Hi there. I am glad you stopped by my personal web page. I am a Professor of Finance at EBS Business School and hold the Chair of Corporate Finance and Higher Education Finance there. Furthermore, I am the Managing Director of XOLAS ADVISORS, a consultancy company that targets higher education institutions as clients. 

My current areas of interest are anything related to risk management, restructuring, and organizational resilience. This also defines my perspective when studying corporate finance topics such as venture capital and private equity or when analyzing higher education and business school issues. My current work also focuses on network analysis and ecosystems.

I have mixed academic work with managerial and administrative posts throughout my career. For the past 16 years, I have held various executive roles at EFMD and EFMD Global. In the past, I have also been Dean and Rector of EBS and Managing Director of EBS gGmbH. I hold a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (GO BLUE!), and have been awarded a Dr. habil in Business Administration by the WHU, Germany.

Rewired for the World: Why Internationalization Demands a New Operating Model

(July 2026) Universities routinely name internationalization as a strategic priority, yet the organizational reality behind that ambition tells a different story. In this article for EFMD Global Focus, Wolfram Berger, Martin Meyer, and I argue that internationalization in most institutions remains an additive function rather than a genuinely integrated one. Mobility offices, international affairs leadership, and individual faculty research collaborations coexist without cohering into a shared architecture, leaving universities structurally fragmented beneath a globally active surface.

We trace this fragmentation to the broader deinstitutionalization of higher education, where traditional learning structures are being unbundled and rebuilt through micro-credentialing, stackable qualifications, and hybrid delivery. Addressing the resulting gap, they argue, requires more than better processes. It requires what they describe as institutional neuroplasticity: the capacity to continuously reconfigure structures, policies, and programs across three dimensions of structural flexibility, policy adaptability, and programmatic agility. The University of Vaasa's move to a multidisciplinary school structure with boundary-spanning research platforms is offered as a working example of this kind of institutional redesign.

Click here to access the article.

Why The Demise Of Critical Thinking Is Not Inevitable

(August 2025) AI is often portrayed as the enemy of critical thinking. But the real challenge may not be the technology itself. It is how we choose to use it. In a thought-provoking article for Poets & Quants, Peter Féher and I argue that business schools should stop fighting a rearguard battle against AI and instead redesign learning around it. The risk is real: students can use AI to bypass essential learning processes such as source evaluation, debate, interpretation, and reflection. Yet the solution is not prohibition. It is to make critical thinking more, not less, central to the educational experience.

The article calls for three shifts:
(1) Moving from assessment models that reward output to those that evaluate learning processes and critical reflection.
(2) Investing in AI literacy among faculty so that AI becomes a thinking partner rather than a shortcut.
(3) Building pedagogy around AI, requiring students to challenge, critique, and improve AI-generated outputs rather than simply accept them.

We conclude that the future belongs neither to those who reject AI nor to those who blindly embrace it. It belongs to those who can combine AI-enabled productivity with the distinctly human capabilities of judgment, creativity, ethical reasoning, and critical thinking.

Access the full article here.

Scaling Without Structure: The Hidden Governance Crisis in Digital Internationalization

(March 2025) Digital internationalization promises global reach, scalable growth, and new opportunities for business schools. Yet many institutions are discovering that the real challenge lies not in technology but in governance. As online programs, cross-border delivery, AI-enabled learning, and international recruitment become increasingly interconnected, traditional decision-making structures often struggle to keep pace.

This article in MBA International Business, co-authored with Wolfram Berger, argues that successful digital internationalization requires governance by design. Business schools must clarify decision rights, balance centralization with flexibility, formally integrate digital specialists into governance processes, and elevate data governance from a technical concern to a strategic leadership priority. Without these capabilities, institutions risk scaling complexity faster than they scale performance.

You can access the article here (pp. 18-20).