considered
And that intelligence is not a commodity — it’s a craft
CONCLUSION — AND WHY THIS WAS MY REAL UNIVERSITY EXAM
Looking back, this wasn’t a job.
It was a full-spectrum education in:
human ambition
limited resources
global complexity
financial peril
organisational psychology
diplomacy
strategy
and the quantum physics of keeping a small team aligned
Keynes would have approved.
Labour politicians would have taken credit.
Global organisations would still ask for another free copy.
And corporations would still negotiate a discount.
But here’s the truth:
This was my real university exam —
the only one where you pass by staying sane
and fail by collapsing the wave-function before payroll.
And perhaps that’s why so much of what I write now circles back to these same themes: clarity in a noisy world, the strange mechanics of human ambition, and the quiet courage it takes to hold things together when no one else can see the wiring. The lessons never stayed in the office. They followed me into every other part of life — and into everything I’ve written since. They’re the connective tissue, the pattern beneath the pattern.
I sometimes think every story I’ve written since — whether about technology, politics, geopolitics, chaos theory, or the oddities of modern life — really comes from this same crucible. Once you’ve survived a small office balancing global expectations on a monthly P&L, everything else becomes commentary.
The coherence was there all along; it just took me years to see it.
Brilliant framing of the three-layer education most MBA programs never capture. The clarity paradox part rings painfully tru - seen it at a hedge fund where aanlysts spent months on market intel, only to have it shelved when it conflicted with existing positions. What made this piece stick for me is the subtlety around productive interdependence - that quantum resonance idea. There's something about small teams with aligned incentives that just outperforms large, politically fragmented orgs every time.