You have nearly three billion dollars. You want it to grow. How do you go about finding the best person to make this happen? Ask Amy de Rham T'86.
She is a senior partner and global head of asset management for the executive search firm of Rhodes Associates, which Dartmouth College selected to conduct its search for a new chief investment officer—the person in charge of investing the college's $2.83 billion endowment (including Tuck's $190 million portion), with each individual gift tracked as a separate line item.
Rhodes, a relatively small if respected player in the executive search world, trumped six other finalists, including two industry leaders for whom de Rham had worked before joining Rhodes. What explains Dartmouth's unexpected choice? By all accounts, it was de Rham herself who both opened and closed the deal (even though, unlike the competition, she made her presentation by phone, from her home base in San Francisco).
"I think we were chosen because of our experience conducting searches in the specific domain of asset management and because we promised hands-on management. I assured the search committee that if our firm were chosen, I would be the primary person involved," says de Rham. It also didn't hurt, she says, that she could leverage her Tuck experience to establish her understanding of the Dartmouth environment.
"We were impressed with Amy as an individual and by the fact that she was a principal who would be actively involved in the search process," says Adam Keller, Dartmouth's executive vice president for finance and administration, who headed the search committee. The committee was also intrigued by de Rham's proposal to broaden the search pool, considering candidates from the private sector as well as from academia, especially those with demonstrated success in alternative investments (in which Dartmouth already excelled).
In all, de Rham spoke to about 130 people from various sectors in the financial services industry. She interviewed about 25 of them personally and presented 12 to Dartmouth. How did she winnow the field? "You talk to people, you talk around those people, find out what they've done, how they accomplished it, their personality, their culture, their investment fit. That's the magic of what I do," she says with a grin. "That's why people hire me."
Among those she contacted was David Russ, then treasurer of the regents and vice president for investments for the entire University of California system, managing a portfolio with an endowment more than twice the size of Dartmouth's as well as the university system's retirement funds and cash assets. She knew Russ only by reputation; it was a cold call.
"I wasn't looking for a job," says Russ. "Amy found me." In the course of their conversation, de Rham sensed that Russ was growing frustrated with the political aspects of his public position and might want to return to what he loved most: pure portfolio management with the flexibility afforded by the private sector. Over the next few months, she called with periodic updates on the Dartmouth search. "She kept me interested," says Russ, who ultimately accepted the job because he believed he could add value to the endowment. "Dartmouth has an excellent portfolio," he says. "My challenge is to make it better."
"I know what the client is looking for because I've been in that seat," says de Rham, whose atypical career path includes a joint degree in comparative literature and political theory from Princeton, an entry-level job in publishing, and a midcourse correction that led to Tuck and increasingly senior positions as a mutual fund portfolio manager and sell-side analyst.
All these experiences inform her current career, which she says requires an understanding of both business strategy and human behavior. As Tuck Emeritus Professor Dick Bower advised her years ago, "It all goes back to people." And in her view, it is the people who make the job rewarding. "There's less direct involvement in finance in my career now than there was 10 years ago, but the relationship side of the business offsets that. I get to speak with intelligent, sophisticated, motivated, and—if I'm lucky—very nice people."
