Dear fellow CMC alumni,

Despite my country’s recent track record at building successful multi-cultural coalitions, CMC has offered me the privilege as serving as your president for the next year. You will note, and I acknowledge, that not one of you voted for me, so I view my role as a facilitator of your ideas (of which I hope there are many) and mediator of your demands (of which I hope there are none).

CMC has a more difficult challenge than most business schools in putting together an effective alumni network. Not only does it have to connect different graduating classes, but it has to bridge entirely different programs taught by different partner universities. It is not an impossible task, but it will take people from each program to make sure that we all get the full benefit from CMC growing network. I hope to recruit such people to work with Kristyna and others at CMC to bind us all together in a useful web of contacts and opportunities.

A few words about myself. I graduated in 2006 from the Thunderbird EMBA program. I work as the Executive Director of the American Chamber of Commerce, which earned me the nickname Hegemon from one paranoid Croatian classmate. I arrived in the Czech Republic as a journalist in 1992. I met my wife, Klara, soon after, and stayed. We have five children- Jakub, a philosophy student; Barbora, a clothes and extreme sports enthusiast; Adam, who is looking to get into the hotel industry; Sebastian, our football player; and Samuel, the only one among us who picked up my dad’s science gene.

CMC already has several very good plans for expanding our network. When you have some time driving home from work, I ask you to give some thought about how we can make it work more effectively for you and send those comments to me. At the end of August, I would like to present a list of projects that we can work on jointly to raise the profile of the school and its value to you and our alumni community.

Enjoy your summer.

Weston Stacey