I had just finished addressing a group of executives in their mid-thirties in one of the B-schools. We all know that as a norm, all executives are sponsored by their organizations so that they could build their strategic thinking skills, and so was the case here too. However, during one of the coffee breaks, a participant walked up to me for a discussion. And during our conversation, I could not stop but think that he looked at least a decade younger than the others in that class, and had also been an individual contributor in the session. My curiosity took the best of me and I asked him as to why his employer had sponsored him for this program?  And his answer was: “I paid for it myself. If I have to wait for my organization to sponsor me for such a program, I have to be a Vice President in the organization before they spend this kind of money on my education.” This was one of the many instances where I got to meet executives who were paying for their own learning. ...