The EMBA route: From lawyer to director
"Ultimately it was a combination of the reputation of the school, the modular format and the very high work experience requirement which made me decide on MBS -people who apply for the Melbourne Business School EMBA are not 26 year-old accountants, they are people with a lot more accumulated work experience."
Sibylle Krieger
Member of the Independent Pricing & Regulatory Tribunal of NSW, (former partner, Clayton Utz 1990-2007, former partner Baker & McKenzie 1986 - 1990, director Sydney Ports Corporation 2002 - 2005)
Sibylle Krieger is an experienced commercial lawyer with more recent experience as a company director and economic regulator.
She is pursuing her EMBA as part of her transition from legal practice to non-executive directorships primarily in the for-profit sector but also in the not-for-profit sector.
As well as undertaking the EMBA, Sibylle is currently one of three members of the NSW state regulatory tribunal IPART. The tribunal regulates pricing for government monopoly services such as water, transport and electricity prices in addition to dealing with a number of ad hoc inquiries, involving things as diverse as the state taxation system and the financial viability of the registered clubs industry.
It's quite a change from what she did for almost 30 years as a full-time solicitor practising in private practice, the last 22 years as a partner in 2 major law firms.
She started thinking about pursuing an EMBA in 2003 after accepting a three-year appointment as non-executive director on the board of Sydney Ports Corporation, a NSW state-owned corporation responsible for regulation of commercial shipping on Sydney Harbour and owner of the container port at Port Botany.
At that time she did the intensive residential version of the Australian Institute of Company Directors' course. She says, "I enjoyed that and started thinking that perhaps I should take it further and do an MBA. But if I had started an MBA then, I would have been doing second year at the same time as my daughter's Year 12."
Sibylle chose MBS for two reasons. She says, it has a high ranking and is highly regarded, not only in Australia but overseas as well. Second, it offered the EMBA program in the modular format which allowed her to balance her personal and professional commitments.
"Ultimately it was a combination of the reputation of the school, the modular format and the very high work experience requirement which made me decide on MBS - people who apply for the Melbourne Business School EMBA are not 26 year-old accountants, they are people with a lot more accumulated work experience," she says. "The intensive residential model also appealed to me rather than evening or weekend lectures."
"I wanted a structured program that could round out my experience. It's been fantastic from the point of view of joining the dots - giving me a lot more information about things I'd heard of but never really knew much detail about and it's given me that information in a structured seamless way."
"A lot of what we do on the tribunal, for example, is to regulate the revenue which monopoly services are entitled to earn. This involves looking at their assets. Base-assets are valued on a discounted cash flow basis-and we look at weighted average cost of capital and all the concepts we deal with in an MBA program. Of course there are economists and analysts who crunch the numbers but the EMBA has given me a much clearer understanding of the significance of those calculations, how they come about and their future implications for the various agencies we regulate."
Undergraduate degree: LLB (Hons), Adelaide University, 1978, LLM (Masters), Columbia University, New York, 1985, GAICD, EMBA Class of 2009
