The AISB Alumni Association aims

"To engage our worldwide alumni, to promote international education and to foster opportunities, we inspire global citizens to make a positive impact by adding value to their communities."

In the first message I wrote for this magazine one year ago, I underlined the fact that our alumni are global citizens, holders of universal rights and obligations. AISB's mission is to engage, prepare and inspire us to fulfill our moral responsibility to better the world through collective action - an idea, with an international dimension, very closely linked to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social contract concept. The AISB Alumni Association strives to link this idea to the breadth of our community of alumni spread worldwide.

In my second message for the Spring 2017 issue, I laid out how our association functions and the strategy we adopted to achieve the above-mentioned goal - (The Tree Strategy). We selected an interest-based approach designed to unlock value throughout our community by satisfying the needs of our stakeholders: Alumni, Current Parents and Students, AISB, and the Alumni Team. The ideas that are at the basis of our path can be found in the book Beyond Winning: Negotiating to Create Value in Deals and Disputes, by Robert H. Mnookin, Scott R. Peppet and Andrew S. Tulumello.

The interest-based approach argues that one should not negotiate through position-based arguments. For example, "I want your car and I will take it even though you are opposed to the idea." Rather try to identify each other's needs/interest and find a creative manner to satisfy them which would in many cases unlock value. For example, "I want your car because I want to go on a road trip" we might discover that you too are interested in a road trip and we could share the cost and company. This is a simple example that shows how value has been created where there previously was none. Creativity and innovation applied to this thinking can solve much greater problems and we have to spread such ideas.

Our mission and that of AISB are in natural alignment, providing continuity. We are not like most traditional alumni associations; our goal is to bring continuous value to our worldwide community. We hope that our members will respect the principles of their education and succeed as responsible global citizens to better the world by applying an interest-based approach in combination with creativity and innovation to unlock value in their communities.

Alexandru Cristescu

Read the entire WORLD Magazine Winter 2017 edition here: https://issuu.com/urbanbrand/docs/aisb_world_winter17/