It was an honor to welcome back previous HSPF MBA alumnus, Nadine Ebmeyer, Class of 2017, Manager at KPMG, and her team lead Ashish Madan, partner of CIO/CFO Consulting Digital Strategy at KPMG. While last year’s MBA students visited KPMG in Frankfurt in spring 2018, it was the new MBA students that had the privilege to welcome Ashish this fall for his first-ever visit to the Hochschule Pforzheim campus. Ashish shared his interest in future projects with HSPF and in doing more business in the area due to the many “hidden champions” near HS Pforzheim.
Ashish shared his story with the new MBA students and his beginnings as an engineer in India to his 14 year journey through academia & consulting in Germany. He talked to the students about KPMG’s growing need for consultants in not just Digital Strategy but in M&A, Operations and many other areas. Ashish stressed the importance of soft skills such as “making a good impression and staying in one’s mind” to be more successful in the field of consulting. Finally, Ashish shared his personal opinion that “strategy is doing something that hasn’t been done in the past” and “if you make mistakes it is important to fail forward, not backward.”
Nadine Ebmeyer, Manager at KPMG, went on to share working student positions, internships & direct entry opportunities at KPMG. She stressed that KPMG differentiates itself because of its “personnel concept, where lots of attention is given to people and employees, that include coaching, training […]” and much more. She also talked briefly about how the company experience and consulting courses offered during the MBA at HSPF helped her transition from the luxury hospitality industry into Digital Strategy at KPMG.
Nadine and Ashish then ended their guest lecture with an “Agile Transformation” presentation. Agile transformation requires employee roles need to be dynamic, flexible and open to new ways of thinking. It is important to include digital technology, adapt ways of working, and encourage a collaborative culture. As Ashish quoted Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” so if you don’t get your team on-board even the best strategies may not succeed. The new MBA students then had a discussion over Agile Transformation and ended with a rich Q&A session that helped answer any remaining questions they had.
Text: Rupert Rivera III, MBA Class of 2020, MBA Office
Photos: MBA