The Hiring of Faculty

I wrote a recruiting letter. Jin Han [Han Jin Kyung] who at the time was an untenured associate professor but was an area coordinator for marketing. He was the most senior marketing guy, so Jin and I in the summer of 03 wrote a letter.

First of all we wrote to my friends, and we send it out under my email number so that my friends would read it within marketing.Also I knew that there was an economic bump in the US at that time. And I knew when I arrived that there was going to be no recruiting at Stanford and many of the other major schools weren't going be in the game. And I said, "Man, look if we wait three or four years, economy's going to turn around, it's going to be hard but the young guys and women coming out now are going to probably find it, might be a little bit more interesting to talk to us." Take a chance. And so I used the economic circumstance. I said if we wait too long, we can't sit on it, we got to go for them. And so this is how we started out my letter to my friends. I didn't just say, "Hey, please send me your students." What I did was, I said this is, and I am quoting now, the first paragraph to the letter arrives from Jin Han and Dave Montgomery. 

(Reading from the papers he is holding) What university numbers on its staff the founding editor of Journal of Consumer Research, the first departmental editor for Marketing at Management Science, the co-founder of the TIMS Marketing College, the co-chairperson of the first ACR [Association for Consumer Research] International Conference, the co-chairperson of the first AMA [American Marketing Association] international conference, the co-chairperson of the first marketing science conference, a co-author of the Asian perspective edition of the fundamental Kotler marketing text, and the authors or editors of over thirty books and monographs on marketing? It's Singapore Management University, SMU. The dynamic new upstart university in Singapore that is raising the bar on standards of excellence in research and teaching within Asia and the global community.

Now I figured that at that point -- and then we went to say, by the way we have some opportunities we'd like to talk to your students, please let us know. And so Jin Han and I and I think it was Rama [Seshan Ramaswami] we all go roaring off to the American Marketing Association educators' conference in August and interviewed like crazy. And basically with this kind of a thing - look, there are lots and lots of little places popping up all over the world, this is a serious one. And I think we had reason to make that claim, and I mean some of it was still a little bit hope, but it was reasoned hope, I think. That was one way, the other thing is we worried about trying to get people to come over and visit, largely because we wanted people to know us, we wanted to have something that would establish the research atmosphere and credibility and actually ideas for course, all this stuff that goes on about what an academic is about and what excellence and academia is all about. And so you want people from the places that are excellent, who are really outstanding, and have them get to know us. And then if I need a review I can write to them, and they know our people, and then they're likely to do the review.

And so one of the things we did was we started a research camp, what we called marketing camp and finance camp. What a camp means was...and we had one in marketing at Stanford, but we actually copied our accountants at Stanford who started the idea, so we stole their idea and started running these camps where you invite friends in, and you have a research get-together for two or three days, kind of a mini conference and a selected group of friends. So, the first mini conference in marketing [at SMU], we had Rick Staelin [Richard Staelin], one of the inaugural fellows of marketing science. We had John Lynch, one of the markers that you use in terms of behavioural science in marketing with Chuck Weinberg [Charles B. Weinberg], also one of the inaugural fellows of marketing science and Andrew Ainsley from UCLA. These folks were the people that came out, and the finance group had a great bunch too.