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Full-time MBA - Philippe Aba ’07, France

Philippe Aba ’07, France
“At Thunderbird... when we study multicultural negotiations, we’ll study how a Chinese or Korean buyer negotiates with an American. A Korean classmate will role play an American’s characteristics and vice versa. You won’t find that anywhere else but Thunderbird.”


Philippe Aba ’07

Before enrolling in Thunderbird’s MBA in Global Management program, Philippe Aba ’07 had spent eight years diversifying his resume: working in dog food sales in South Central L.A., cosmetics marketing with L’Oreal in New York City, and, ultimately, the luxury spa and artificial intelligence industries with a venture capitalist in Switzerland.

“I came to Thunderbird with a desire and a need to find focus and direction,” admits Aba. “My Thunderbird MBA allowed me to do that. To focus my experience – to frame it so that I could come out of the program with a real value-added proposition for my next employer.”

Aba says he isn’t disappointed with the end result. “That’s the kind of thing a Thunderbird MBA allows you to do. It allows you to focus or reframe. Here I am today managing a business where I’m focusing on data centers, network architectures – high technology.”

Working as a global account manager for Cisco Systems in Geneva, Switzerland, Aba is, today, responsible for sales within the Nestle Group.

A self-defined global nomad who has lived in France, Switzerland, Australia and the United States, Aba was exposed to cultural diversity in his own household – with one parent of French descent and the other of American. “That’s part of the reason I felt Thunderbird was the right school for me. I was surrounded by people who had grown up in multicultural environments or who had a sensibility about them and a desire to learn more.”

Aba says that not only are T-bird students culturally diverse, but they also come from different professional experiences. “I was surrounded by a lot of people who did the Peace Corps, working in corporate social responsibility – people who were focused on trying to find sustainable business ideals and models of entrepreneurship,” he explains. Aba says that his capitalistic and ‘big business’ philosophies didn’t always align with his classmates, but that the exposure to different points of view was priceless.

“I walked out feeling like the planet matters, that people matter. It’s not just about the buck,” he says. “Both kinds of students walk out of those discussions with a different sensibility at the end. Thunderbird forces you to sit down and discuss those differences.”

When Aba looks back at his Thunderbird education, he says his classmates stand out most. “I think T-birds are well equipped to change the world. Will they? I don’t know. But they’re certainly going to try. The people I sat in class with for 17 months; they are the people who are going to give it a shot and change the world for the better, not just for themselves.”