Emre Ertan, MBA ’14: Look Outside to Resolve Business Problems

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Emre Ertan, MBA ‘14 | ToniBird Photography

This series features our students’ reflections on their aspirations, learnings, challenges, and joys. Here, Emre shares how the contributions of passionate people in diverse fields have been essential to his learning experience.

I admire people who are passionate, who live and breathe what they are doing, and who express themselves through their creations. They push the limits and make our lives better with their creativity. I’m trying to learn as much as I can from the life stories and contributions of people across many different disciplines: entrepreneurs, artists, architects, and political leaders, amongst others. I find it very interesting that no matter what field they are in, they have very similar motivations, mindsets, and characteristics.

Observing these common threads and learning more about the specific individuals and their passions drives me. The idea of really understanding a theory or phenomenon present in nature, physics, sociology, or different subjects and extrapolating it to the business landscape has so much potential. So many engineering solutions have been inspired by nature, for example. I really believe there is a great opportunity in the business world to create solutions using the inspiration of new theories or models from other fields.