3 - 2019 - Asia School of Business

Trust plays an instrumental role in Asian business. Business relationships cannot be built instantly; they require effort and commitment. The Chinese even have a word for it — guanxi — a personal trust on which relationships are built, often based on a sense of moral obligation. “Asia is relationship-driven”, muses Benjamin Archangeli. “If people are going to trust you, you have to show that you are willing to eat their food, to learn their language, and to put in the time, otherwise they won’t take you seriously.”

Building business relationships in Southeast Asia has been a journey for Ben. It began when he opted to study his MBA at the Asia School of Business (ASB) in Kuala Lumpur. After graduating, he joined Esquel Group in Vietnam, a leading cotton garment manufacturer supplying global brands, including Hugo Boss and Ralph Lauren.

He attributes his success with Esquel to the immersive ASB program, where he learned to adapt to new environments and build those all-important relationships focused on trust and communication.

Why Asia School of Business?

For a long time, Ben was keen to follow the path less traveled. As a mechanical engineer, graduating from Kettering University in Michigan, he moved to Houston, where he worked for an oil and gas service company in varying manufacturing roles. Despite his engineering background, he was drawn to the business side of these roles. All the while, he looked-up to his older sister who had successfully built an international career across Europe and Asia.

He was inspired by his sister but, even more so, he was restless in Houston. “I didn’t want to be doing something that everyone else was,” Ben recalls. His career needed a new direction. Earning an MBA had always been at the back of Ben’s mind, and to do so at the Asia School of Business seemed like the perfect opportunity to jump-start his own international career.

Southeast Asia has a booming manufacturing industry, in which Ben was eager to be involved to maintain and strengthen his engineering roots. “It was important to me not to completely abandon engineering and manufacturing,” Benjamin emphasizes, “But to build on that skill set.”

What did the MBA provide?

As a starting point, Kuala Lumpur was a “great gateway to the region,” with a balance of Asian and international cultures which made it easy for a Westerner like Ben to integrate. Importantly, the MBA program at Asia School of Business laid the foundation for him to begin building the business relationships that ultimately led to his career with Esquel.

An impactful part of the program was the Lean practicum, which gave students direct exposure to Asian manufacturing operations. Ben and his classmates spent one intense week at Aerospace Composites Malaysia, a supplier of Boeing and Hexcel, implementing improvement projects with local engineers and managers. This involved hands-on work in the factory, as well as time spent evaluating the problems the factory was facing and coming up with tangible solutions.

Learning about the “real world” challenges that businesses face equipped Benjamin well for his future career. But it was the Action Learning program from which Ben benefitted the most. Each semester student teams are paired with companies across the region to work on real-world projects. For Ben, this involved projects with AirAsia in Kuala Lumpur, and his current employer Esquel, in Vietnam.

“Other MBAs maybe have summer programs where you can travel, but usually it’s only for a couple of weeks. You don’t really have that same immersive experience,” he says. Ben met his current boss during an Action Learning site visit at the Esquel factory in Vietnam, “At the time I was just excited to be meeting the engineering director, but I didn’t realize it was actually my first interview.”

How did the MBA fast-track his career?

For Ben, Asia became not just a place to study, but a place where he could build an international career. While he considered employment elsewhere, he viewed working in Asia as a “long-term gain”—a place where he could build relationships and challenge himself. This relationship-building had been helped by the diversity of his MBA class. As one of 13 represented nationalities, he had quickly learned to adapt his communication skills to fit an international context.

“If someone doesn’t understand you, that’s not their problem; that’s your problem,” Ben advises. He applies this communication mindset to problem-solving in his current role as Technical Engineering Manager.

Read the full article here
This article was originally published on BusinessBecause, a network helping MBA students make connections before, during and after their MBA.

Sitting in a leather armchair in the St. Regis hotel, Raghav Narayan had just come back from a visit to a factory in a far-off Malaysian town. He had heaved a sigh when he arrived, explaining that these days his entire life was a whirlwind. This week was the rule, far from the exception. Hailing from India, Raghav has had anything but the standard career trajectory.

He has trained and worked as a lawyer, as well as starting his own businesses and even doing a stint at Google. Earning his MBA at ASB was a way to realign his career path with his growing interest in the financial sector. “I was very clear that this was what I wanted to do,” he says between sips of his drink, reflecting back on the experience.

Southeast Asia turned out to be the perfect place for Raghav to make this career switch, as he was hired straight from ASB into the Kuala Lumpur office of a Dutch private equity firm. He reasons that finding a job in the industry here was easier than it would have been in other regions. “In Asia, you don’t have to follow the traditional path because it’s flexible,” he says. “It’s easier to take higher-level positions.

Elsewhere, I would have to work in investment banking for a few years before going into private equity.” During the course of our catch-up, another of his colleagues walked in and introduced himself. As it turns out, this was a common after-work destination for the whole company, located within walking distance the office. Raghav doesn’t mind this, and in fact loves spending time with his co-workers both in and outside of the office.

“For me,” he says, “they’re the people I’m closest to in Malaysia, so I will usually hang out with them before anyone else.” To him, his close relationship with his colleagues is a by-product of the intensity of the industry. More than just a job, he considers finance a “lifestyle,” and warns to anyone considering investment banking or private equity that they should expect and enjoy this intensity. Those who hope for standard 40-hour workweeks should look elsewhere.

“You need to love what you do,” Raghav explains. “I go to the office at 8:30 AM and leave at 10 PM because I love my work. Everything is tied to outcomes, so It doesn’t matter whether the partners are around, things need to get done. Because the job is self-managed, you cannot do it without hard work and discipline.” Raghav spends much of that time in the office doing two things: learning and meeting people.

The former entails acquiring an unfathomable amount of knowledge about an industry in a short period of time. For example, he was recently approached by a local pharmaceutical company aiming at national expansion. He knew nothing about the industry but made sure that before he met with its directors, he had learned everything he needed to speak about it intelligently.

This ability to absorb knowledge quickly was strengthened through the MBA program at ASB. Termed “drinking from the firehose,” much of the curriculum comprises of intensified versions of courses where a lot of material is packed into a short timeframe. This is especially the case when visiting MIT professors teach at the Kuala Lumpur campus.

When he’s not gathering intelligence on various industries, Raghav is meeting a wide variety of business owners across the region, often exploring multiple opportunities within a week. “It’s great, because everyone wants to sell to you,” he says. Recently, he has looked into acquiring a packaging company as well as a family business. He claims the process of determining what offers to take is one of the most exciting parts of the job.

But he doesn’t spend all of his time in the office. Often, he travels on-site to recent acquisitions to monitor and manage the firm’s portfolio companies. The factory he just returned from is one such visit. There, the firm hired a new general manager, so Raghav plans to visit often to help ease his transition into the role. Though at first Raghav knew nothing about manufacturing, now he feels comfortable giving direction about everything from strategy to purchasing.

The biggest issue, he claims, is convincing the employees to accept change. He admits, “They’re used to doing things in a particular way, and are sometimes opposed to change.” This sort of advisory work isn’t new, as he has gained experience through completing five Action Learning projects at ASB, often dealing with proposing change to large organizations. Notably, he completed his Summer Action Learning Project at OCBC Bank, giving him an insider’s look at the banking industry.

Now, after working in finance full-time for several months, Raghav has come a long way from where he started. Tasks that used to take him three hours now take only one hour, but he laments that his bosses are still much more efficient as a result of their many years of experience. However, Raghav believes that he’s only at the beginning of his learning process, and looks forward to continuing to grow in the industry. “Eventually,” he says with a smile, “I want to get better to the point where I can create a massive amount of value for the company.”

When it comes to running an airline, it doesn’t get much more impressive than AirAsia. Originating in Malaysia, AirAsia was voted the world’s best low-cost airline for the 10th consecutive year in 2018. This may have to do with the fact that it has the world’s lowest available seat cost per kilometer at $0.023—a universally recognized measure of airline efficiency. Or that it now services 25 countries in and beyond Asia. Or that in ten years of new ownership, sold with $11 million of debt, AirAsia now turns a yearly net profit of $354 million.

As the firm gears up for large-scale expansion—aiming to grow to 500 aircraft by 2027—AirAsia demands employees with impressive business acumen and the necessary skills to help it on its way. Its proximity and access to MBA students at Asia School of Business (ASB) in Kuala Lumpur offers just this.

More than just an engineer

Ash Kachwala (pictured), originally from Mumbai, India, works for AirAsia as a data scientist, where he applies his dual academic background in computer science and business. Ash studied industrial and systems engineering at Georgia Tech University, but was keen not to get “pigeonholed” too early on in his career. “I got bored of looking at firewalls, backend systems and being that IT guy,” Ash recalls.

Ash was drawn first and foremost to the Action Learning program on offer at ASB. MBA students get the opportunity to work on five different projects— significantly more than most other business schools.

The program involves real-world consultancy projects at large and exciting companies in the region like Motorola and Johnson & Johnson. Ash found the latter to be the most exciting, in particular the market research element.

“The beauty of it was that it gave us the chance to venture out of the city more,” Ash enthuses. “I visited 10 to 15 different hospitals around Kuala Lumpur for Johnson & Johnson to get a feel for what the doctors were saying about their products.”

This practical experience was combined with top-level instruction, involving faculty from Sloan School of Management at MIT with whom Asia School of Business is partnered. This included a month spent studying at MIT Sloan, which Ash remembers as one of the highlights of the course.

Rapid career progress

It was the Action Learning projects, and the interpersonal skills he took from them, that Ash attributes to his current employment at AirAsia. In his initial interview at AirAsia, his energy and understanding of project-based work distinguished him from the crowd, things he learned during his practical experience at ASB.

work, he reveals, is project-based, giving him the opportunity to move between different departments and help them communicate more efficiently. His work now is significantly different from his previous employment pre-MBA—his focus is now much more on the business side of things.

Ash didn’t necessarily see himself based entirely in Asia—but he now sees first-hand the opportunities of working in this exciting region. “Asia is the fastest growing region in the world,” Ash muses, “but what does it actually mean to the individual?” For Ash, it’s the possibility of rapid career advancement. Ash says he sees people moving much more quickly up levels of seniority in Asian companies like AirAsia.

Ash is not fixated on salary, and insists that other Asia-based MBA students have a similar attitude. “It’s a very fluid area and things do tend to change. You really can shape and mold what you want to do.”

An opportunity for change

Sylvia Lian’s (pictured) background is a little different. Originally from Kuala Lumpur, Sylvia trained as a lawyer and found her way to AirAsia before her MBA—first in the legal department, then as an insurance manager in risk management. Her desire to move away from law was met when the opportunity at ASB sprung up through her job. She was offered a scholarship as a ‘talent’ within the company to earn a two-year MBA at Asia School of Business before returning to AirAsia.

“In this part of the world, it’s difficult to break away [from your profession] unless you get another professional qualification,” Sylvia warns. Her MBA was the perfect opportunity for her to become acquainted with business skills to add to the soft skills she had gained from a legal profession.

Specifically helpful to her role were courses in global management, which looked at how to deal with global issues surrounding companies which are expanding beyond their region of origin. Given AirAsia’s recent global expansion, this was invaluable.

Like Ash, Sylvia also found the Action Learning program to be an incredible and diverse experience. She worked on a variety of projects, including a project for Del Monte, helping to monetize some of the partners working on their platform, and SmartStudy, the digital education company responsible for 2019 viral video sensation ‘Baby Shark’.

The benefits of an open mind

Having grown up in Kuala Lumpur, it was Sylvia’s exposure to students and ideas from around the world which grew her understanding of global perspectives on specific business issues. She points out the diversity of the class, with students hailing from around the world including Mexico, South Africa, Russia, and the Philippines. This exposed her to different ways of thinking and approaching a problem.

This article was originally published on BusinessBecause, a network helping MBA students make connections before, during and after their MBA.

Or that it now services 25 countries in and beyond Asia. Or that in ten years of new ownership, sold with $11 million of debt, AirAsia now turns a yearly net profit of $354 million. As the firm gears up for large-scale expansion—aiming to grow to 500 aircraft by 2027—AirAsia demands employees with impressive business acumen and the necessary skills to help it on its way. Its proximity and access to MBA students at Asia School of Business (ASB) in Kuala Lumpur offers just this.