NYU Stern profiles TRIUM student, Nadeem Zaman, Class of 2013

This image reflects student’s term project study and this is not the final commercial ad work

Entrepreneur Franck Dubarry , TRIUM Global EMBA 2012

Before he had ever set foot in a TRIUM classroom, Franck Dubarry (T ’12) had experienced a level of success any business school graduate would envy. By age 45, he had already founded, managed, and sold three companies, including TechnoMarine, a luxury watch brand with operations in more than 100 countries. As might be expected, Franck had a lifestyle to match, complete with his own polo team (he is an expert polo player).

But, as Franck explains it, as accomplished as he was, in regard to the elements that make for a successful entrepreneur – vision, resourcefulness, energy, perseverance, assertiveness – he knew that his management skills could use improvement. “At TechnoMarine, I suffered from not appointing a CEO,” he says. “I was flying around the world between our three offices in Geneva, Hong Kong, and Miami, doing it all myself, and I was burnt out within 10 years.”

Franck, 50, born in Algeria to French parents, was an infant when his family moved back to France after Algeria won its independence. Raised in Marseille, he attended university and law school in Aix-en-Provence. By age 23 he was one of the country’s youngest CEOs — his first company created billboard advertising for trucks in Paris and Marseille.  After two years, he sold his interest to his partner and realized a boyhood dream of living in southern California. When not surfing or running the small surf shop he opened on State Street in Santa Barbara, he consulted on international licensing.

In 1989, at 28, he moved back to France and founded a creative advertising agency called GRAM that handled consumer and luxury products, including major lifestyle brands, and launched, among others, Nespresso Coffee Company. He sold the company in 1996, and a year later founded TechnoMarine, having carefully identified a niche combining luxury, sports, and ultra-hip styling. The watches sold for thousands of dollars. In 2007, just before the subprime mortgage crisis plunged world economies into a recession, Franck sold TechnoMarine to private equity investors.

“Prep” school
At that point, Franck determined to better his management skills.  In 2008, an “inspiring” summer course at HEC in Paris led to his applying to the TRIUM program, he says:  “I was hungry to learn more, and I was impressed with the reputations of the three partner schools.”  Because he feared his quantitative skills weren’t up to snuff, he hired a finance professor from another top business school to tutor him for six months prior to starting TRIUM.

TRIUM has more than lived up to Franck’s expectations. “The program has the ability to gather professors and speakers who have accumulated an incredible wealth of knowledge” he says. “I had goose bumps listening to the professors, from the moment I sat in the first class at LSE.”

For Franck, the consummate entrepreneur, TRIUM’s capstone project was one of the program’s highlights. His team was formed during the Shanghai module: Renato Stefani, Thomas Siegenthaler, Rosa Gazizova, François Kouroriez, and Srdjan Janicijevic.  They proposed to develop a property in Switzerland, which Renato had identified, into a caviar farm. The worldwide supply of caviar had plunged, while demand – and price − had risen. There would clearly be a market. The team planned to farm two types of sturgeon for different types of caviar, and to farm in a sustainable way, such that the fish would live and be able to produce repeatedly. In traditional caviar production, the fish are killed for their eggs.

Incubating the egg farm
Because of his expertise, Franck was tasked with creating and developing the brand strategy and the marketing for the caviar farm, to be called Kasperskian; each of the others focused on his or her specialty, including finance, market research, corporate strategy, and sales and distribution. “We approached the project like a puzzle,” Franck explains, meeting via Skype for several months.  The team members have decided to stay with the caviar farm venture beyond TRIUM, as partners. As of March, they were close to raising the necessary capital to make the project a reality.

The capstone project may have been the program’s highest-profile group effort, but Franck says that the multiple work groups he was involved in throughout the two years have all been invaluable collaborative experiences, especially given his entrepreneurial background:  “It was good not always being the boss. The qualities of leadership fell into place naturally, and the process always went very smoothly.”

Franck reports that he is graduating in September as a more effective businessman, manager, entrepreneur, and investor. “I acquired the tools to evaluate potential investments more rapidly and effectively. Quantitative tools, corporate strategy, marketing strategy – all became much clearer,” he says. These lessons are coming in handy for Franck’s other ongoing projects, including biodiesel production and real estate in Argentina. And another TRIUM class “changed my life,” he says: “Conflict resolution is no longer an issue that I try to avoid. That comes from what we learned about group dynamics and management skills.”

TRIUM “is a great place for entrepreneurs,” Franck says, “because not everybody there is an entrepreneur.”  The diverse backgrounds of his cohort made for a culturally and intellectually rich experience, with peers from government, military, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals, to name a few. “You share a lot,” he adds. “TRIUM delivered the message I was looking for“

TRIUM has launched a scholarship programme for UN staff. While the scholarship is open to all candidates, the priority is for womenfrom developing countries with at least 15 years’ professional experience. The scholarship, which offers up to 50% of the tuition (currently around US$150,000), is geared both to encourage more women in leadership roles worldwide, and to support the work of the UN.

A website has been established for members of the UN and its associated agencies, organizations, funds and programmes: www.triumemba.org/uno.

To read the full article please visit: http://www.triumemba.org/pdf/UNDP_Report.pdf

Peter Blair Henry, Dean, NYU Stern School of Business Invites You to a Fireside Chat with Vijay Vaitheeswaran, award-winning global correspondent for The Economist and author of Need, Speed and Greed (Harper Collins, Mar ’12), and Professor Paul Romer, director of NYU Stern’s Urbanization Project on How Global Innovation Can Tackle the World’s Toughest Problems.

Date: Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Time: 6:00-7:00pm *Registration will begin at 5:30pm and a Q&A to follow the discussion
Location: NYU Stern School of Business, Kaufman Management Center, 44 West Fourth Street (at Greene St.), Gardner Commons, 1-100, New York, NY 10012

RSVP via online form or call 212-998-0670

Please Note: RSVPs are required, but do not guarantee a seat. Seating is limited and will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis.

Follow @NYUStern on Twitter during the event and join the conversation #GlobalInnovation

In an interview with CNBC, Dean Peter Henry discusses, MBA Students: Wall St. vs. Silicon Valley.

“We teach our students to think about how to transform challenges and opportunities to create value. And that perspective, I think, is a perspective that companies are particularly liking at the moment.”

Read more and watch the interview here.

Date: Thursday, 21 June, 2012 – Sunday, 24 June, 2012
Location: Hotel Real Villa Itália, Portugal

Registration is now open for the TRIUM Global Alumni Module, you can register via this link.

The idea behind this event is to bring together the TRIUM alumni community, in an informal setting, where pre and post-module assignments are a thing of the past.

Stimulating talks and presentations are an integral part of the agenda, but above all, it is an alumni-led event, with emphasis being vey much on strengthening the existing TRIUM network.

This event will be held in sunny Portugal. Among its many attributes, it was the elected country for many of Europe’s Royalty when they were forced into exile during the Second World War. Among these was the King of Italy, Umberto II, who lived in Cascais for 37 years, in what is now the Grande Real Villa Itália Hotel – the venue for Module 7, 2012.

TASC look forward to seeing you in Cascais in June!

Want to learn more about the top global brands and the companies that build them every day ?

ANA is well known for its fall “Masters of Marketing” Conference – which features terrific content and prominent speakers, including many leading CMOs and other marketing thought leaders.   They are pleased to announce a special Spring version of the Masters of Marketing – the ANA/WFA Global Marketing Conference.

ANA and their sister trade association, WFA (World Federation of Advertisers), will welcome leaders from the global marketing industry and marketers from the world’s leading brands to share, learn and rethink strategies as part of their first-ever, joint Global Marketing Conference.  The conference has a phenomenal line-up, featuring some of the world’s leading masters of marketing:

•     Chris Burggraeve, Chief Marketing Officer @ Anheuser Busch InBev
•     Luke Dowdney MBE, CEO & Founder @ Luta
•     Marc Mathieu, Senior Vice President, Marketing @ Unilever
•     Marc Menesguen, Managing Director Strategic Marketing Department & Global Chief Marketing Officer @ L’Oréal
•     Jim Stengel, Former Global Marketing Officer of P&G and Author of GROW
•     Joe Tripodi, Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer @ The Coca-Cola Company

WFA, based in Europe, is the only global organization representing the common interests of marketers and champions responsible and effective marketing communications.

The Global Marketing Conference will share eclectic and inspirational approaches to global brand building from the four corners of the world.

Begins:    Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at 2:30pm
Ends:    Wednesday, March 14, 2012 at 4:30pm

Location: New York Marriott Marquis, 1535 Broadway, New York, NY 10036

For more information including the agenda and to book a space at this conference please click here

TRIUM Academic  Director (LSE), Dr Andrew Walter has topped a Foreign Policy poll for Favourite Reads of 2011 with his book “China, the United States, and Global Order”. The publication, co-authored by Professor Rosemary Foot, the John Swire Senior Research Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford University, discusses multiple facets of the Chinese-American relationship and its quoted as “a must-read for anyone interested in the future of global governance“.

To read more about this story please click here.

Professor Craig Calhoun has been appointed the new Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Professor Calhoun, a world-renowned social scientist whose work connects sociology to culture, communication, politics, philosophy and economics, will take up the post on 1 September 2012.

He is currently University Professor at New York University, director of the Institute for Public Knowledge and President of the Social Science Research Council.

Read more.

Dean Ramanantsoa is featured in the Financial Times article “Meet the Dean — Bernard Ramanantsoa” by Emmanuelle Smith.

“Ça n’a rien á voir,” says Bernard Ramanantsoa when I ask how his experience of an MBA at HEC in 1976 might differ from that of today’s participants. In other words, the two are worlds apart. The classes were smaller then – 70 a year compared with 200 now; there were “four or five foreign students”, compared with 85 per cent; and the programme was taught in a small classroom rather than its own large building. The content, too, has changed, he says, with better-structured teaching of analytical and leadership skills.

Many of the most important changes have taken place in the past 16 years, while Prof Ramanantsoa, 63, has been dean. One of the developments he is most proud of is the globalisation of the school. “We have many more foreign students, many more foreign ¬professors, and many more links with foreign companies. Half of our MBAs do not work in their country of origin.”

A prime example of HEC’s internationalism is TRIUM, the three-centre, global executive MBA taught in association with New York University’s Stern school and London School of Economics.
“TRIUM is a great experience, in that we really work in great depth and at all levels between the three institutions,” he says. “It’s hard – ‘challenging’ as you say in English – but it’s also enjoyable.”

Read full article.