After growing up in Greenland and Belgium and finishing high school in Denmark, Tine Lundegaard joined a trainee program at A.P. Moller Mærsk at the young age of 19.
“I have adventure in my blood,” she says with a wide smile. “I think the combination of liking math and also my time spent abroad as a child were some of the reasons that I got through the needle’s eye at Mærsk.”
During that time, Lundegaard worked during the day and attended university in the evenings to complete a degree in finance.
“I was working 24/7 and weekends but I loved it,” she said. “It was a very good environment.”
By the early 2000s, Lundegaard had left the shipping industry. She spent a few years on the trading floor and worked at many big banks in Denmark. But it was at Jyske Bank, where she managed a small group of staff, when an opportunity arose for her to further educate herself in the form of an EMBA.
Lundegaard had learned about IMD during her time at Mærsk. “I said I wanted to go to IMD, nowhere else,” she says, laughing. “They were working a lot with IMD, and I knew it was a very credible business school.”
When Lundegaard arrived in Lausanne, she was in her mid-30s with two small children. But managing her studies alongside family responsibilities was thankfully not an issue as her husband stayed in Denmark with their daughters. Lundegaard was able to go home to her family during the breaks.
“It worked out so well,” she recalled. “I felt it was a point in my life where I needed to learn something new, and I’m curious in my nature and lucky in my marriage.”
Problems to solve
The 2005/2006 EMBA cohort comprised 63 students from 27 different nationalities.
Lundegaard credits IMD for providing her with valuable tools that she has been able to use and apply whenever needed throughout her career.
“During the financial crisis, and later through the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of the study cases at IMD became real-life cases. One example is the impact of suddenly exploding commodity prices on a company’s value chain and profit/loss which you, as management, need to react quickly to in a totally new regime.”
She elaborates by describing a hypothetical problem her class had to solve. “We were told, ‘You’re the CEO of a company. You’ve come to a new country, brought your family, and you all need to adapt, and then suddenly your spouse will leave you. What do you do?’”
The significant learning experience for her was that the choices and decisions people made were very much dependent on where they came from and their different cultural values.
“Whether they were from Denmark like me, Russia, Romania, Poland, or the US, it made a difference in how we saw the world and the decisions we made.
“Sometimes, we tend to think that the way we see the world is how it is or should be for everybody. But that’s not the case,” she says.
Making a difference
Three years ago, Lundegaard left the corporate world for a smaller company, a move she observed others from her EMBA program have made as well.
“Some of them are now my very good and close friends, and what I see is that many of us have actually stepped out of the large corporations and trying to do something that makes a difference, in a smaller place.”
She believes this move could have been due to their personalities, a curiosity about doing something else, or thanks to having an IMD-based education.
“The reason for me was that I wanted to do something new, and being part of building up this organization is fun. I love it a lot.”
Lundegaard is currently Chief Commercial Officer at the Copenhagen-based asset manager Qblue Balanced, founded in 2018 by Bjarne Graven Larsen, former CIO at ATP and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.
The company’s mission is to help clients to achieve their goals by developing and delivering robust and sustainable investment solutions with superior risk-adjusted returns at an attractive price. Approximately 90% of the assets Qblue manages are considered the greenest, with the company’s portfolios valued at approx. $2bn.
“We are proud of having a range of funds that have an MSCI ESG AAA rating within the Global Equity peer group,” Lundegaard said.
Importance of different industries
Lundegaard also became a board member of the IMD Alumni Club in Denmark in 2016. The board’s strategy is to include people from different industries, and they didn’t have any members from the financial sector at the time.
“When we have a variety of industries on the board, we can broaden our network and cover diverse topics,” she explained. “And during our meetings or board dinners, we can also learn and gain insights from each other.”
Getting to know new people can also unexpectedly lead to great friendships.
“Two people from the alumni board, Ingrid and Jens Christian, are now two of my best friends,” Lundegaard says fondly. “That’s what can happen when you like working together.”
