MAY 2006

Hands Across the Water

MBA students cultivate their mindsets as global managers with internships outside the United States.

by Theresa Johnston
Photos by Peter Stembler

Translator of Price Points

Second-year MBA student Michelle Chen does not speak French. In fact, before last summer, the Chinese native had never even traveled in Europe. Yet by all accounts, her summer internship with LinguaNet, a Paris-based international translation services provider, was a tremendous success.

“Michelle is simply brilliant,” says Vassilis Chamalidis, MBA ’96, chief executive officer of the LinguaNet Group, which has offices in 10 European countries. “Even though this was her first experience in Europe, she fit easily into the LinguaNet team. Everybody appreciated her for her listening and communication abilities. They were also impressed with Michelle’s capacity to grasp complex marketing issues, analyze them, and produce sharp, concise proposals within a dramatically short time.” Her fresh perspective, he says, “stimulated each and every member of the team.”

Chen and Chamalidis took advantage of the Business School’s Global Management Immersion Experience (GMIX), a summer internship program that sends MBA students between their first and second year of classes to work in countries outside their former orbit. The interns are often more valuable to the organizations they join precisely because their professional background is not local.

For most of her four weeks on the job, Chen lived at the home of the company founder and worked at LinguaNet’s office in Montpellier, about 250 miles south of Paris on the Mediterranean coast. One of her tasks was to help define strategic positioning for the growing company, which translates software, websites, corporate presentations, and product literature for a wide range of clients—from small local firms to multinational automobile, medical device, and software companies. A second assignment was to investigate whether LinguaNet should expand to provide translation services to Chinese companies. Her recommendation: Wait a while. “The translation market is definitely growing in China,” she explained, “but the price point in China is so low that the move would not be profitable.” For now, she said, LinguaNet would be smarter to focus on providing Chinese translations for non-Chinese companies that want to enter the Chinese market.

Besides working in Montpellier, Chen made business trips to LinguaNet offices in Paris and Munich and enjoyed weekend outings via train to Barcelona and Heidelberg. Frequently she was the only Asian person around—let alone the only Chinese. “I had a great time,” she says. “Not being able to speak French, I built a lot of survival skills over the summer.”

Nurturing Nonprofit Concepts

As a native Madrileño, Jaime Rodriguez had no worries about culture shock when he arrived for a SMIF internship last summer at the Chandra Foundation in Spain. Nevertheless, his 10-week experience at the high-tech Madrid nonprofit had a profound effect on his thinking. “I discovered I don’t want to work as a nonprofit executive director. Continuously asking for money frustrates me too much,” said Rodriguez, who worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Co. before coming to Stanford. “Conversely, I am now sure I want to make nonprofit a significant part of my professional life through board service, pro bono work, and giving.”

Founded in 1999, the Chandra Foundation sponsors websites aimed at helping nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations and the disadvantaged populations that they serve. Its most popular site is a kind of Monster.com for volunteer and nonprofit jobs in Spain. Rodriguez’s assignment was to devise a plan for a new site that would channel surplus business goods—used computers, office furniture, and hotel linens (which by law have to be replaced every few years)—to nonprofit organizations that can use them. Chandra director Elena Acin said she was particularly impressed by the knowledge Rodriguez had picked up at Stanford about the latest trends and approaches in managing nonprofits. “After the summer work we went to California to visit some businesses and institutions,” she said, “and Jaime has been very helpful in counseling us on how to approach them.”

Rodriguez, scheduled to receive his MBA this June, intends to return to McKinsey in Spain. His dream is to create a program there for young Spanish business professionals modeled after Stanford’s Board Fellows program, which matches MBA candidates with the boards of directors of Bay Area nonprofit organizations for eight-month apprenticeships. “The people in the sector I talked about were thrilled about it, so I only need to go and do it when I get back,” he wrote on the Public Management Program website. “SMIF nurtured the nonprofit seed in me. And I’ll do my utmost to make it grow strong.”

Finance for Medical Technology

When Melissa Lopez of Dallas was looking for an overseas summer job, she wanted to work someplace she would not likely go on her own as a tourist. She wound up with a GMIX internship at Creative Solutions, a small consulting company based in Sofia, Bulgaria. “It was a really unique opportunity,” said Lopez, who worked as an investment banker with CitiGroup before coming to Stanford and is now a second-year MBA student. “All of my previous experience had been in San Francisco, and I thought that was kind of a weakness on my resume. I wanted something to show full-time employers that I’m seriously interested in being abroad.”

Lopez’s assignment was to create an investment proposal for a new Bulgarian medical facility that would use cutting-edge laser technology to treat cancers and other tumors noninvasively. The goal was to raise 10 million euro for equipment, land, and construction costs. “The project was very similar to what I was doing in corporate finance work,” Lopez said, but there were some interesting twists. In the United States, it’s easy to take structured processes and markets for granted, she said, whereas Bulgaria’s venture capital industry is still in its infancy. “From what I saw in the smaller-sized firm where I worked, business was largely conducted through networks and relationships versus formalized contracts. It was definitely a learning experience.” Her sponsor, Irena Komitova, Sloan ’01, was so pleased with Lopez’s work that she said Creative Solutions absolutely would be willing to host another Stanford Business School student in Bulgaria. “For us,” she wrote, “it turned out to be a very, very important project, which is … coming to fruition now.”

When she wasn’t working in Sofia, Lopez managed to take a couple of weekend trips, one to the Black Sea and another to Istanbul. As for her time Bulgaria, she said, “I sensed a lot of entrepreneurial energy—small business and people taking opportunities that were not available to them before.” The formerly communist country is up for admission to the European Union in 2007, she added, “so there was a lot of buzz in the general population about the implications of joining versus not joining. It was interesting to see all of that firsthand.”

Nonprofit Market Analyst

Just over a year ago, the National Kidney Foundation of Singapore launched a major initiative called the Asian Children’s Medical Fund, aimed at providing crucial medical treatment for destitute young patients in Southeast Asia. So far, the program has flown 13 children from Cambodia to Singapore for heart surgeries and screened 60 more for early detection of life-threatening illnesses. The nonprofit organization also provided an interesting training ground last summer for Korean-born Yoonyi Lee.

As part of her 10-week SMIF internship, Lee was asked to do a market analysis of her home country, to see if Korea might be a good place for the organization to do some fundraising. Among the factors she looked at were the Korean legal system, public feelings about charity, media practices, and competing fundraising organizations. “It was an invaluable experience,” the second-year MBA student later wrote, “because I could incorporate everything I learned at the Graduate School of Business and prior work experience into a well-organized plan for a fledgling charity fund with such a great lifesaving mission.”

One of the highlights of Lee’s summer was the chance to meet and befriend Cambodian children like Chenda, a cheerful 5-year-old who went to Singapore to have surgery. The job also offered Lee a fascinating view of the downside of foundation work when Singapore’s government launched a highly publicized inquiry into accounting and fundraising irregularities at the National Kidney Foundation that led to the departure of the CEO. Despite the shakeup, “Yoonyi was a wonderful addition to the NKFS team,” said her mentor, Hildy Fong, former program manager for the Asian Children’s Medical Fund. “She helped us explore NKF’s expansion into an international focus outside of Singapore and was invaluable as a contributor to daily team and senior-level meetings. It is without question that her participation in Stanford’s SMIF summer internship program benefited both her and us.”

Information Systems Consultant

Sebastiaan Kuitenbrouwer, Class of ’06, had been to Australia once before and loved the country. So when he heard about an opening for a four-week GMIX internship in Sydney last summer with the boutique consulting firm of Pacific Strategy Partners, he was quick to apply. “I had done consulting before I came to Stanford for Bain & Co., so that seemed to tie in well,” said Kuitenbrouwer, a native of the Netherlands. His assignment—to develop a 5- to-10-year strategy plan for IT systems within an Australian insurance company—was fairly standard consulting work, he said. “But I was given a lot of early-on freedom and had a lot of client interaction. They placed a lot of trust in my ability.”

One of Kuitenbrouwer’s favorite things about Australia was its egalitarian feel. “There was very little sense of ‘I’m better than you,’” he said, noting that it was easy for him to sit down and talk with senior people in the firm or on the client side. Another plus was the down-to-earth, direct language he encountered at Australian business meetings, combined with an Aussie-flavored can-do attitude. As he explained, “Sometimes in the United States there’s more of an effort to please everybody. In Sydney, the impression I got is that there was less of a need to be politically correct. It’s not that people were insulting. There was just less beating around the bush. People said what they needed to say, and it was very direct and very clear what the issues were.”

Pacific Strategy Partners director Ian Clarke, MBA ’92, said he and his staff enjoyed Kuitenbrouwer’s presence in the office and appreciated the different perspective he was able to deliver on their strategic planning process. “Personally,” said Clarke, “I enjoyed catching up with the news from the GSB and reminiscing about evenings sitting in the hot tub reading the next day’s case.” The internship program, he added, “is a great example of the GSB reaching out to the broader Stanford community in an innovative way.”

If you are interested in sponsoring a GMIX student for a minimum of four weeks over the summer, see the program’s website at www.gsb.stanford.edu/gmp/career/gmix.html and write to Sponsor_GMIX@gsb.stanford.edu to receive sponsor guidelines. If you are interested in sponsoring a SMIF Fellow to provide management skills to a nonprofit or public-sector organization, application information can be found at www.gsb.stanford.edu/pmp/resources/smif/.

Theresa Johnston is a Palo Alto freelance writer and a frequent contributor to Stanford Business.

FEATURES IN THIS ISSUE

No Time for Backpacking

Stanford business students tend to be a well-traveled lot. Indeed, about a third of this year’s MBA candidates are not from the United States. There’s a big difference, though, between studying abroad or backpacking through a foreign country and actually working in one.

Fortunately, two programs make it easy for students to get valuable overseas work experience in the summer between their first and second year. In the Global Management Immersion Experience (GMIX), sponsored by the GSB’s Global Management Program, participants explore business in a country that is new to them. Selected students are matched with sponsors—frequently Stanford alumni—for minimum four-week internships at international companies, nongovernmental organizations, or multilateral agencies such as the World Bank.

“Students from all countries, including many Americans, have expressed strong interest in gaining greater perspective on business and society outside their native countries,” said Grace Yokoi, MBA ’01, director of the Global Management Program.
Many of these jobs supply only housing and a living allowance, but if students wish, they can earn academic credit by writing a scholarly paper. Since the program’s founding in 1997, nearly 200 GMIX interns have worked in 41 countries, at companies ranging from Nokia in Finland to Sam Fong Cosmetics in Hong Kong to Save the Children in Ethiopia.

The second program, the Stanford Management Internship Fund (SMIF), now celebrating its 25th year, supports MBA students who serve as summer interns in the public and nonprofit sectors throughout the world.

Since the program was founded by Stanford MBAs in 1981, roughly 400 SMIF Fellows have taken part, serving in over 250 organizations focused on everything from microfinance, public education, and health care to social enterprise, government, and the environment. To arrange their internships, SMIF participants typically partner with alumni and the School’s Public Management Program, or they can reach out on their own to organizations that interest them by writing letters and making phone contacts about six months in advance. Summer salaries, averaging $1,300 per week for 10 weeks, are paid half by the host organization and half by donations made by classmates, GSB community members, alumni, and foundation donors. Of the 150 students who participated in SMIF internships over the past five years, one-third of them went abroad.

For many students, the cultural immersion offered by these internships is an eye-opening experience. Some interns find themselves picking their way thorough unfamiliar business etiquette mazes or taking crash courses in what is or is not politically correct in different parts of the world. Others enjoy the importance certain cultures place on after-business socializing. Nearly all say they relish the chance to get out of the tourist mode. “The student at Nokia in Finland, for example, came back totally jazzed,” Yokoi said. “He’d gotten to present to the top management of his group on the strategy of the company and where they should be focused. That’s a success story, the kind of experience that MBAs seek out.”

As for the host companies and organizations, most say they feel lucky to have such talented MBA students on board, even if only for a short while. According to Jennifer Ratay, associate director of the Business School’s Public Management Program, SMIF intern employers have said consistently that they would highly recommend the program to their colleagues, and that, on average, each SMIF Fellow added more than $20,000 in total economic value to the host organization. Yokoi has had similar positive feedback from the GMIX sponsors. “They say the students are very professional and really added value to their organization,” she said. As these summer ’05 interns illustrate, “It’s amazing what these students can accomplish in such a short time.