The Most Powerful Network in Switzerland?

Graduating from business school is the start of a whole new chapter in your professional life, as a responsible and hopefully responsive alumnus, guiding, advising and helping students from your alma mater.

 

Tight knit communities like St. Gallen's MBA alumni ensure that current students can pick up the phone or drop an email to a senior executive at a number of prestigious firms in Switzerland, and get a warm response.

 

St Gallen University as whole has more than 18,000 alumni, including Dr Josef Ackermann, Chairman of Deutsche Bank, and Walter Kielholz, Chairman of Credit Suisse Group. University alumni chapters supported by Swiss embassies and Chambers of Commerce around the world, and meet regularly in cities such as London, Paris, Milan, New York, Chicago, Singapore and Hong Kong. 

 

St. Gallen alumni love helping current MBAs get ahead in their careers. Each year, the MBA alumni network selects a new board to keep the network active. Their mission is to use: "Cool heads, warm hearts, and active hands" to enhance the value of the St. Gallen MBA.

 

The Fall semester saw a strong display of alumni pulling power, as week after week St Gallen MBAs were treated to lectures on leadership, job-hunting, pitching ideas and inside industry information from a lineup of MBA alumni in influential and exciting roles.

 

Nitin Madan, a St. Gallen alum from the class of 2010 brought this year's MBAs a workshop on “Pitching for Success” earlier this month. Nitin is a Business Development Manager for Group Strategy and Innovation at telecoms giant Swisscom. He is part of a team that responsible for incubating disruptive business ideas and providing investment, coaching and leadership to corporate-development projects.  

 

Pitching is a key skill in today's business environment. Whether you are raising finance, seeking employment or proposing a project, delivering a snappy pitch with great poise and enthusiasm makes a world of difference. At the one day workshop MBAs had a chance to participate in a case study, practise pitching and also have a go at coaching. They packing into a day of learning what they might have taken years to pick up in the workplace. 

 

The St. Gallen MBA class also recently welcomed Karel Doclo, IBM-Oracle Alliance Executive, for a Leadership Experience Project on Conflict and Project Management. Karel is a 2006 MBA Alumnus who credits the St. Gallen MBA with helping him see projects in a broader economic and industrial context.

 

Doclo's workshop on Project and Conflict Management focused on four goals: where to find useful information around project management, understanding the importance of change management in projects; judging different types of conflicts and applying a project management framework to a real life case study. 

 

As if all the excitement isn’t enough, the MBAs were also treated to a company presentation by Microsoft. The session was led by General Manager of the Consumer Channels Group, and St. Gallen alum Daniel Moschin. He told them what life is like inside the tech giant, current priorities and projects, technology trends and the company’s broad range of consumer and enterprise technologies.

 

Daniel stressed the importance of building strong links with the alumni community. He said, "St. Gallen has allowed me to meet so many bright people that I still know today. The alumni network is the core of my business network. I would say 40 to 50 per cent come from St. Gallen and I have very close contact with them today.” 

 

These presentations came at a time when the students were deciding where to do their company project, as well as picking out prospective employers.