A l u m n i M a g a z i n e - Duke University's Fuqua School of Business

FUQUA
Alumni Profile In today’s business environment, “working
together globally in virtual communities
is the name of the game,” Bruno
Schmid states decisively.
He should know. As department
head for education and consulting within
corporate information technology at
Zurich Financial Services Group, Schmid
is responsible, worldwide, for IT-related
education and consulting in this area
with about 9,000 of Zurich’s more than
68,000 employees. This is a man who
practices what he preaches. At headquarters
in Switzerland, Schmid leads a team
of a dozen employees, but his “virtual
group” worldwide — “the people with a
dotted line to our activities” — is much
higher. “It’s a virtual thing,” he says.
“There are no longer those classic, hierarchical
types of organizations.”
To support these virtual global communities
and improve effectiveness and
40I
F u q u a / W i n t e r 2 0 0 1
Bruno M. Schmid ’98
“The content of the MBA program and its
application were very important, and the
faculty is world-class, ... but the most
important learning for me came out of
working together globally in community-
oriented virtual teams with professors and
with the other students.”
IT TAKES A GLOBAL
By L a u r a E r t e l
efficiency, Schmid’s department focuses
on five areas: knowledge exchange,
process and performance management,
human capability development, maturity
assessment and global governance activities.
The terms for each of those responsibilities
have been chosen carefully.
“We use the term ‘knowledge
exchange’ rather than ‘knowledge management,’”
Schmid explains, “because
most of the capital we own besides financial
capital is human capital in the form
of tacit knowledge: knowledge in people’s
brains. We can never copy all this
knowledge on paper or collect it on the
computer. Therefore, the major focus is
on connecting people, not only on collecting
information.”
Another important area is human
capability development, which comes in
the form of workshops and other educational
opportunities for employees world-
wide. Schmid’s group in Switzerland
works closely with the company’s decentralized
education centers around the
world to do what he calls “niche-oriented
global catalyst-type workshops.” It
should come as no surprise that one of
those intensive workshops is on highperformance
global virtual communities:
“connecting communities of experts — in
whatever area, maybe database design or
risk engineering or claims management
— to form a virtual team.”
Schmid’s interest in building these
virtual global communities is one of the
reasons he decided to enroll in Fuqua’s
Global Executive MBA program in 1997,
a year after joining Zurich as head of IT
knowledge management.
“I was looking for a program with a
strong international reputation, where I
didn’t have to stop my business