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How to Succeed in Business
A global education gave Phee Boon Kang the skills he needed

By Carolyn Beeler

Phee Boon Kang was already “studying abroad” when he came to the United States for college. As an international student from Malaysia, Beloit College in Wisconsin was half a world away from home. But in his junior year, Kang packed his bags again to spend a semester in London. His experience abroad helped prepare him for a career that would have him living all over Asia, expanding businesses and determining the needs of customers in brand new markets.

Kang’s decision to study abroad came from a lifelong passion for learning. He was the first in his family to receive formal education, though his father, a Chinese immigrant to Malaysia, had taught himself to read and write. “The spirit of education came from my parents,” Kang says.

But his exposure to a higher level of learning, he says, came at Beloit. He ended up in the United States after his future wife Siew, who was in his class in high school, looked into colleges in the States. “I implicitly trusted her,” Kang says, and he was accepted to Beloit with a full scholarship.

Kang decided to study abroad on a search for “global adventures,” as he puts it, but he also had more practical reasons. He had plenty of courses in economics and physics, but he was missing the humanities. The semester-long London study abroad curriculum was a “perfect choice” to fill in these gaps. He credits his time in London with rounding out his liberal arts education, which taught him the problem solving and critical thinking skills that allowed him to succeed in business later in life.

With about 20 other students, and professors, from Beloit and the London School of Economics, he studied mostly history for a semester, including a course on the history of modern drama.

“I have been fortunate as a product of these global experiences,” Kang says. The intellectual maturity that he attained during college and while abroad allowed him to succeed in his career. Business, he says, is an “actual life rendition of challenges in college.”

Since he left school, Kang says his life has been one long field study. Working for Citibank, Bank of America, and American Express, he’s lived in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan and Taiwan, and said he “never hesitated for a moment” when offered a position in a different country. As a “branch maker,” as his son once called him, Kang’s duties once he arrived in new countries included expanding the companies he worked for and opening new branches of banks.

Studying internationally was Kang’s way of trying to fit the pieces of the world into a whole. Living in three different countries before graduating college, he learned how to adapt to new surroundings by drawing parallels to what he already knew. These skills prepared him for his professional career. Each time he moved to a new country to do business, he examined the political, economic, and cultural situation, and related it back to what he knew from Malaysia, the United States, and Britain, and from his studies.
After a 30-year career in banks across Asia, Kang opened his own company in 2006. Boon Allard LLC, a consulting, training, and coaching company that aims to “help change the world by managing business differently than in the past,” is based in Taipei but serves all of Asia. His new job, he says, is one “intellectual case study” after another. Coming into a new company and trying to figure out how to make it better is a new challenge every time.

In keeping with his dedication to knowledge and learning, Kang also helped establish the Jane Goodall Institute in Taiwan, a branch of a global nonprofit that focuses on education in environmental issues. After becoming friends with Goodall 11 years ago, she approached him to help start a nonprofit focusing on environmental issues. In the spring of 2006, he furthered his involvement by founding the Jane Goodall Institute Global Secretariat, an umbrella organization that oversees and provides support for the individual national chapters. He now serves as chair of the global secretariat. A primary goal of the institute is to educate children to be stewards of the earth. Kang says this work appeals to him because he’s always been passionate about learning.

Since his years at Beloit, Kang has been on an intellectual journey, both figurative and literal. Many countries, schools, and jobs later, Kang still gives some credit to his study abroad experience. “Without it, I wouldn’t have gotten the experience in the general education we call liberal arts.” AV