Alumni Affairs Update
Singapore Club’s Attitude and Techniques Lead to Success
With a population of 4.5 million and an area covering three times the size of Washington DC, Singapore is a tiny island nation, but it has big ambitions. Chat with any of the professionals in this lush garden city and you’ll find out quickly that for most executives, Singapore is a home base. Most jobs are regional and require lots of travel.
The situation creates an immense challenge for the leadership of the Chicago GSB Alumni Club of Singapore, whose members are drawn from the same highly mobile alumni community it serves. Despite this challenge, their positive attitude has propelled the club to become one of the more flourishing groups in Asia.
Planning Ahead
When Lito Vicencio, ’05 (AXP-4), took the helm last year, he and his team decided that the way to make the club successful was to create a framework of events for the entire year—a task they completed at their first committee meeting. The goal was to ensure a committee member would lead each event, and could plan his or her own travel schedule around these key dates. “We tried for a combination of interesting and fun events that provided for interaction and socialization,” Vicencio said.
This planning also allowed the club to market events more aggressively. Last year, an event featuring Bob Herbold, former chief operating officer at Microsoft and author of The Fiefdom Syndrome, was sold out. In March, the club organized the second Business Forecast Lunch, which featured panelists Chris Fossick, ’03 (AXP-2), international director for Jones Lang LaSalle Southeast Asia, and JPMorgan star analyst David Fernandez, whose thesis advisor was Ben Bernanke. Dean Edward Snyder moderated this lively discussion. For the third year, the club has hosted a biannual event series called “Leveraging Your MBA” where alumni share details about how they developed their careers after the GSB.
Surveying Alumni
Newly-elected club leadership led by Darren Smith, ’05 (AXP-4), had plenty of ideas, the first of which was to survey all alumni to assess preferred activities. The results helped shape club plans.
Smith said, “Running the alumni club is unrivaled in its complexity because many of the alumni don’t live in Singapore, lead incredibly busy lives, and, thanks to the Chicago way of thinking, are demanding when it comes to transparency and such issues. Getting the right balance of the different types of events and ensuring that we’re taking as many views as possible into account is a constant challenge that requires forethought, patience, and diplomacy.”
But it’s worth the work, he said. “Seeing the alumni attending events that we’ve organized and watching the networking that results makes me feel proud; this would not have taken place without the executive team getting their hands dirty.”
By surveying both members and nonmembers, Smith said, the club’s executive committee learned that “we’re doing the right things generally (hosting speaker events and pub nights), but they’d also like us to organize higher-value events including wine tastings and sporting events. We’re looking forward to expanding our program and encouraging more members as we do so.”
In July, the AXP-6 cohort hosted an alumni dinner, an event championed by Sarita Singh, ’07, who works out of the country almost 70 percent of the time. “By hosting a regular series of dinners, we can develop deeper relationships with each other rather than just engaging in the small talk,” she said. Plus, having each cohort take responsibility for organizing one dinner can help alumni from different classes get to know each other.
A Long History
The Singapore alumni club was started in the 1990s, headed by past participants of a special certificate program which included former Singapore minister Cheow Tong Yeo, who now sits on the GSB’s Asian Global Advisory Board, as well as such alumni as Philippe Jaccard, ’96. Since the launch of the Asia campus, the club has thrived. One of the pioneers, Carolyn Chan, ’02, remembers, “My biggest challenge and greatest learning was about leadership. This was not something taught in the classroom, but learned from the experience as president of the club. I highly recommend that alumni get involved and continue this lifelong learning journey with like-minded people. They’ll also have lots of fun.”
Alumni clubs across Asia are growing, and the leadership welcomes both your ideas and participation. If you live and work in Asia, please update your profile in the online Community Directory at directory.ChicagoGSB.edu, so you’ll be sure to get invited to events in the region. For more information, please email me.
