When I'm interviewing candidates, I like to see that they have lived or worked in different countries, even if it's just studying overseas for a semester or doing a volunteer job in another country.
I similarly like to see someone whose background indicates they straddle two cultures eg someone who speaks native Spanish at home but has an Anglo-American education.
Why? Because this sort of experience indicates they have experienced more than one culture. That typically means that they have a much stronger appreciation that the "usual" way of doing things is often different from culture to culture.
In an investment banking context, this has several advantages:
- More able to realise that "this is the way it's done" for any activity is not the only way it can be done and may not be the best/most efficient method
- More culturally sensitive to differences, less likely to offend/look like an uncosmopolitan person in front of clients or colleagues
- More flexible, open minded and able to deal with new situations, new experiences and cope with "fish out of water" experiences
- When looking at an industry or product, more likely to appreciate that the way a product is typically marketed, regulated by government and consumed in one market doesn't apply to all markets
- Related to the last point, a greater appreciation of how an industry or regulation can change and the opportunities and risks that presents to a company's business model
The two last points are particularly important and, in my view, the key points to make when selling yourself in an interview based on your overseas experience. Once you've learned how two cultures/markets do an everyday thing differently, you can identify opportunities/threats better in either of them. Often, people who have only ever lived in one culture/market are so used to the "ordinary" way things are done, they can't think outside of their experience and so can't identify these opportunities and threats.
So, if you're in an interview and you've got some overseas experience on your resume or your background straddles more than one culture, this is how I would market it. Be sure to have 1 - 2 examples handy.
Having lived abroad for a few years and traveled extensively both for work and pleasure I agree with you but I don't hold it against an American candidate, especially when they're just out of school, if they haven't simply because they may not have had the chance. If your parents are typical Americans who may not even have a passport or you didn't have the money in college to study abroad, or your program didn't allow it (I seem to remember engineers at my school not having the option unless they wanted to stay an entire extra year) there's not much you can do about it.
I agree that it definitely gives a much more open minded approach to life in general and business specifically when you get to see how things work in another country, and it can be better or worse in that other country, but you get to compare it to how things are done in the US and you can think of a way to improve it, or you get to see why things work better in the US for example.
I'd be interested to get your take on China in the same vein. I believe you wrote that you spent a long time living there working in PE. I've done business there a few times but never lived there or spent more than 2 or 3 weeks at a time so I have a pretty basic understanding of the people and how things work but you obviously have a much greater understanding of the culture and people. I've almost always come away from my business dealings in China with the attitude that this is how it's done here (which I accept, I'm in their country), in a very specific way, and that's how it's supposed to be done the world over, it all revolves around such government influence or outright control of so much of the private sector, the media is very tightly controlled and until pretty recently travel was restricted for a couple of generations so no one saw the outside world, nor did they even have the stories like at least I did from my grandfather's generation who were in WWII and told stories of Europe and Japan. As China has started to do business outside of China and invest globally, I'm interested how they'll adapt to doing business in other countries, especially the US and Western Europe, because they are almost the complete opposite of what you described in your original post: they've been institutionally isolated since basically WWII.
I know they can throw their weight around in a place like Angola to wrap up natural resources, but when they try to buy a business or property in the US, for example, they won't be able to do that. As an example, we were raising a fund and were put in touch with the stereotypically crazy Chinese billionaire (and anyone who's done business in China has met the crazy billionaire) and after having to smoke really bad cigarettes and drink more tea and maotai than your body should ever be subjected to over multiple trips and meetings with him and his group he wanted to invest with us but he just couldn't wrap his mind around a fund concept: it was simply foreign to him. So we tried another track of him co-investing on a deal by deal basis, which he understood in concept but the conversation somehow turned to him giving us $100MM and agreeing to pay him 2x in something like 3 or 4 years (I forget the specifics because we didn't do it but it was something like this) because that's what he would do in China. He couldn't really wrap his mind around equity risk or debt because it's basically a foreign concept to the PRC and only in the last decade or two have they existed on the mainland. Even our guys in HK just shook their heads at those in the PRC. I have multiple examples of this where they just couldn't get the ways of western business. Maybe I'm reaching an incorrect conclusion though.
In the same general theme as your post, what are your thoughts on the Chinese doing business abroad after being sheltered for so many decades and not simply sheltered, but in a communist, command economy.