Mr. Francis Anthony, India

We were required to submit essays that essentially focused on how we planned to contribute to our community—and community is defined fairly broadly; it could be your company as well. The moment that they said "company," I was full of ideas, because I head my department and there are so many ways in which things can be improved in my department. And that is my community, and the larger community are the customers that we cater to."

The Capstone Project runs through the life of this course; in fact, it starts even before the course begins, and it continues on even after the course has ended. So it's always at the back of our minds. And with everything that we learn, in some way, we need to find a way that we can use it in our Capstone Project.

I rather enjoy the social sciences and liberal arts, and that was my primary driving factor in applying to this program. I was very intrigued by the fact that this management program offered such an extensive curriculum in liberal arts. But I think I ended up learning extensively on the hard subjects, which I don't necessarily enjoy so much. But I know they're important for business. So corporate finance teaches you how to focus and how to get hard numbers, which are important whether I like it or not. I ended up learning some of those concepts quite nicely as well. Because, at the end of the day, people care about feelings, but people also care about your business case: can you make a solid business case and can you back it up with numbers, figures, and data? So, this course helped me bring out those attributes to my project, that I can talk to people in my company, not just in terms of feelings, and how I "feel" something should be, but back it up with credible information.

One of the main things I learned from this course was to know what your sphere of influence is and work within that sphere of influence, and secondly, build small successes very quickly and use that as leverage once you've got the credibility of having delivered output successfully—use that to create more successes and expand your footprint. That is my plan.

* The project started by the royal family of Thailand with the aim of reducing issues with poverty experienced by the people in the northeastern part of Thailand. The project succeeded in enabling villagers to be self-sufficient as they produce cash crops such as coffee instead of narcotics.

I was initially skeptical, because I have several friends in India who work for the nonprofit sector and I've heard their stories; that generally makes me a little cynical about how that sector operates. And I think that cynicism was probably apparent on Day One when I spoke to people there... But at the end of the whole module, I think I had a change of heart because I could see how livelihoods were actually impacted.

At one point there was this lady who was talking to us about macadamia nuts [one of the products being grown and turned into finished goods at the Doi Tung Project], I think. And she was one of the workers, or one of the daughters of one of the workers—and by the way, some of the women who are working at the macadamia nut factory are HIV positive, and they used to be a part of the sex trade. But the factory is a very inclusive environment. She was youngish, probably my age [Francis is in his 30s]. And she wore Crocs. In India Crocs are very expensive, and I would assume that they are expensive in Thailand as well. So I commented to her, "obviously you're making enough money to buy them" during an informal part of our discussion. And she kind of broke down, and she said that in her parents' generation, they were leading a hand-to-mouth existence; you know, they didn't know where the next meal was coming from. But because today that whole area has been transformed, she gets to make these kinds of choices. And for me, that was a vote of confidence in what has been accomplished. Obviously it was a very sensitive topic for her, and my question was very flippant—I was commenting on a sign of consumerism up in the highlands. But for her, it was very emotional.

I think some of the smartest lecturers were from the module in Singapore. Very sharp people, very very bright, and their teaching style was highly interactive… I think the members of government in Singapore are very empowered. Especially the young people: the guy who headed a division of the Economic Development Board was around my age, and was highly accomplished… His peers from college are now ambassadors to other countries. You see, Singapore is very small, but it maintains a diplomatic presence in pretty much every country, or the large countries that play an important role on the global stage. And he said that his diplomat friends' counterparts in other countries are usually much older.

My classmates were a mix in every sense. They came from organizations doing radically different things than what my organization does. For example, we have a lady who teaches at a university in Vietnam, another who teaches at a polytechnic in Singapore, and a guy who builds dams in Laos. So some of them came from very different backgrounds, and there were also some IT people such as myself. And I think that adds to the enrichment of the program, because everybody's perspectives about how you apply things that you learn in the classroom are very different. The guy who builds dams thinks very differently from the people who teach at university, or people like me who work in IT. I come from Bangalore, which is pretty much a tech city: everybody around you works in the tech sector, so it gets very monocultural from a business ethics and a style of work point of view. It was very refreshing to have people who do things that you don't do.

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