A visionary in research and teaching for corporate management and foreign trade
It is with great sadness and gratitude that we bid farewell to Rolf Pfeiffer. He passed away on March 7, 2025 at the age of 84.
Rolf Pfeiffer founded the Export-Akademie Baden-Württemberg at Reutlingen University in 1983 and was its director for over 20 years. With the Export-Akademie, he established Germany’s first MBA course with a focus on international marketing and built up partnerships with more than 50 universities worldwide. With his innovative foreign trade training programmes, he has helped many small and medium-sized companies successfully enter foreign markets.
The Export-Akademie Baden-Württemberg was privatized in 2008 under the management of Rolf Pfeiffer and Bertram Lohmüller. Rolf Pfeiffer worked there for many years as Managing Director and played a key role in its development. Today, the Export-Akademie is a leading company in the field of green technologies and a partner for the qualification of specialists and managers along the value chain for green hydrogen.
One country to which he felt particularly close and which he traveled to time and again was Argentina. There he was an honorary professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and honorary director of the Escuela de Marketing International La Plata. The Export-Akademie still has a branch office there today.
Rolf Pfeiffer worked intensively on the core elements of successful corporate management. In the 1980s, he developed the IMLead® Heptathlon management concept for Integrated Management and Leadership together with well-known entrepreneurs from Baden-Württemberg. The IMLead® concept brings together the different perspectives of technology, digitalization processes, skills development and sustainable management & leadership and still forms the framework for all training and consulting projects at the Export-Akademie today.
In 1999, Rolf Pfeiffer was awarded the Baden-Württemberg State Teaching Prize for his special services and pioneering work in practice-oriented teaching in the field of corporate management, foreign trade and export.
His legacy extends far beyond the present day. It lives on in his books and publications, in the IMLead® Heptathlon management model and, above all, in the people he influenced and inspired as a professor and mentor.
