Networking

It's not what you know, but who you know by Ben Wilmot

The Beach Boys played at a rock 'n roll hall of fame. Top management guru Michael E. Porter was a guest speaker. The annual global alumni conference of Harvard Business School in Cleveland, Ohio, last May was a glittering sell-out, luring 1,000 graduates from many countries.

This kind of jamboree has yet to hit Asia, but business schools are waking up to the power of their alumni.

Big name American schools lead the pack, and they are paying greater heed to Asia as they recruit more and more students from the region. At one of the top-ranked US schools, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, international students are no longer a peripheral concern, says associate dean of international relations Jeffrey Sheehan.

Foreign students now make up nearly 50 percent of the Wharton student body, and the biggest sources are India and China. Some 3,000 alumni now live in Asia. One star is Pridiyathorn Devakula, Class of '70, who is Thailand's central bank governor.

A Wharton alumni executive board, comprising 40 members from 15 Asian nations, keeps track of the alumni network. Sheehan describes their connection in a language that business can appreciate: "They are global resources to each other. They know they can draw on a network all around the region."

While schools are capitalising on their graduates, so new trends are emerging among fast-track Asian students seeking to ascend the corporate ladder. The old pattern of students going to the US, and then never returning to their home countries, has changed. Sheehan believes the typical graduate now thinks of the entire world as a home base. He attributes the change in part to a shift in business school thinking. "We don't look at the national level of competition, we look at the company level," he says.

Writing in the leading management journal, McKinsey Quarterly, Janamitra Devan and Parth Tewari say developing countries can compete in the global market for talent only by leveraging the skills of their young expats. But there is a problem: "brains" being literally "abroad".

They write: "About 30 percent of the 1998 graduating class of the famed Indian Institute of Technology headed for graduate schools or jobs in the US."

Although, at the time, the jobs bonanza was mainly a dot-com phenomena, the number of visas has not fallen off. The US has nearly doubled the annual quota of temporary work visas it grants to foreign professionals, from 115,000 to 195,000 in the last year.

Obviously the US benefits from this "brains abroad" trend. But the McKinsey paper contends that having this kind of network "makes it easier for business leaders in the home country to tap specific skills abroad."

About 30 percent of the job offers made last year to the 183 graduates from the Institute of Management, Bangalore, required relocation abroad. The US, especially the San Francisco area, attracts business school alumni because career and growth opportunities - and financial rewards - cannot be matched in India.

West Coast business graduates recently met up in Santa Clara, California. Organiser Pooja Malik says the US alumni network has been active over the past two years. The trend has been driven by the increasing globalisation of business qualifications and the soaring number of firms recruiting business graduates.

This network of friends is being transformed into something more. "What began primarily as a social network, has rapidly evolved to a point where it is in many instances a stronger business network," says Malik. "People also view this forum as a way to build and leverage relationships," he says.

These ties now span the globe. Indian engineers in Silicon Valley are responsible for many of the investments that US companies have made in high-tech firms in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Malik says the potential of the growing alumni network is enormous. "We stay in touch with a few of the faculty and with a lot of friends and classmates."

The challenge for the business schools is to start using more of its alumni's knowledge, contacts, and capital.

Australia's Melbourne Business School has made this a priority. It recently held a Singapore alumni dinner at the Lion City's upmarket Fullerton Hotel.

The host, Professor Paul Rizzo, Class of '69, and now director of the Melbourne Business School, says MBS alumni play a key role as talent scouts: in identifying "high quality applicants."

For those who get the nod, the trip Down Under is worth making. Management consultant A.T. Kearney has ranked attendance at MBS as producing one of the highest returns on investment among all the business schools in the world.

To Rizzo, the challenge in alumni relations is turning "warm feelings" into involvement.

He says: "Alumni are keen to be involved because business school is a life-transforming experience that provides ongoing intellectual stimulation, and alumni want to give something back."

The National University of Singapore's business alumni association grew out of the MBA alumni-only association. The association runs seminars, CV-writing workshops, tech-venture forums, and happy hours.

The group is an intrinsic part of the business school. Association president Yeo Keng Joon says: "We are invited to meet up with new incoming students, attend cocktails and functions for visiting dons, and to sit on interview panels for incoming MBA students."

This network has a global reach. Although most MBAs are from Singapore, executive MBA programs have drawn in senior executives from as far afield as Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shanghai and New Delhi.

The network has a powerful voice in Singapore's boardrooms and corridors of power. The business community in Singapore is dominated by alumni from NUS and its predecessor institutions. Over 24,000 are spread across industry, institutions and the public sector.

"We have politicians, CEOs, CFOs and entrepreneurs in our midst," says Yeo. Class of '85 includes government minister David Lim, hospital boss Dr Jennifer Lee, and Boon Swan Foo, Singapore's CEO of the year 2000.

Alumni networks can bring benefits over the span of a career.

Says Yeo: "It opens doors - and we have tremendous camaraderie for fellow alumni who will help out each other with introductions, phone calls and quick responses brought about by familiarity and fellowship."