May 07, 2026
| by Mohammad Al-MoumenI was driving down Escondido Road, the street that I’d called home for six years as an undergrad and Stanford GSB student. Over a decade had passed since I’d gotten my MBA, back when shaking up the world and getting rich doing it was what mattered most to me.
Editor’s Note
In this ongoing Stanford Business series, we ask Stanford GSB alumni to reflect on how their worldviews have changed in the years since they earned their degrees.
Mohammad Al-Moumen, MBA ’15, is the founder of Wazza Studios and a former senior vice president and associate partner at McKinsey & Company.
Having done neither since then, instead I was driving a janky car while filming myself roasting the tech entrepreneur beside me for claiming that he would grow a network of data centers in space when he couldn’t even grow a proper mustache right here on Earth.
Where did things go so horribly wrong for me?
My career at McKinsey had been humming along until Covid hit. I tried to boost workplace morale by making videos poking fun at our bosses. It started on a whim, but the more humor content we created, the more we saw its positive impact on our community. Before I knew it, I was producing comedy videos for internal events worldwide, and Professor Jennifer Aaker, PhD ’95, and lecturer Naomi Bagdonas were writing a case study about how I was shaping global culture at McKinsey. WHAT?!
Passion is when you stay up all night writing and rewriting jokes and manually timestamping videos onto thousands of rows in Excel (I missed the AI memo), and it just feels fun. But was this passion worthy of a career? A conversation with McKinsey’s global managing partner Bob Sternfels (BA ’92) convinced me the answer was yes. “You’re disrupting change management through humor, and you’re driving behavioral change by making people feel something different and do something different,” he told me.
Today, instead of advising Fortune 500 executives, I “punch up” at them to humanize them, make them approachable, and help them become more effective leaders. I recently kicked off a $10 billion company’s finance summit by roasting the CFO in front of his new leadership team — upon his request — because he wanted to flatten the hierarchy to set a meritocratic culture. For another event, I produced a video featuring the new executive team of a Fortune 500 financial institution that was undergoing organizational changes and looking for ways to motivate colleagues. Watching the executive team read out funny feedback about themselves with a twist turned out to be motivation enough.
My company, Wazza Studios, helps businesses and leaders inspire their people and customers through humor and creative storytelling. I believe strongly in the power of levity to boost culture and break down barriers. Where better to apply it than the place we spend most of our time? Nobody knows where AI is taking us, but I want work to be a place where we can still connect in uniquely human ways.
Humanizing ourselves and our stories through creativity is what matters most to me now, because it shows that, regardless of our titles or accomplishments, we can relate to each other in ways that make our collaborations so much more powerful. Here’s to having more fun, shaking up the world, and driving a janky car down the road less traveled.
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