Archive for August, 2011

By Charles Reeves ‘09
Program Manager, Thunderbird Emerging Markets Laboratory

Think back to your last semester at Thunderbird. Imagine you’ve already taken your major focus area class like Corporate Finance or Business Intelligence and now, instead of finishing up with a few more campus-based electives, you board a plane. You form a crack consulting team with some of your most trusted classmates — each team member brings years of experience and a unique skillset to create a whole, greater than the sum of its parts.  You fly to an exotic locale where the climate steams and the economic opportunities sizzle — bubbling over into the crowded streets. Your team takes on a tough client and an even tougher project; how do you manage a stakeholder group including both private industry and a communist government?  How do you tell a patriarchal leader in Africa that he needs to push power down into his organization? How do you tell the leaders of a social enterprise headquartered in the former dictator’s palace that they won’t have enough cash to make payroll in six months? 

Your past experiences and your two years of global education at Thunderbird begin to crystallize. Classroom lessons get remembered and put into action. All of a sudden you are negotiating project scope in indigenous languages through translators. You are meeting with scientists to understand a new technology and prepare a market entry strategy. You are creating robust financial models, kneeling in the dirt with farmers to understand their cost structure. Or you are spending countless hours in meetings with your client, the government minister, enduring the realities and vagaries of “client resistance.” 

This experience is the Thunderbird Emerging Markets Laboratory (TEM Lab). This is how a truly global business education should culminate. Sixty-eight Thunderbirds have completed a TEM Lab consulting project over the past two years, working with clients in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, Central America and South America.  Governments, private industry, and social sector stakeholders have all benefited from their services. Our graduates have gone on to positions at major consulting firms and in one case, a team leader is now the president of the organization for which he consulted. This graduate, David Jaime ’10, is now implementing the turnaround recommendations that his own team provided.

TEM Lab is at the cutting edge of MBA curricula around the globe and it is born out of Thunderbird’s Vision 2020, particularly the strategic priority to expand our expertise and impact in emerging markets. TEM Lab began two years ago as a “special topics course” on a trial basis. Now the course is a permanent part of Thunderbird’s course catalog. But we face one more hurdle: building a network of partners and clients large enough to sustain the program long into the future. We need the support of Thunderbird’s vast international alumni network. 

You and your organization can benefit from a Thunderbird consulting team! TEM Lab works with Fortune 500 corporations, governments and nonprofits. The TEM Lab administrators are requesting, with all seriousness and urgency, that you approach them with your business needs.

A TEM Lab consulting team brings professional experience, international savvy, language skills and functional expertise above and beyond the MBA average. Admittance into TEM Lab is a competitive, team-based process and only the most dedicated students are deployed internationally. 

TEM Lab is a seven-week (one module) full-time consulting engagement with a client in an emerging market.  Five of the seven weeks are spent in the field. No other classes are taken simultaneously with TEM Lab, meaning that the student teams have a single focus: creating economic or social value for their client system. 

A TEM Lab consulting team is responsible for all phases of the consulting process, including scope management, discovery, data analysis, reporting and recommendations.  A TEM Lab client can expect results of the highest professional caliber. The only costs to the client are project related expenses and an international administration fee.  A typical project costs $25,000, varying based upon the cost of international airfares and local lodging. Students pay for their own food and for a portion of the administration fee. 

To learn more about our projects visit our website at www.thunderbird.edu/temlab, where all past projects are archived.  Each project page contains the project synopsis, team bio and blog posts covering cultural and business issues from the field. A project begins with needs identification and a synopsis — samples of which are also available on our website. For more information, contact Charles Reeves ’09 at charles.reeves@thunderbird.edu.

Caption: Kevin Rohrer ’82, left, and HouseHaunters founder Brian Kelly ’83 visit a short-listed factory in Guangdong, China.

Creating a scene has always come naturally to Brian Kelly ’83. The New Jersey T-bird wins awards most years from his local Halloween festival for transforming his family, himself or his home into something unexpected.

But what hasn’t been so easy for the former software salesman is finding ways to turn his budding costume and seasonal home décor company, HouseHaunters, into a viable business — that is, until recently.

“I’ve been doing HouseHaunters for three years now, but doing it right for only one year,” Kelly said.

The big game changer for the rookie entrepreneur was moving manufacturing to China. With the help of Hong Kong-based T-bird Kevin Rohrer ’82, Kelly short-listed factories, visited with their teams and eventually identified the one that would manufacture his designs.

“It was eye-opening,” Kelly said. “It showed me why the whole world manufactures in Asia.”

Kelly slashed his production costs and now sees profitability a season or two away, but not before jumping over a few hurdles.

“Quality is a challenge when manufacturing in China,” Kelly said. “You can’t just say, ‘Give me a gorilla mask,’ because that wastes time, money and goodwill.”

Kelly’s flagship costume — a gorilla that appears to be carrying the wearer inside a bamboo cage — was quite complicated and required detailed negotiation. Starting with accurate prototypes and maintaining constant quality control were keys to success.

“If you give them a prototype with a mistake in it, they will reproduce your error,” Kelly said. “Nothing beats face-to-face meetings to inspect production samples.”

As Kelly continues designing new costumes, looking for distributors and streamlining his supply chain, he credits Thunderbird with giving him the confidence to go overseas and access to a competent alumni network he continues to count on.

“Working with T-birds provides a level of trust that is key when manufacturing something 8,000 miles away,” he said.

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Navigating China

Brian Kelly ’83 shares his top 10 lessons learned from manufacturing in China:

1. Control inventory. Only manufacture what you’ve already got sold. Excess inventory is a waste for small businesses that need to conserve cash.

2. Be a sponge. Pick the brains of everyone you meet. Walk trade shows domestically and overseas. Talk to exhibitors. Remember, business travelers found stretching their legs in the back of jets to and from Hong Kong are often well-informed and eager to share. 

3. Visit your factories. Collect managers’ cards with both English and Chinese characters. Get to know their concerns. Who are their large customers and what are their key shipping dates that you will need to work around? Only after probing did Kelly discover that Chinese utilities had imposed power outages three days a week in the middle of his factory’s busy season.  Two biggies: Cost increases after they’ve already bid on your job, and workers who don’t return after the Chinese New Year.

4. Fail fast. Kelly builds prototypes of many new costumes to show at preview events in November. Only a small portion of these get developed for buyers to see in January.

5. Invest in good prototypes. Factory managers want to touch and measure actual prototypes. Prototypes communicate across all languages and provide proof of your intention.

6. Learn from competitors. You have more in common with them than you do with your customers. 

7. Avoid the $900 rookie’s phone bill. Turn your mobile phone off when arriving in Hong Kong or mainland China. Then buy a simple $39 cell phone and $25 prepaid card with a dual SIM card. Only use Skype when calling home.

8. Schedule strategically. Optimize your visit to Hong Kong/China by scheduling it around a trade show.

9. Be patient. Understand that this is a marathon, not a sprint.

10. Use the network. Contact fellow T-Birds in Hong Kong and China.

Watch as the most recent additions to the T-bird Alumni Network share their greatest Thunderbird Adventures.

Thunderbird held Summer Commencement on Friday August 19 in Phoenix, Arizona.

Ignacio Silva ’80 has been appointed the first International Business Development Director for CAS Medical Systems. Silva has spent 20 years in medical device sales and has worked in Europe, Africa and Asia. He was most recently with Teleflex Medical OEM as Vice President of Global Sales, Marketing and Customer Care.

Dana Mansuri ’86 was recently sworn in by the U.S. Agency for International Development as the mission director to Nigeria. Mansuri will oversee a program totaling over $600 million annually. Mansuri’s career with USAID spans nearly 20 years and she most recently served in Jordan as Deputy Mission Director.

Christina Jackson-Skelton’88 will serve a four-year term of Executive Director of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) Mission Advancement Unit effective Oct. 1, 2011. She is currently the ELCA Treasurer and has served the ELCA church-wide organization since 1989. Jackson-Skelton will continue to serve on the Lutheran World Federation Council and Executive Committee and to chair the LWF Finance and Administration Committee.

Annette Bousquet ’89 is now the Vice President  & Chief Financial Officer for Give2Asia. Bousquet has spent twelve years at Bank of America in San Francisco and London.  In 2003, Bousquet chose to leave Bank of America. She moved to India, where she spent two years helping to develop and expand a Kerala state-sponsored microcredit program that served more than 48,000 women and provided over $4 million in microloans.

J. Teig Boyle ’92 was recently appointed Vice President of Sales for TMG Health in Pennsylvania. Boyle brings more than 16 years of sales and account management experience to TMG Health. He spent seven of those years at Aethon, a leading provider of robotic delivery and asset management systems to the healthcare industry.

Lindsay Osborne ’10 recently joined the Snell & Wilmer law firms in Tucson as a member of the real estate, banking and commercial finance group. Osborne is a volunteer attorney for Southern Arizona Legal Aid assisting clients in domestic relations issues.

By David Carpita ’67

I need to share my experience in the hopes you will consider me in the draw for the best Thunderbird career.

American Express was a great employer for my first eight years after graduating from Thunderbird in June 1967. We had eight weeks of orientation in a midtown Manhattan hotel. Then we were off to Europe for a training program that included three cities in Germany and finally Zurich, Switzerland, where we had a gorgeous house overlooking the lake.

I spent the next three years in Pakistan during the “good old days” with first-class around-the-world airline tickets each summer and a generous vacation time to let our growing family explore the world. I capped my American Express career with two exciting years among the bowler hats in London.

After five years in San Francisco and Seattle, I returned to expatriate life. This time I worked as the general manager of a boutique investment bank in Bahrain. Then I spent three years living on the Bosphorus in Istanbul as the manager of a Turkish investment bank.

Midcareer, it was time to switch gears with my partner in life as owners of a country inn and cooking school in beautiful Saint Remy-de-Provence in southern France. We have been doing this since 1993. Our inn is currently ranked No. 2 of 30 hotels in the region, and the cooking school has an international following.

Not so bad for a young kid from Montana whose life was transformed by enrolling in Thunderbird, or the “Tute” as it was irreverently called in those days.

See a recent post from Ask the Headhunter as he responds to a job hunter’s question about handling nervousness during interviews.

Real-life assignment inspires Thunderbird fiction

 By Patricia McArdle ’79

When I arrived at Thunderbird in 1978, I had been out of the U.S. for almost five years — first as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay and then as a U.S. Navy officer stationed at a small communications base in Morocco.

One of the first students I met on campus while searching for my swamp-cooled barracks dorm room was another former Peace Corps volunteer who had served in Afghanistan. Despite the exotic locales I had just come from, I was instantly jealous. Afghanistan was a country I had wanted to visit ever since I had read James Michener’s Caravans.

Unfortunately, by the time I graduated from Thunderbird in 1979, the Peace Corps had pulled out of Afghanistan and tourism had become too dangerous as that country began its descent into the war and chaos from which it has yet to emerge.  

A quarter century later — just three years after the 9/11 attacks — I was sifting through my overflowing inbox at the U.S. Department of State, when I came across a memo from personnel seeking diplomats willing to spend a year as U.S. government representatives at NATO military outposts throughout Afghanistan.  I responded immediately, and 12 months later was dropped at an empty airfield in northern Afghanistan with my suitcase, helmet, tent, sleeping bag and body armor.

Two young soldiers in an unarmored Toyota Land Cruiser picked me up and drove me to the British Army’s mud-walled compound in Mazar-e-Sharif. It was the beginning of a fascinating, troubling and life-changing year.

I kept a detailed journal while I was in Afghanistan — something I’ve done since I was a teenager — and initially considered writing a nonfiction account of my experiences when I came home in 2006. In the end, knowing that I couldn’t reveal the identities of the Afghans I had known and worked with, I decided to weave my experiences into a novel with fictionalized composite characters.

My entire manuscript had to be submitted for pre-publication review by U.S. government agencies mentioned in the novel, but I’m happy to report that they didn’t change or delete a single word.

Having no agent and little hope of finding a publisher, I entered Farishta in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, which accepts 5,000 general fiction manuscripts every year.  First prize is a full publishing contract with Penguin Books. A miracle happened in 2010, and I won.

Thunderbird School of Global Management’s Thunderbird for Good has partnered with MicroMentor, an online service that connects small business owners with volunteer business mentors.

The organization’s mission is to help small businesses grow faster, generate more revenue and employ more people.

“The system is like match.com for mentoring,” said India Borba, program manager, Thunderbird for Good. “We constantly have alumni contacting us asking how they can get involved and give back, so this is an opportunity to engage alumni and offer them the chance to give back.”

The mission of MicroMentor is to help small businesses grow faster, generate more revenue and employ more people. The program is a good fit for Thunderbird’s mission of creating sustainable prosperity worldwide.

MicroMentor makes it easy to be a mentor, find a mentor and build a business.

Register here and follow the links to join the organization and create a profile. Mentor profiles describe the mentors’ strengths and expertise, while entrepreneur profiles describe the entrepreneurs’ business and goals.

About 20 T-birds and their families and friends enjoyed six days of breathtaking landscapes, delicious seafood and a challenging rugby game during the Mjöður Old Boys Rugby Tour of Iceland.

Although the Old Boys lost 45-27 to the Reykjavik Raiders, they were only down 17-24 at the half and played a good game overall.

“Considering we only play together once a year, we did play well,” said Chuck Hamilton ‘91, president of the Thunderbird Alumni Rugby Association (TARA).

The trip was a mix of planned activities, such as a trip to Blue Lagoon Hot Springs Resort and the Golden Circle Tour, as well as free time and socializing. T-birds even met local alumni Magnús Bjarnason ‘92 and Hafsteinn Þór Einarsson ‘96 at the reception party. The group also enjoyed more than 20 hours of daylight every day in a country that Hamilton said is filled with hospitality and small town warmth.

Thunderbird student and rugby player Morgan Siegal ‘12 attended the trip and was impressed with the strength of Thunderbird’s rugby alumni network. “The inclusion I felt was remarkable,” Siegal said. “I was honored to be invited.”

Siegal said that before this trip, he had wanted to build a relationship with alumni, but found it challenging to begin getting to know them. Rugby gave him the opportunity.

“Participating in rugby at Thunderbird is not something you only do while you are at the school; It’s part of your identity going forward,” Siegal said.

Next up for TARA will be another trip with a new competitor, possibly in Croatia.

“We lost this time, yet nothing builds friendship like making your hosts look good,” Siegel said. “The Icelanders were exceptional hosts and many lasting friendships were built with them.”

To get involved with future trips and games or to receive the Rugby Alumni e-newsletter, contact Hamilton at chuck.notlimah@gmail.com. Hamilton also would like to thank association sponsors Playstation 3 and Suntron Corp. as well as an anonymous rugby alumni donor who generously covered the costs of three students to play on the tour.