MBA Alumni Reunion 2025

The psychology of happiness: Tips and tricks on taking charge of your own happiness 

Everyone says they want to be happy, but no one reads the textbooks on how to achieve that. Companies should pay attention: we expect our work to contribute to our happiness, and when it doesn’t, we disengage or look for something else. Happiness does not come natural to us. Our brains developed to keep us alive on the savannah, not to enjoy the modern world, and these two are often in conflict. 

But… we can do better—and it’s not that complicated! The science behind happiness allows us to take conscious action to build a more fulfilling life, both professionally and beyond. In this workshop, Dr. Philip Eskenazi shares key insights to help you and the people around you grow happier. 

Dr. Philip Eskenazi, Academic Lecturer & Programme Director, RSM & Amsterdam Business School 

Philip Eskenazi is an academic lecturer at Rotterdam School of Management, Amsterdam Business School, and various other schools. His teaching focuses on essential thinking skills, including decision-making, critical thinking, creative thinking, deep concentration, and managing uncertainty. 

In addition to teaching, Philip designs and manages executive education programmes and has extensive experience coaching professionals in their development. He earned a PhD from RSM and a philosophy degree from King’s College London, and his research has featured in leading academic journals

Using power & influence wisely: An interactive session  

Power and influence are key resources to get things done in the workplace. This session will explore different sources and motivations for power and influence and the myriads of ways you can use power and influence to improve your work outcomes. These dynamics will be illustrated with role plays. 

Dr. Maartje Schouten, Department of Organisation and Personnel Management Rotterdam School of Management, RSM 

Maartje Schouten is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Organisation and Personnel Management of Rotterdam School of Management. With her research, Maartje seeks to understand how and why people increase their influence at work. She examines the role of conflict, expertise, and non-task behaviours in this quest for influence. 

She also teaches people how to leverage each of these elements to increase their influence in their organisation to get the outcomes they want.

What leaders get wrong about employee motivation

Leaders want intrinsically motivated, engaged employees, who get things done on their own initiative. Yet most organisations are designed on the assumption that people need to be incentivized to work harder, and monitored to ensure that work is done. The current wave of return to office policies are based on leaders’ desire to see whether people are working at all. In this session we’ll look into the assumptions we hold about motivation and I will challenge you to think about how these assumptions shape your leadership. Are you helping your people to thrive or stifling their potential? 

Dr. Bex Hewett, Associate Professor, Human Resource Management | Scientific Director; Part-time PhD programme, RSM 

Dr Bex Hewett is an Associate Professor in Human Resource Management at the Rotterdam School of Management. Her research focuses on how work can make employees’ lives better while also creating organisational value. She is research lead of the People and Self-Managing Organisations project. Bex taught the MBA elective on People Analytics from 2017 to 2022. She is currently the Scientific Director of RSM’s part-time PhD programme and teaches experienced HR professionals through the Beyond HR programme. 

Bex works with organisations to apply research to practice as part of the People, Organisations & Change research group. She is currently an Associate Editor of Human Resource Management Review and a member of the Executive Committee of the HR Division of the Academy of Management.  

Bex is Academic Director of the ERIM part-time PhD programme, and teaches on RSM's Beyond HR programme for experienced HR professionals.  

Leading positive change during times of societal transition

During this interactive session, we will explore how to lead positive change during times of societal transition. The craft of leading such change goes beyond drawing up strategic plans and providing operational directions. Instead, it requires a uniquely human skillset combining critical thinking with care and entrepreneurial action. During this session, we will make use of the X-Curve as a guiding framework that helps us to both navigate larger-scale transitions and lead them with great impact. One key observation of this framework is that large-scale change does not only hinge on innovation but also requires active break-down of previously dominant practices. Along the way, we will work on shared concerns ranging from AI to sustainability and provide the opportunity for participants to learn from each others' experiences. The toolbox that we will build together, will bring participants one step closer to transformational change mastery and empower them to lead positive change in any context. 

Dr. Jochem Kroezen, Associate Professor in Organization Theory, Department of Organisation and Personnel Management and Academic Director of the full-time MBA, RSM

Jochem has extensive teaching experience across a wide variety of university programmes on subjects such as social systems change, culture, trust, strategic transformation, international business and research methods. Jochem earned his PhD from RSM in 2014, and was an Assistant Professor in International Business at the Cambridge Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge in the UK. He specialises in the sociological side of organisation and management theory. 

Jochem’s research focuses on processes of institutional change, revival, and persistence. His current projects explore the revival of craft in organizational society and how craft can be used to identify an alternative approach to working, managing and leading in a world marked by complex transitions. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, Jochem has published widely, including in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Annals, and Academy of Management Journal.