The following article was originally sourced from the piece “Hungarian Honor” on Kellogg’s News & Events page.
Kellogg School of Management’s Robert Knuepfer moved to Hungary in 1992 at the request of a superior at the Baker & McKenzie law firm, beginning a three-year stay where he was tasked with starting up the firm’s practice in post-Cold War central Europe where mergers and acquisitions became prominent after the Iron Curtain fell.
Knuepfer and his family lived and worked in Hungary from 1992 until 1995, with two years of commuting after that. Almost twenty years later, the Kellogg professor has received the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Order of Merit, the country’s highest honor.
“I was stunned; a complete surprise,” Knuepfer said, going on to describe how honored he was to be for his diplomatic and economic work.
Those contributions include among other things, lobbying for business-friendly laws in Hungary and his continued promotion of relations between the countries. In 2013, he was appointed Foreign Economic Counsel to Hungary.
While his primary goal in Hungary was to build up the practice, which he did extremely well—Knuepfer helped grow that one-person office into a practice with hundreds of lawyers in offices throughout central Europe and central Asia—he also helped improve the community he worked in. He helped start up a Rotary International chapter and Boy Scout troop, while the family supported an orphanage by hosting a coat drive and a Thanksgiving dinner.
“Each one of those experiences created another network,” he said. “When you’re out of your comfort zone, you make friends much faster.”