MBA Career in Real Life

I've been at Experian for the past four months. By virtue of being in a "rotational" position and initially working in an area like innovation, I have been lucky to have a great degree of latitude on what I work on and amazing access to key individuals at the company. Of course when many high level executives are aware of what we work on, our names may come up in management meetings. That is what happened to me and my colleague this week.
We have been working on one project that we are particularly passionate about. It was sort of an unofficial, underground project which, when the opportunity presented, we tried to make the most. I guess we have been raising awareness because we were surprised that the project was raised in a meeting that our North American CEO was sitting in.
In a funny sense of timing we were scheduled to meet with him the next day. It was meant to be more of a "how are things going" meeting. After the CEO's meeting the day before he decided to morph it into a project pitch meeting and invited our project sponsor. We discovered this a half-hour before our meeting.
Adding to the awkwardness of the situation was that we had yet to show our sponsor our updated proposal, so he walked into the meeting completely unaware of what we were going to say.
The meeting started with introductions, a couple of light jokes, and then the CEO looked at us and said "Go ahead." Four months in, working on an underground project, without input from our sponsor, and we have to deliver an impromptu presentation to our NA CEO.
Welcome to the business world MBAs.
It was a tough lesson that when you are playing at this level, raising awareness throughout an organization, you need to be prepared to advance your causes at any situation.