When Olanike Salau left Lagos for London, she wasn’t just changing time zones-she was stepping onto one of the most competitive stages in global business education. Now a member of the London Business School MBA Class of 2027, Salau embodies the international ambition and professional pivot that have long defined LBS. In this Poets&Quants profile, we explore how her journey from Nigeria’s corporate corridors to the heart of London’s financial and innovation hub reflects the evolving face of MBA talent-and what her story reveals about where business education, and future leadership, are headed.
Inside Olanike Salau path to London Business School and what attracted her to the MBA
For Olanike Salau,the road to Regent’s Park began in Lagos traffic,not in a polished boardroom. As a product strategist in a fast-scaling fintech, she learned to translate complex data into simple decisions for first-time digital customers, often drafting product roadmaps from the backseat of ride-shares between client visits. That improvisational rigor shaped her MBA ambitions: she wanted a program that treated global business as a living laboratory rather than a casebook abstraction. After benchmarking schools across three continents, she was drawn to London’s status as a financial and innovation hub, and to the way LBS wove real-world experimentation into its curriculum. A single visit to campus-where her coffee chat with a second-year student turned into an impromptu tour of the library and a debate on African venture funding-confirmed that this was not just a place to study markets, but a place to be in the middle of them.
What ultimately sealed her decision was the intersection of community, curriculum, and career acceleration. LBS offered a blend that matched both her analytical instincts and her desire to build products for underserved markets:
- Location with leverage: Proximity to global banks, impact investors, and rising tech firms in London’s ecosystem.
- Global classroom: A cohort where emerging-market operators, ex-consultants, and former founders share the same project teams.
- Flexible design: Electives and internships structured so she can pivot from fintech operations into broader growth and strategy roles.
- Network density: Access to alumni shaping policy, scaling startups, and leading innovation units across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
| Key Goal | LBS Advantage |
| Bridge African fintech and global capital | London finance & impact investing scene |
| Deepen strategic toolkit | Analytics-heavy core and tech-focused electives |
| Build a cross-border career | Diverse cohort and regional alumni clubs |
How a background in strategy and social impact shapes Salau classroom contributions at LBS
In classrooms overlooking Regent’s Park, Salau threads her experience in corporate strategy and social innovation into case discussions that might otherwise stay purely theoretical. When peers are dissecting a market-entry plan, she pushes the debate beyond margin expansion to consider stakeholder incentives, regulatory realities, and community impact. Her questions often start with, “Who gains, who loses, and over what time horizon?”-a lens honed from years working with mission-driven organizations. This lets her challenge conventional assumptions about “success,” turning strategy sessions into rigorous explorations of both viability and obligation. In syndicate meetings, she is known for connecting financial models to human outcomes, grounding complex spreadsheets in the lives they ultimately affect.
Salau’s presence is also felt in how she structures collaboration. Drawing on her background in cross-sector partnerships, she nudges teams to adopt tools from the impact space-such as theory-of-change mapping and inclusive stakeholder design-when they tackle consulting projects or entrepreneurship assignments. Her classmates see strategy frameworks applied not just to Fortune 500 boardrooms but to rural health initiatives and youth employment ventures. This dual fluency is especially visible in her contributions to group work and club activities:
- Reframing cases to include long-term social and environmental risk.
- Bridging silos between impact-focused and commercially driven classmates.
- Introducing impact metrics alongside customary KPIs in team deliverables.
- Modeling stakeholder engagement as a core strategic capability, not a PR add-on.
| Dimension | Salau’s Lens | Classroom Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Case Analysis | Profit + purpose | Richer debate |
| Team Projects | Cross-sector mindset | More nuanced solutions |
| Leadership Style | Inclusive and data-driven | Higher engagement |
Navigating London Business School culture Salau tips for maximizing academics recruiting and networking
Straddling academic rigor with the pulse of a global city requires intentional choices from day one. Olanike frames her week around “anchor commitments” – core courses, study-group meetings, and recruiting milestones – and then layers in the serendipity that defines the school’s social life.She recommends treating the first term like a living lab: experiment with different class participation styles, volunteer to lead a case discussion, and rotate roles within your study group to build range. On campus, she leans into the diversity of her cohort by using breaks and post-class walks to ask classmates about industries and regions she doesn’t know, turning casual chats into micro-career treks. To avoid being overwhelmed, she blocks “no-event evenings” into her calendar, guarding time for deep work, reflection, and sleep – disciplines she argues are as crucial as any strategy lecture.
For those pursuing London’s hyper-competitive recruiting scene, Olanike suggests designing an integrated plan that binds coursework, clubs, and networking into a single narrative. She maps each target sector to specific touchpoints:
- Academics: choose electives that produce deal decks, market entry plans, or data-heavy projects you can reuse in interviews.
- Clubs: use professional and regional clubs as low-pressure spaces to test your story before facing recruiters.
- Networking: schedule coffee chats in clusters, debrief them in a simple reflection log, and follow up with one concrete update rather than generic thank-yous.
| Goal | Weekly Move | Non‑Negotiable |
|---|---|---|
| Excel academically | 2 deep-focus blocks for each core course | No phones during study sprints |
| Recruit with purpose | 3 targeted coffee chats, 1 CV tweak | Track every lead in one document |
| Build real community | Attend 1 event outside your comfort zone | Follow up with at least 2 new contacts |
Salau advice for prospective MBA applicants on crafting a compelling story and thriving in year one
Salau urges applicants to think less about sounding “perfect” and more about sounding specific.She recommends starting with a simple prompt: “When did I feel most alive at work?” and building from there. From that moment, connect three threads: what you did, why it mattered to others, and how it shaped what you want next. Rather of listing promotions and projects, she suggests turning your narrative into a clear throughline that an admissions reader can summarize in one sentence. To stress-test your story, she advises sharing drafts with people who know you in very different contexts-colleagues, friends, even a former manager-to ensure your essays sound recognizably like you, not like an AI-generated brochure.
- Anchor early: Block time before term starts to clarify your goals and non‑negotiables.
- Protect your energy: Treat sleep and exercise as calendar items, not optional extras.
- Experiment fast: Join a few clubs, then quickly double down on the one or two that matter.
- Find truth-tellers: Build a small circle of classmates who will give unvarnished feedback.
- Document learning: Keep a weekly “MBA log” of wins, failures, and surprises.
| First-Term Focus | Salau’s Recommendation |
|---|---|
| Career | Begin coffee chats by week 2; refine target list by week 6. |
| Academics | Form a study group that mixes backgrounds, not just industries. |
| Network | Prioritize depth: one meaningful conversation over five quick intros. |
| Well-being | Plan “no-MBA” hours each week to avoid burnout and keep perspective. |
Concluding Remarks
As London Business School’s MBA Class of 2027 settles into Regent’s Park, voices like Olanike Salau’s signal where global business education is headed: toward leaders who are as committed to impact as they are to performance. Her story underscores a familiar LBS theme-careers are no longer linear, ambition is no longer one‑dimensional, and an MBA cohort is now as much a laboratory for purpose as it is for profit.
In the years ahead, Salau’s journey will offer a lens into how tomorrow’s executives navigate emerging markets, shifting corporate priorities, and the demands of inclusive leadership. For now,she joins a class defined less by traditional metrics than by the breadth of its experiences and the scale of its aspirations-exactly the kind of profile reshaping the modern MBA,at London Business School and far beyond.
