09 Apr A word from our MBA Captain: I am I

How many of us would subscribe to the title – many is my guess. However, some experiences in the last week made me challenging this view and made me understanding how fluid our lives are. A few weeks ago I was In Budapest, truly the Paris of Central Europe with a wider river, missing an Eiffel tower but much more beautiful art-deco spas. While in Budapest I had the chance to see the opera and the performance of Ban Bank, probably the most Hungarian opera telling the story how foreign mighties, – and the Hungarian history has long periods of foreign oppression and influences. And yet, there is a Hungarian identity that has been developed by being fluid throughout the centuries.

Returning from Hungary, I visited the art fair TEFAF in Maastricht with my daughter and we (re) discovered a Polish artist Pjotr Uklański, whose Nazi portraits – a mixture of well-known Nazis, like Hitler and Göring, and portraits of young German WW2 soldiers – belong to the most recognized art works of the latest contemporary art show documenta14 in Kassel, Germany. At the TEFAF he presented paintings on velvet. He printed classical 19th century portraits of Western nobles on the velvet and then painted Arabic costumes around them. Uklański’s work plays and provokes with the categories of identity.

For sure I am I – and me is stable and also fluid across times and situations. This is what I also see in the development of our MBA students. They arrive as strong personalities to the programme and then expand through the inspiration points offered by our faculty and the idea and value exchanges with their fellow students not just from 29 different nationalities but also from very different experience backgrounds. A software engineer uses a different problem solving approach than a person who completed law school or has a Bachelor in retail management. Learning to collaborate with people from different background is what our MBA offers and is the reality of senior managers across the globe. In a globalized world our personal management challenge is to combine safety and stability with adaptability and openness to change.

Boris Blumberg, MaastrichtMBA captain