Alumni profile
Dr Franziska Bendisch MBA 2004, PHD 2010
Today, Dr Franziska Bendisch is responsible for Sustainable Development and partnerships with food companies at Bayer CropScience's regional organisation for Latin America.
Franziska Bendisch started her MBA at Bradford University School of Management at the age of 23, as the final stage of a 3-year practical and company internal trainee programme at Bayer CropScience AG. "I was excited about starting the programme since I knew that it would train me how to integrate the tools and methods I had previously learned in theory, and to apply them to the business environment, which I had experienced over the last 3 years, in order to operate strategically and generate value for the company."
She successfully finalized the programme, achieving awards for the best management project and as best overall student. After a short stay in the UK subsidiary of Bayer CropScience, she returned to the company headquarters in Germany, but without turning her back on the School of Management. During her MBA studies she had identified a topic, which intrigued her so much she wanted to research it in-depth: how chief executive officers can be conceptualised as brands and how CEOs as brands can generate value for their organisations.
Thus she started a PhD programme at Bradford in 2004, continuing as a part-time, distance-learning student during her time in the UK, later for almost 3 years from Germany, until her graduation in 2010, by which time she had already expatriated to Brazil, where she now works at Bayer in Sustainable Development Partnerships.
She has been publishing several papers within her fields of academic and professional expertise. Looking back at her times of the MBA at Bradford, she concludes that this year, besides being one of the "most fun of all years of education", it has awakened her interest and motivation to work strategically, integrating management theory with practical approaches and thus allowing her to continuously improve and grow professionally.