It was a great weekend catching up with friends, some of whom I have not met in five years. Since that time, some of us (myself included) have added inches to the waistline, others have given up the fight against white hair, and bizarrely, two of us look younger because they have put on braces to get a perfect set of teeth. Amazingly, everyone could still pronounce my name, which is no mean feat given that there were people in Stanford who gave up trying to wrap their tongues around the word Hwa.

 

We congratulated the new fathers and mothers, reminisced about our school days and spared a thought for those who could not make the journey to the reunion. All with copious amounts of alcohol --- I will never forget the waitress at Phoenix Palace slipping a handwritten note to our class rep with the news that we had exceeded the amount of alcohol that had been pre-ordered so a hastily arranged money collection in the form of a beer mug had to make its way around the two tables.

 

TL, whom I stayed with over the weekend, asked me which of my classmates had advanced the furthest. I was completely at a loss for words. Could it be N, for whom the hurt of losing his share in the company he built to his Silicon Valley backers is only dulled by the many millions that he reaped as a result of the buyout? Or SG who sacrificed so much of whatever savings he had to take the Sloan programme that he lived the entire year in the Indian YMCA, did not see the birth of his first daughter because his wife stayed behind in India, but post-Sloan built a global company that raised $1 billion for Indian companies and how has a house on Kensington Church Street? Or S, who fortunately escaped the ugly recriminations when the oligarch he worked for in Russia fell out of favour, and is now the happy father to twins waiting for his opportunity to resurface in Russia?

 

The difficulty with answering such a question is that it forces one to compress achievements into one dimension. Certainly, I don’t think many of us in Sloans really think about who made the most £’s the way some MBAs might. We celebrated everyone’s journey post-Sloans in equal measure :- from H who gave up a life in banking to teach at a secondary school in Belsize Park; to J, who only had three prospects a month when he started his wind-turbine business --- he now gets that number in a single day; to LQ who moved from a lab in GSK to venture capital and is now a private banker in Zurich. Who knows? Maybe some people might think my journey from Singapore to Cambridge was worthy of a mention.