Reena Miglani, Director – CX Cloud Applications, Oracle Corporation 

Reena is head of global sales engineering at Oracle, overseeing Marketing, Sales, and Service Cloud products. Her customers are hundreds of Oracle sales consultants located around the world. Reena also manages Oracle’s portfolio of acquired new products, communicating the value of each product, and ensuring that it becomes part of the Oracle ecosystem. “It’s exciting work. These aren’t back-office application, the CX market changes and evolves constantly – there’s always something new going on,” she says. Reena has worked for Oracle for 20 years.

Discovering UC Berkeley Exec Ed

In 2018 as Reena’s responsibilities at Oracle were expanding, she went online to look for training and development opportunities to expand her knowledge level. Her online search led to the UC Executive Education Digital Transformation Strategy program description. The thought of learning under the guidance of reputable Haas faculty was appealing to her and, reading further, she learned about UC Exec Ed’s Certificate of Business Excellence (COBE) program. She knew instinctively this was her path so she launched her COBE journey.      

“With my first program, Digital Transformation Strategy, I was looking to energize and refresh my knowledge in this area. In three days, I got a semester’s worth of learning!” Most of the learning came from stories and experiences shared by other students in the program. Reena explained, “The information and knowledge I gained from that program and my fellow cohorts was significant. Within a month after this program, I was itching to learn more.”  

Next on Reena’s list of programs was the Women’s Executive Leadership program. “This program was amazing – it was unlike any other for its ability to help me grow as a person. It was less academic and more about learning to be authentic,” she says. In the program, Reena connected with other professional women around the globe and learned how other women leaders navigate the same challenges and face the same realities, all the while they forged meaningful relationships and bonds because of their time together in the program. “I am still deeply connected with the women I met. We stay in touch via LinkedIn, and those of us who are local regularly meet for lunch, dinner, and coffee. We’ve stayed in close contact – especially now during the pandemic – often daily, through texting, direct messaging and video get-togethers. 

“In the Corporate Business Model Innovation program, I was inspired to learn from professor Henry Chesbrough because he invented the open innovation concept – there is no better person on this topic to learn from!” Reena says. “I work with cross-functional teams at Oracle and I learned a lot about how to leverage innovation across a large corporation.”  Reena also met cohorts from across the world who have 10-20 years of experience in the field. “Hearing the global perspectives from others in the class was enlightening. Since the program ended, we’ve remained a very tight group. We are active daily on WhatsApp. Because innovation is constantly evolving, there is much to share regularly. Most of us work in corporate innovation within large organizations so the knowledge sharing is invaluable.”

To learn more about Reena's COBE experience, visit here. 

Ramit Lamba, Professor of Radiology, Associate Chair, Chief of Abdominal Imaging, CT Director

The business world has always been an interest of mine. I was at a stage in my career where I felt like I already had leadership roles, but was also at a point where I wanted to learn more.

Physicians are very good at taking care of people but are generally not trained in understanding the operations of a business. They tend to be change-averse and sometimes resistant to learning about fields outside of medicine. In contrast, the business world focuses a lot on dynamic leadership, change, nimbleness, and strategy.

Going into the Berkeley Executive Education Program, “strategy” was just a generic term to me. Examples of ‘strategy’ included things such as: ‘this is my strategy to prepare for an exam’, or ‘this is my strategy in dealing with a difficult situation’. Taking the executive education programs at Berkeley Haas gave me not only a better understanding of organizational leadership, but also what strategy means in the context of a business, it's importance, why we need to learn it, and also illuminated how physicians sometimes lack the skills of building and implementing strategy in their practice environments.

Developing a strategy for your practice is a good start, but there's a huge component of how you execute it. My time at Berkeley Executive Education has helped me realize how important it was for me to get out of my current mindset and grow my understanding of business and leadership. Completing the Certificate of Business Excellence (COBE) Program at Berkeley thus has helped me immensely. I realized that just like medicine is a structured science, business is a structured science and to be an effective leader, it must be learned.

The Berkeley Executive Education program, particularly the Certificate of Business Excellence, interested me because world-renowned Haas Professors teach it, and Berkeley has a brand presence and a reputation that is hard to match. Berkeley Haas consistently ranks among the top 10 business schools in the country. It has fueled innovation in Silicon Valley. The reputation is just amazing.

To learn more about Ramit's COBE experience, visit here. 

Apurv Kamath, Engineer 

I discovered the Certificate of Business Excellence (COBE) Program while attending my first Berkeley Executive Education program. I've considered executive MBA programs including Berkeley's, but I thought the COBE offerings met my requirements and allowed me to be systematic and focus on select skills. I am reluctant, given my work-life circumstances and a small child at home, to commit to an executive MBA program. The COBE Program for me has been ideal. In addition to the Product Management Program, I have benefited from the Berkeley Executive Leadership program, Financial Analysis for Leaders and Digital Transformation Strategy. Though I’ve completed the COBE, there remain programs that interest me, so I plan to return.

I didn't have formal training in product management, so the first step I took was to find training that could close that gap. The most in-depth training I was able to find was the week-long Product Management program at UC Berkeley. I brought one of my close colleagues with me, and we attended the class together. It provided such a broad and deep view of product management best practices that we have since sent all of our Product Management staff to the Program.

After the Product Management Program, I looked into additional training that would fill the toolbox needed for my new role. Financial planning and analysis is a key skill for our Product Management team. Not having been trained in finance, but now having to work on project prioritization, I took the Financial Analysis for Leaders program. It was excellent. Accounting and financial analysis would have been difficult for me to have self-taught. The Berkeley program was engaging, and the techniques were made immediately applicable.

My most recent class was the Digital Transformation Strategy program. I found it especially valuable because it provided tools and vocabulary to describe how our organization can and must continue to deliver the most valuable offerings in our space. How do we articulate value? How do we measure value? How do we articulate innovation and measure innovation effectiveness? It was a very pragmatic class, and it resonated with my engineering training and background.

To read more about Apurv's COBE experience, visit here. 

I was looking for ways to gain new tools and new knowledge to keep a competitive edge in a dynamic landscape. That’s when I came across Berkeley Executive Education and the Certificate of Business Excellence program. The first course I took was the New Manager Boot Camp because I wanted to see what Berkeley had to offer. The course appealed to me because there were several managers within my organization who were up for promotions, and I wanted to experience the classes before recommending them to others. I quickly saw how beneficial this class would be for a new manager –– I also learned some useful tips in the program as well!  I recommended the course to the new managers and they came back full of excitement and eager to test their new-found knowledge. I believe this course helped them move effectively into that next phase of their careers. It’s rewarding to help others succeed, and to have the tools to make it a reality. 

Even though I’ve been in finance my entire career, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I learned in the Financial Data Analysis for Leaders program. Having studied finance in India, I was especially intrigued to learn about financial processes in the U.S., so that I could apply best practices in my current role. The most significant take-away from the class was learning how to present financial information to non-finance people. The short formulas I learned enable me to take complex financial concepts and communicate them in a stripped-down, simple fashion for the lay person. I will continue to use this method throughout my career.

As I’ve mentioned, I lead the finance operations for Rahi Systems, and my accounting and finance team comprises 11 employees, 10 of which are women. My team has the most women of any function within the organization. It’s no secret that our industry is male-dominated. I was drawn to a course focused on women in leadership not only for my own development, but also to help the women on my team develop as professionals. The Women’s Executive Leadership program gave me tangible tools and skills that have resulted in noticeable improvements in confidence and performance for me and my team. I could see a noticeable improvement in a recent presentation I gave, and the best part was noticing how confident I appeared being on stage in front of all of those people. That was not how I felt in the past! I have nothing but praises for UC Berkeley and this amazing class.

I elected to take the Venture Capital Executive program because Rahi Systems was looking into venture funding possibilities. I had absolutely no experience or knowledge about that area of finance, and I was eager to learn more. I wanted to determine if venture capital made strategic sense for my organization. I learned a lot in the course, especially the case study of another company’s model. Taking the course has helped me in my conversations about venture capital; I am much more fluent in this specialized area of finance.

To learn more about Rashi's COBE experience, visit here.