He studied economics at the Vrije Universiteit, and his wife studied dentistry and their two children were born at the VU University Medical Center. As if his bond with the Vrije Universiteit wasn’t strong enough, one evening Ron Teerlink (1961) spent an evening surrounded by Vrije Universiteit students. In January, he invited them to the Rabobank office in Utrecht, where he works as a board member. We speak to him about what he got out of the meeting.
“Lets keep this interview informal,” Teerlink suggests, “We do that at Rabobank too.” To which he adds in surprise: “I’ve noticed that students are very formal nowadays. We never did that when we were studying.” He walks swiftly to The Basket, a café on the Vrije Universiteit campus, where the interview takes place. Even before sitting down he begins to talk enthusiastically about the master class. This took place as part of The Boardroom, a series of masterclasses that prominent Vrije Universiteit alumni give to twenty master’s students. They do this together with a Vrije Universiteit professor, and Teerlink works together with professor by special appointment and Rabobank colleague Wim Boonstra. The workshop was about ethics in Dutch business life, particularly in the banking sector. “It was hard to leave the building on time, because there was still so much to discuss.”
What did you have to offer the students? “The most difficult decision that you have to make as a banker is: should I grant a loan or not? Wim Boonstra and I had prepared a couple of ethical dilemmas that Rabobank has wrestled with in the past, and we asked the students what they would do if they were Rabobank managers. After that, we told them what our decisions had been. We had agreed beforehand with the students that everything we shared with them would remain confidential. We could therefore be very open, including about the decisions we’d made in the past that we were less than proud of. The students told us afterwards that they were surprised at how vulnerable we made ourselves.”
‘It was hard to stop on time, because there was still so much to discuss.’
What was your most important message? “Actually, one of the students came to that conclusion independently: there is no real right or wrong. With ethical issues you find yourself in a grey area pretty quickly. This is exactly what we wanted to get across. Not complying with the law is always wrong, but there is a lot of room within the law. Furthermore, you don’t know everything. We don’t want to support trade in weapons, but we do invest in the building of aircraft. Aircraft are used to transport people now, but also for other things. Should you stay out of this sector then? As difficult as these decisions are, as manager you have to make them.”
How do you make a decision if you don’t know anything for sure? “By talking to as many people as possible and gathering many opinions on an issue. It gave me a lot of self-confidence to see that the students in the master class also took this approach to ethical dilemmas. It increased my confidence in this method. That doesn’t mean, by the way, that a decision can’t turn out to have been the wrong one, in retrospect.”
‘It gave me a lot of self-confidence to see that the students took the same approach to ethical dilemmas as I do.’
What was it like to work with the students? “I enjoyed the fact that students are not yet accustomed to organisational practices and were therefore candid with their opinions. This led to heated discussions. I was impressed by the speed with which the students reacted to statements that they were only just then hearing for the first time, and the passion with which they described their visions. I hope that some of them will apply for jobs with us after graduating.”
What did you learn from them? “That we as a financial sector in general and Rabobank specifically are very bad at explaining what we do. We have a huge responsibility for explaining how we arrive at our decisions and we still do this far too little. On the other hand, the students were also unable to come up with an answer as to which channels we could use to communicate about this. Actually, I think that gatherings just like The Boardroom are extremely well-suited to this.”
Are you going to seek contact with students more often? “We are going to evaluate The Boardroom soon, and I hope that we will be able to expand these masterclasses as a result. The Vrije Universiteit has done very little with its alumni for a very long time. As a student, you would like to know what your future might look like, and there is no alumnus who doesn’t like talking about what he or she does. The relationship between students and society can and must become stronger.”
