May 2005

People

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBBIE McCLARAN

Lifeline Communicator
Gregg Swanson, MBA ’88

A former U.S. Air Force officer and fighter pilot, Gregg Swanson went to business school to start a second career. Now he’s on his third. After 15 years in high tech in Silicon Valley and Oregon, Swanson is founder and executive director of HumaniNet, a nonprofit he describes as a virtual help desk that gives practical communications assistance and advice to humanitarian organizations in the field.

Swanson was director of technology for Northwest Medical Teams, a volunteer organization in Portland, when, shortly after 9/11, it sent a team to Afghanistan. “Being an old military dude, I said, ‘Well, how are these people going to communicate?’” Remembering that Motorola had introduced a satellite phone called the Iridium, Swanson tracked one down and sent it with the team. It worked.

“What struck me was there was no one place for organizations like these to go for practical help,” Swanson says. “Different nongovernmental organizations had bits and pieces of information, but no one was putting the jigsaw puzzle together for the nonprofits.” At the same time, he notes, “There are a lot of people in technology who want to make a difference, but they don’t know how to be involved.”

HumaniNet puts the pieces together. Operating out of his home office in Oregon, Swanson receives orders for equipment and answers questions about communications from humanitarian organizations all over the world. “There are people we hear from who don’t know what a computer virus is,” he says. “They’re standing in the middle of Mauritania and don’t have any staff.” In return for its help, HumaniNet asks them to share what works.

Swanson is assisted by volunteer experts based as close as Portland and as far as Nepal, and by technology companies that are willing to loan equipment or lease it at low cost. Together, aid workers and missionaries, tech experts and companies are building a network that is ready to help humanitarian organizations everywhere.

When the devastating tsunami hit the Indian Ocean in December, HumaniNet provided mobile communications within 24 hours. By the end of January, it had equipped more than 50 teams in Indonesia and Sri Lanka and was delivering information to more than 70 organizations. Its contribution was profound. As one team manager in Banda Aceh put it: “Please send the equipment quickly. It is our lifeline.”

—JANET ZICH

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Indian Dreamer
Farhad Forbes, Sloan ’91

In 1980, life was good for Farhad Forbes. Armed with two Stanford degrees in electrical engineering, he landed a job in research and development at the legendary Silicon Valley company Hewlett-Packard. But a funny thing happened on his way to the American Dream.

Forbes attended a lecture on campus by then-Indian Ambassador to the United States Nani Palkihwalla, who exhorted Indians in the audience to be proud of their homeland and return to make a difference in its future.

Forbes returned to India to work in the family business, an engineering company that specialized in energy conservation and process-control instrumentation. When he took on more general management responsibilities nearly a decade later, he returned to Stanford to pick up added skills in the Sloan Master’s Program.

The concept of giving back to the community was familiar to him, since it had been practically mixed into the soil at the company founded by his father, Darius, and grandfather J. N. Marshall. “When we set up our factory here in Pune, the land we are on was actually farmland,” says Forbes, managing director of the company now known as Forbes Marshall. “The initial contribution we made to the people at that time was to provide employment.”

As the company expanded, so too did its community programs. Initiatives serving area residents beyond the families of its 700 employees include free health care dispensed by a 35-bed hospital, two pre-primary education centers attended by 80 children, 30 self-help microfinance women’s groups and—the latest enterprise—a job training operation for underprivileged youth that in its inaugural class placed 80 young people in service jobs throughout Pune, an industrial city outside of Mumbai.

In the 22 years since his return to India, Forbes has helped the company grow 20-fold. “We established ourselves as one of the leaders in this business in India, with an increasing global presence, and we are an Indian company which did it. We showed that we can compete with the best in the world,” he says.

What gives him the most satisfaction, however, is the knowledge that he has made a much greater difference in India than he would have made in America. “I found it was possible to make a contribution at a much more basic level here,” he says, “and I think we’ve seen the rewards of making some impact on the people and the community in which we operate. We see that as very much the role of business.”

—HELEN K. CHANG