Transilvania Executive Education Announces the Launch of the Fifth Volume of IN SEARCH OF TOMORROW

Transilvania Executive Education is proud to announce the launch of the fifth volume of IN SEARCH OF TOMORROW – Critical Thinking about the Romanian and International Business Environment, written by the Executive MBA Class of 2025. This new edition carries forward a tradition that began in 2019. What started as an initiative driven by curiosity and ambition has grown into a meaningful annual contribution to the Romanian academic and business community.

This year’s volume features essays by:

The book project was coordinated by Dr. Ovidiu Oltean and Dr. Alin Băiescu – lecturers for the TEE EMBA programme, and published by the University of Buckingham Press. The volume includes essays authored by: Ioan-Florin Bucșa, Cristian-Ionel Călbază, Adelina Cotfas, Mihaela-Adela Coroiu, Laura Dragoș-Rădoi, Alexandru-Romulus Harbuzaru, Nicolae Moldovan, Horațiu-Adrian Pop, Andrei-Adrian Racu, Vasile Rusu, Adrian Sălăjan, Cipriana Stan, and Radu-Ștefan Tărău.

This volume is a testament to the diverse expertise and experiences of the graduates who have played important roles in shaping the trajectory of Romania’s business sectors, and it reflects the discipline, curiosity, and professional maturity that define the EMBA experience. The continued success of this series shows just how valuable these perspectives have become—not only to our academic community, but also to practitioners and leaders who follow each edition with interest.

Why read this book?

The essays in this volume cover a wide range of topics that mirror the complexity of today’s business landscape. Readers will find reflections on financial analysis, marketing strategy, governance reform, leadership, innovation, sustainability, and energy transitions. What unites these diverse themes is a shared commitment to grounding theory in real‑world experience. Each chapter draws on the day‑to‑day realities of managers and entrepreneurs who navigate these challenges firsthand.

Individually, the essays capture personal journeys of learning, questioning, and discovery. Together, they highlight the ability of Romania’s executives to think critically about global trends while staying deeply connected to local contexts. The result is a thoughtful and comprehensive contribution to the ongoing conversation about how business can evolve—here in Romania and far beyond.

This book creates a meaningful link between academic thinking and everyday managerial practice. For EMBA students, it offers concrete examples of well‑crafted essays that blend theory, structure, and critical reflection with ideas that can be put to work immediately. For master’s and doctoral students in business and economics, it opens a window into real cases from Romanian and international settings—written by managers and entrepreneurs who don’t just analyse these challenges from a distance, but live them and work to move their organisations forward. And for business leaders and policymakers, the collection shows how academic learning can be transformed into practical insights for leadership, governance, innovation, and sustainable growth.

This volume, therefore, continues to serve not only as a compendium of essays but also as a portrait of a business community in transformation: innovative, reflexive, and increasingly confident on the European and global stage.

Topics covered in this book:

Adelina Cotfas, in her chapter Revising Romania’s Financial Education Strategy, offers a critical perspective on Romania’s 2030 national strategy, highlighting gaps in inclusivity and behavioural design. She reframes financial education as a matter of financial well-being and resilience, particularly for vulnerable groups, while calling for policies adapted to the realities of digital finance. This focus on systemic gaps naturally anticipates the innovation-oriented project of Ioan-Florin Bucșa, whose essay later in the volume develops a youth-focused digital financial education platform, showing how policy and innovation can complement one another in addressing one of Romania’s pressing socio-economic challenges.

If Cotfas and Bucșa bring our attention to public responsibility and innovation, Adrian Sălăjan reminds us of another key dimension of sustainability: family business governance. His essay, Ownership Strategy and Governance Solutions: Transgenerational Continuity, explores the dilemmas of succession and conflict in a family-owned enterprise. By proposing the four-room governance model, he demonstrates how structure and foresight can preserve organisational resilience across generations. In many ways, Sălăjan’s insights parallel Cotfas’s call for systemic frameworks, since both underline the need for continuity and stability in the face of change.

Yet sustainability is not only a matter of governance but also of leadership culture. This is vividly illustrated in Alexandru R. Harbuzaru’s From Mad Men to Sad Men: A Self-Reflexive Case Study of a Toxic Triumvirate in a Small Advertising Agency. His autoethnographic narrative explores the failure of an organisation he co-founded, offering a candid reflection on ambition, misaligned visions, and the corrosive effects of personal conflict. Harbuzaru’s account resonates with Sălăjan’s discussion of governance, for both point to the fragility of organisations when leadership falters—whether through a lack of structure or through a failure of self-awareness.

The theme of scrutiny and resilience is carried forward by Andrei Racu, whose essay, The Company: Information Technology – Software Services, provides a rigorous financial analysis of one of Romania’s leading IT firms. By evaluating performance indicators and acquisitions, Racu situates the company in a sector both dynamic and vulnerable, emphasising the importance of financial discipline for sustainable growth. His chapter speaks directly to Harbuzaru’s reflections: where leadership failures can undo an organisation, sound financial strategy can help secure its future.

From financial evaluation, the volume moves into entrepreneurial imagination with Cipriana Stan’s Marketing Plan to Launch “Gelateria Dolce Lusso” into the Romanian Marketplace. Stan proposes the launch of a premium gelato brand in Cluj-Napoca, combining traditional craftsmanship with innovative CSR and digital marketing strategies. Her essay, while entrepreneurial in scope, resonates with Racu’s financial analysis, for both show how businesses must navigate competitive environments by aligning creativity with economic rationality.

The question of alignment is also central to Cristian Călbază’s contribution, Applying Operations and Supply Chain Management in a Software Company to Optimise the Bench. He explores how unallocated human resources can undermine efficiency and proposes Lean and Just-in-Time solutions.

Călbază’s concern with operational agility transitions smoothly into Horațiu Pop’s essay, Should We or Should We Not Monitor Our Software Development Team Members?, which addresses the human dimension of efficiency. Where Călbază emphasizes optimization, Pop highlights the risks of excessive monitoring, suggesting that trust and engagement are equally critical for organisational performance. Together, these two essays demonstrate that efficiency cannot be separated from human motivation.

It is precisely this human and societal dimension that Ioan-Florin Bucșa elaborates in Empowering the Next Generation: Developing a Financial Education Platform for Youth. Building on Cotfas’s earlier concerns, Bucșa applies the Doblin model of innovation to design a gamified, partnership-driven platform that seeks to improve Romania’s poor financial literacy rates among children and young people. His essay closes a thematic arc on financial education while also extending the discussion into digital innovation and systemic transformation.

From national challenges, the volume broadens to global perspectives with Laura Dragoș-Rădoi’s Tesla (TSLA) Financial Analysis. By analysing Tesla’s recent performance, Dragoș-Rădoi shows how a global leader navigates crises such as the pandemic and supply-chain disruptions while pursuing innovation and growth. Her essay complements Racu’s Romanian case study: both chapters, taken together, illustrate how financial analysis can illuminate organisational strategies at different scales, from local firms to global giants.

The question of leadership during transformation is further developed by Mihaela Coroiu in Driving Strategic Change: Transformational Leadership in a Manufacturing Context. Coroiu explores how leaders can guide organisations through resistance and uncertainty, emphasising the importance of vision and empowerment. Her contribution resonates with Harbuzaru’s cautionary tale, but instead of failure, she offers a roadmap for successful change.

This attention to people and organisational culture is echoed by Nicolae Moldovan in Employee Engagement: A Study in a Corporate Organisation. Moldovan examines how engagement strategies shape performance and retention in large corporations, linking his insights with those of Pop and Călbază. Together, these chapters remind us that at the heart of competitiveness lies not only structure and efficiency but also the capacity to create workplaces that motivate and inspire.

Finally, the volume turns toward the broader structural transformations of our time. Radu Tărău, in Harnessing Energy Transitions: Strategic Pathways in the Electrical Engineering Sector, situates Romania’s energy industry within the European Union’s climate agenda. His reflections on sustainability, governance, and infrastructure align with Dragoș-Rădoi’s global case, demonstrating how industries from Cluj to California are grappling with the dual imperative of growth and responsibility.

In parallel, Vasile Rusu’s Rethinking Organisational Learning in Software Development: Addressing Gen Z’s Career Challenges through Soft Systems Methodology returns us to the world of IT, but through a systemic lens. By analysing generational tensions and remote work practices, Rusu proposes solutions that reinforce team cohesion and mentorship, issues that directly connect back to Pop’s and Călbază’s essays.

Each essay in this volume captures the true spirit of an MBA journey—learning, unlearning, and learning again. They show what it means to stay curious, to question familiar ways of doing things, to innovate with intention, and to stay agile in a world where business challenges shift quickly and often unexpectedly.

By bringing these varied perspectives together, the fifth volume of In Search of Tomorrow shows just how valuable experience‑driven reflection has become in today’s fast-moving business world. The essays reveal a community of Romanian executives who are not only responding to the challenges around them, but also helping to shape the conversations that will influence the country’s economic and organisational direction in the years ahead. As the series continues to evolve, it stands as clear proof of the curiosity, discipline, and ambition that define the TEE EMBA community, and we are proud of their achievements and hard work they put into publishing these essays, and for providing us with an open invitation to think more deeply, lead with greater purpose, and approach the future with confidence and clarity.

The Book was launched during a private event dedicated to the TEE community and Executive MBA alumni on the 25th of February, 2026.