Lisa Murphy began her medical career in London, in general medicine, moving into emergency medicine and then anaesthesia and intensive care. Many years later, on the other side of the world in Melbourne, she decided to switch careers and take the big step into the corporate world, with the idea of working in not-for-profit health organisations. So she enrolled in a Master of Business Administration course at Deakin University in Victoria and focused on leadership.
Now CEO at the Stroke Foundation, Murphy says she uses the business skills she learned in the MBA course every working day, and she recommends an MBA degree to anyone who wants to lead an organisation.
“It brings you that breadth of knowledge and experience which you just wouldn’t otherwise get,” she says. “It provides that framework for day-to-day delivery on strategy, managing people, managing finance; that scaffolding and framework to hang things on.”
Murphy’s medical career had originally been interrupted by the arrival of her two sons, one born in 2007 and one in 2012, and both diagnosed with type 1 diabetes before they turned five. She emigrated to Australia from the UK in 2010 with her husband, also a doctor, and to begin with she wanted to focus on looking after her children.
When she was ready to return to work, she didn’t want to go back to medicine because she thought she had been away from the discipline for too long and to return would entail beginning again at a much lower level.
She did a little freelance medical writing and then some project work for Kidney Health Australia in the field of kidney cancer. She moved up quickly in the organisation and when the CEO left, she was appointed interim CEO, a position she filled for a nearly a year.
But when Murphy applied for the permanent position of Kidney Health Australia CEO, she didn’t get the job. She left the organisation in 2020, just as the Covid pandemic was starting to take hold, to begin work at the Stroke Foundation, where she ran a tranche of the Foundation’s programs, activities and research.
Although she didn’t get the top job at Kidney Health Australia, “a bump in the road”, she knew she wanted to pursue a career as a chief executive. She thought about taking a public health course to beef up her credentials, but reconsidered because she already had multiple medical degrees, and she realised she really needed to take on a comprehensive MBA course.
“As a doctor, you don’t learn about profit and loss statements, or about marketing or about strategy,” she says. “I didn’t want to just do one of those shorter MBAs. I wanted to do the whole thing because I thought I had too many gaps. I need to have that breadth. And so I took a big, deep breath, because I was working full time; I still had a young family, and an MBA is not an insignificant undertaking.”
Appointed interim CEO at the Stroke Foundation, Murphy successfully applied for the permanent position, and she was offered the job with a single unit needed to complete her MBA degree. She graduated in 2023 after three-and-a-half years of part-time study.
“Without the MBA, I don’t think I would have had a chance, it’s very, very competitive,” she says. “It really provided me with the confidence that I could work outside the health field and shift into leadership management.”
Last year she worked on the new Stroke Foundation strategy, she says. “Without the backing of the MBA, I wouldn’t have had some of the structures and the thinking that was so useful in developing that strategy.”
Murphy chose to take her MBA at Deakin because the university offered flexibility. It had a good reputation for public health courses and for online teaching, she said, and it also allowed students to go the university campus to study “and I love that human interaction”.
“I was very strategic in choosing which university I went to,” she says, adding she chose to focus on leadership skills in her MBA degree, and she also signed up for a residential course which she enjoyed. “It’s that connection with people; that network you get from an MBA which is so valuable,” she says. “I still draw on some of those networks now.”
She took a couple of leadership electives within the MBA course, an innovation elective and a couple of people management subjects. Students can tailor the course to suit their goals and their particular interests and also choose to top up their understanding in certain areas of business, Murphy says.
The Deakin MBA course was worth its fairly steep price in terms of time, effort and sheer dollar cost, she says.
“There’s the financial outlay, but then there’s also the commitment of time,” she adds. “Dialling in at six o’clock in the evening when you’ve had a long day at work; late hours in the evening or early morning, sacrificing family time on the weekends to study. Even if you’re doing one unit at a time, it’s a lot of work, but I would highly recommend it.”