RESUME
Short summary of my life
I was born before WW II, in Hungary’s capital city, Budapest (whose famous chain bridge across the Danube, connecting Buda and Pest, are pictured). After the defeat of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, I emigrated to the USA.
Awarded one of the most competitive graduate scholarships in the USA, I earned MA and PhD. degrees from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, concentrating in international economics and business and became a professor of business at Indiana University, Bloomington (1975-2000). See my main campus: iu.edu/life-at-iu/bloomington.html
I specialized in the economic transformation of Central and Eastern European countries, East-West business relations, strategic management, and the significance of business cultural differences between nations. I was promoted to full professor.
Until 2000, I was consulted several times by the committees of the US Congress and I regularly helped prepare the newly-appointed U.S. ambassadors to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
I was resident consultant to the IMF (in 1982) and the World Bank (several times) in Washington and the OECD in Paris.
Then I returned to Hungary to serve as prof of business and academic director at the US accredited, English-language Central European University in Budapest (2000-2016), which taught American business degree programs.
Summarized below are three key projects I had been involved in:
1. President George Bush appointed me to the Board of Directors of the Hungarian-American Enterprise Fund (HAEF) in 1990.
President Clinton reaffirmed me in that position in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2001. HAEF invested and supervised – as a private entrepreneur – the $60 million that the United States donated to Hungary to support private businesses.
I was continuously a member of HAEF’s Board of Directors, including the Supervisory Board, for 16 years.
2. I was the main organizer and co-director of the Hungarian-International Blue Ribbon Commission (BRC), which worked for several years to plan Hungary’s transformation to a market economy. The BRC (working with a staff of 100) published its detailed recommendations to the new government that was formed following the 1990 collapse of Communism.
3. Between 2016 and 2020, I worked with a small group, led by famous psychologist Prof. Mihály Csikszentmihalyi, on measuring and improving leadership skills, using the prof”s widely-known „Flow” concept. I was the senior author of the resulting 2015 book.
We developed FLIGBY, or „Flow is Good Business for You,” is a serious game designed for leadership development and improving business skills.
You can find more about Flow and this project under FLIGBY subpage.
I have written or edited 24 books and 150 articles and chapters, mainly on the political, economic and business situation in Hungary and other Central and Eastern European countries.
In 2020, I published a bilingual book about a fascinating person, still alive during 2020-21, a coworker of the famous Swede, Raoul Wallenberg. Together they daringly rescued thousands of potential Holocaust-victims in Hungary during WWII.
Since then, I have been working on a trilogy, Episodes from My Life – In a Historical Context, whose first and second volume were published in 2024; the third is forthcoming soon.
