Being Flavius Marcus

Someone asked a Fisherman from Romania to go to ESMT for an MBA and he did and he became Flavius Marcus to us. It is not easy to get your company to nominate you for an MBA but E.ON, one of ESMT’s founders, nominated Flavius ahead of his more favored colleagues and I guess they saw in this finance whiz a large potential.

I had the fortune to be in the same group with him – Group Florence – You will read about this later – for the first module. Full of energy and jokes, this man would not keep his energy or laugher down. He cracked us – Ambar, Stefanie, Casey and me – up with his many jokes and we understood a lot about the relationship between Hungarians and Romanians. Hey! His mentor is a Hungarian – now that would be interesting. He is a virtual superhero with the computer and could churn out web pages, photo shop images with absolute ease and be on top of all the courses. He would volunteer for all the assignments and I guess must be the only one who worked on all the assignments that we have ever done in Module 1. He cracked JP Molasses ( Decision Making – Assign 2) within a couple of hours while others spent days on that and drew the whole tree for Gillette. He was always bursting with ideas. You cannot ignore him when he is in the room. He is Flavius “The King” Marcus.

Cut the scene to the classroom and you meet Flavius “The Invisible Man” Marcus. He attributes this to being cold called during day 1 session 1 by Francis Bidault. He says that it upset his balance and he was never the same again. He usually had the case study handouts in Marketing and OB highlighted in all shades of color indicating he had actually read them (can you believe that?) and would infact explain the case studies to the rest of the group before the start of the class. But in class, he had no answer to say when a question was posed to him – This mental whiz and human dynamo switched itself off in class. The best was when he was asked a question by Michal (MicroEconomics) who later explained that it was the first time that he had ever cold called anyone. Sitting directly opposite to Flavius in class, I observed him take a deep breath, rock back in his chair, eyes rolled to look at the ceiling, lowered the gaze back to meet Michael, lean forward and reply “It depends…” While the class waited, he made a long pause. Michal followed “…and…??”. Flavius replied “….and ….” and explained something that made no sense. He later explained that he had switched off for 2 minutes while listening to Yury, and Michal thought he had to cold call for the first time in his life, picked the one guy who went into a trance for just that minute. As Flavius later remarked to me, people may forget the grades they ever got in the MBA but one thing they will definitely remember – the “It depends” of Flavius and I am doing my bit to record this for posterity.

I have one more week with this bubbling genius. Then we part company to move into our new groups for Module 2. This is a program where you make friends and I know I have one in Flavius. Hopefully he will figure out a way to untie his tongue in class and watch out guys, when he does that – the class will not be the same again.