Tribute to José Ramalho Fontes

I am a lucky person!

After being appointed CEO of Dia Portugal, I had to move from Porto to Lisbon.

It wasn’t an easy decision to make. Before moving I was flying 6 times per week, from Porto to Madrid, from Madrid to Lisbon, and back to Porto, just to start all over again, week after week. It was impractical, it was expensive and fatigue was winning over my resistance. But moving to Lisbon, meant changing a lot of important things in my life, including teaching at Católica University! The idea of stop teaching was almost unbearable…

But the moment to say goodbye came as no surprise! It was impossible to conciliate working at Dia Portugal and keep doing a decent job as a teacher.

I took a plane to Porto after lunch and by 5:00 p:m I was presenting my resignation personally to Augusto Medina, the Head of Biotechnology University at Católica (Porto).

I left the school an hour later and headed to the airport to return to Lisbon.

I was feeling miserable as I was turning that important page over. I was sure I was going to miss the contact with students and to abandon the academic part of my life made me suffer a great deal.

Queueing at the airport check-in and quite lost on these thoughts, I heard the voice of José Manuel Ramalho Fontes behind me! José Manuel had been recently appointed Dean at AESE, the first Business School at Portugal. We became friends when I attended PADE – Programa de Alta Direção de Empresas – some years ago.

To hear his voice, awoke me from my thoughts.

We started talking about our new respective professional challenges, me at Dia and him at AESE. At a certain point, I told him why I was at Porto that day and shared my sadness about it.

I was far from expecting his words:

“…Ramiro, if you really like to teach, how would you like to teach at AESE…?

No more than 75 minutes had passed since I stepped down at Catolica, and I was receiving an invitation to keep teaching, this time at the most prestigious Portuguese Business School. If this is not to be a lucky person, then I don’t know what being lucky is!

As of today I’m one of the oldest teachers at AESE. But I will never forget that magical moment when José Manuel invited me to teach there and the joy I felt when I answered: “…yes, definitively yes! Thank you so much…!”

(This is my personal tribute to the President of AESE- José Ramalho Fontes! The School has changed my life in so many different ways – all of them positive – that my walk of life wouldn’t be as gratifying, if it wasn’t for his invitation. Sometimes we disagree a lot, but he doesn’t know what hard feelings are. I don’t waste my time with them either. My debt of gratitude to him is endless and I’m very proud to call him a friend).