From lawyer to senior manager with the Corvinus-MSM-Maastricht University Executive MBA  programme

Ferenc Gondi experienced one of the biggest challenges of his life when he had to manage the transactions of a strategically important acquisition at work, while, at the same time, he was attending the intensive summer period of the Corvinus-MSM-Maastricht University Executive MBA programme. There was no question about the priority of the transaction, and missing the programme was not an option, either. The Managing Director of CTP Hungary told us about the challenges of the Executive MBA programme, as well as about the instruments the programme gave him, making a big difference in his career. 

‘When I was a law student, I was asked during a job interview what my ultimate career goal was. I replied that I wanted to be a lawyer who is involved in creating business strategies. My interviewer was sceptical, but I stuck to my dream. Now I an proud to say that life has proven me right: I have achieved and even exceeded my goal! I think I have a very structured way of thinking, and, at the same time, I am really creative, too. I can see what the ‘out of the box’ solutions are, that can be used to get over a situation and improve a system. Law is very limited in a lot of aspects, so I was always looking for ways to move towards the business aspects, first as a team leader and later as a middle manager,’ says Ferenc Gondi.  

Finally, he was given the opportunity and trust in his current job at CTP, one of the largest industrial real estate developers in the Central European region. As the head of the legal department of the company’s Hungarian subsidiary, he started to get involved in more and more strategic decisions, and later volunteered to draft the company’s procurement policy and then to set up the procurement department. And when the previous managing director of the company left, the foreign owner promoted Ferenc to the position of managing director of CTP Hungary.  

‘CTP is an international company with a very flexible organisational culture, where the constant development mentality has always been an excellent breeding ground for personal and professional development, so my skills and ambition met the company’s focus on growth,’ he adds.  

There was no other option but to succeed  

Meanwhile, Ferenc applied for the Corvinus-MSM-Maastricht University Executive MBA programme, too, which was preceded by a very thorough and conscious consideration on his part:  

‘At that time I was already working as a manager, directly with the owner at CTP. I knew that this training would be a very stressful time in my life, but I was sure that it would be worth the effort and that the knowledge I would gain from the training would help me to become more professional and better as a person,’ he recalls the time around the application.  

He attended the Corvinus training, which required a considerable investment of energy and time, in parallel with his daily management tasks, and, looking back, he sometimes wonders how he managed to cope with such a constant and extreme workload for two years: ‘I had to balance work, study and my personal life on a daily basis to keep them all going. The start of the Executive MBA programme coincided with the start of my honeymoon. I asked the lecturers if I could miss the first classes, and they suggested that it would be better to skip a year. That was the time when I understood the mentality of this programme. Later on, it became clear that without active and regular participation, this programme could not work, because almost all the pieces of the syllabus are built on one another,’ he says about the challenges he has experienced.  

‘For me, this training was a huge motivation, and I said that there was no other option, I must succeed,’ adds Ferenc.  

It works like a quick link 

When I asked whether he had considered other Executive MBA programmes available on the domestic market, Ferenc said that the prestige of a degree from Corvinus University, the international diploma awarded jointly with Maastricht University and the excellent teaching staff meant that he did not take any other domestic Executive MBA programme into consideration: ‘I looked at the training institutions as a kind of guarantee that I would not only receive a piece of paper about my knowledge, but the right instruments, too, to become a confident senior manager. And this preliminary expectation was confirmed by the programme.’ 

And what did the two-year Corvinus-MSM-Maastricht University Executive MBA programme give Ferenc overall? 

‘It would take a long time to list them all,’ he says with a laugh, ‘but it certainly gave me a comprehensive knowledge and approach for running a company, taught me to examine different aspects of operations together, shaped my management approach very strongly, and, of course, gave me a network of contacts. In fact, to this day, the programme works for me as an abundance of knowledge and contacts, so whenever a question of any kind arises, I know immediately where to turn for solutions and inspiration.”