Business Minded Jesuit

At 84, the Jesuit Fr. Paul De Blot's (here) energy still radiates as he expounds theories he ardently believes in. And he talks from experience – his story is the stuff of novels. Spending his earliest years on a sugar plantation in Java, in 1942 he became a commando, who was interned in a punishment camp when the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies. A whole year in a windowless death cell followed, a period he now says was his most valuable experience, teaching him that without friends it is impossible to survive.

When freed, he went on to train as a Jesuit and to study and practice Eastern culture, taking time out to study physics in Cologne. He became campus moderator at Nyenrode in 1979, and specialised in the philosophy of science at the Vrije Universiteit (VU University) in Amsterdam.

His business case study into the 450-year old Jesuit order, into which he was incorporated at the age of 39, investigated the way in which this organisation had managed throughout the centuries to maintain its position and even grow in "a chaotic environment".

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