Alumni Stories · Strategy - Leadership

Serial entrepreneur gains formidable network and confidence in IMD’s EMBA

Torsten Scholl reflects on the impact of IMD’s Executive MBA
October 2016

Torsten Scholl is co-Founder and CEO of Teleretail, a revolutionary robotic
delivery service business based in Switzerland and Germany, which allows urban courier robots to be ordered on demand through smartphones. His company has recently been racking up awards and won several million US dollars in grants.

Originally from Heidelberg, Germany, Torsten earned his Executive MBA at IMD in 2003. But before coming to IMD, Torsten had already achieved the unthinkable. With USD $500 and starting off working in his attic, he created a global long distance communications company and sold it five years later for USD $300 million.

“I wanted to go to IMD to figure out how I had been so successful in the first place so I could do it again,” he joked.

Torsten describes himself as a serial entrepreneur but he said that path can be very lonely sometimes. He wanted to calibrate himself and learn valuable insights about what other business leaders were doing.

He chose IMD for several reasons among them being its association with Swiss excellence and the fact that it had smaller cohorts than many other schools offering more intense interaction.

“I liked the setting and I was impressed by the people who go there. The son of IKEA’s founder was amongst the students in my class,” Torsten recalled.

In addition, he said he got more exposure to prominent business leaders and the area of family business than he would have elsewhere.

Thinking back, Torsten says that one of the things he most appreciated about his IMD EMBA experience was that it provided him with an outstanding network and access to people that he would have never met otherwise.

“IMD helped me gain a kind of confidence in myself that I hadn’t had previously, and it helped me go further. I was really able to calibrate my business experience in the EMBA program.”

IMD’s Executive MBA program is for fast-rising, internationally experienced executives. It’s one of the most challenging and rewarding EMBA programs in the world.

Find out more: http://www.imd.org/emba

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