Emilia Bunea is an inspiring speaker both for executive and for wider audiences. Her TED talk, “Why leaders should take their leisure seriously”, has been viewed over a million times. In 2021 she wrote and produced the world's first cinematic management case study, "Clara Banu at Crossroads Life", to be used by educators around the world for teaching leadership to executive and MBA audiences. Central among the case materials is "Crossroads Life", a one-hour film that has received numerous film festival awards.
Having spent nearly two decades in the C-suite, as CFO and later CEO in the financial services industry, Emilia is particularly interested in bridging academic and practitioner perspectives on leadership.
Emilia was CEO of Metlife Romania (an operation with 2 million customers) from 2014 to 2017, CFO of ING Insurance Europe (overseeing a $20bn balance sheet) from 2010 to 2014 and held other CEO and CFO positions prior to that. She holds a PhD in management from Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, she is an alumna of the London Business School’s Senior Executive Program and a CFA charterholder. She is currently on the supervisory board of an asset management company.
Emilia's research focuses on the subject of leaders’ passionate hobbies (formally known as “serious leisure”) and she has interviewed numerous CEOs of major corporations.
Emilia’s research has been published in Frontiers of Psychology, was featured by Harvard Business Review, Les Echos, London Business School Review and was widely mentioned in the general press (The Wall Street Journal, GQ, Le Monde, etc).
