Spring is finally in the air! After months of snow and low temperatures we welcome you to the Spring edition of the DUBS Alumni Network e-newsletter.

You may be forgiven for thinking that with all the wintry weather we have experienced of late that the Mill Hill Lane redevelopment may have slipped behind schedule. However it is still pushing forward and we are in fact still on track for staff to be relocated in readiness for the new academic year. To keep up to date with the build take a look at the latest time lapse videos here.

We are now in the final stages of production for the next issue of our DUBS Alumni News magazine which features alumni and faculty contributions to articles on pension schemes, family businesses and a Q&A section with alumna Lisa Pollack, reporter for the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog. The Spring 2013 issue will be sent out to alumni in early May, so if you have recently changed address please contact us at business.alumni@durham.ac.uk to ensure that you receive your free copy and are kept up to date with all the latest DUBS news and events.

In this edition of our e-newsletter we feature research from two of our faculty members, Emma Black and Dr Michael Guo, in 'Diversification: Does it really add value? Evidence from China'. We also introduce you to one of the latest additions to our DUBS Alumni Network members’ benefits package, ‘The Marketing and Management Collection’ by Henry Steward Talks. This new resource allows all Alumni Network members free access to hundreds of series of online seminars in marketing, management, finance, law and more which are headed by leading experts in each field. For those newer members to the Alumni Network we have also included a brief guide on what resources and services are available in the DUBS Alumni Network Members Benefit Package.

In our regular round up we have a selection of the forthcoming events planned for Spring/Summer 2013, including a further five International D8 Masterclasses and the upcoming Global Get Together.

We hope you find this e-newsletter interesting and, as ever, welcome your feedback. We look forward to meeting many of you in the coming months during our trips to Moscow, Beijing, London, New Delhi & Mumbai.

The Alumni Relations Team

DUBS Alumni Network Webinar Series 2013

Leading on from the success of our DUBS Alumni Network webinar series we have three further webinars to help you succeed in your career. These webinars are led by career development and career planning experts Position Ignition and feature topical career issues and challenges.

Recordings of the first three webinars of the series ‘Selling Yourself with Confidence’, ‘Networking for Success’ and ‘Getting into Senior Roles’ are available to watch on the alumni website. The next live webinar is themed on the topic ‘Developing a Career Plan’  and is scheduled as below:

• Tuesday 30 April 2013- Developing a Career Plan

• Wednesday 15 May 2013- Becoming a Great Manager and Leader

• Thursday 13 June 2013- Building Influencing & Persuasive Skills

For more information or to sign up to one of these workshops click here.

Diversification: Does it really add value? Evidence from China

Here, two of our faculty members Emma Black, Teaching Fellow in Accounting, Finance and Economics and Dr Michael Guo, Senior Lecturer in Finance, share some of their most recent research as part of the School's Institute for China Development and Research.

Since the seminal work of Markowitz in the fifties, academics and practitioners alike have debated the value of diversification. Defined as the spreading of risk, investors were recommended as being able to benefit from diversification through combining together assets that do not move in perfect harmony (ie. they exhibit less than perfect positive correlation), such that an investor can benefit from combining, for example, Apple with Wal-Mart, to the extent that they do not move in the same manner as each other. The benefits of diversification have been shown to be optimally gained with approximately thirty stocks held within a portfolio of equities, while research has promoted further diversification of risk through the inclusion of different asset classes into the overall held position.

In recent times, we have seen diversification sought not just across industries, but across countries. Diversification has mimicked globalisation and has spread investor portfolios onto a global scale. To continue reading please click here.

DUBS Alumni Network Members Benefit Package

As a member of the DUBS Alumni Network, you are not only entitled to the facilities that our website provides, but to a whole host of other benefits and services exclusively tailored for DUBS students and alumni.

We offer you reduced subscriptions to publications such as The Economist, special rates for alumni on postgraduate study and access to a whole host of careers resources, to name but a few.

Durham University Business School encourages a lifelong relationship with its students and is keen to see its alumni succeed in their chosen careers. In the interest of taking an active role in developing the careers of its graduates, the School has a wide offering of resources available to all DUBS Alumni Network members:

• Two free MBA Career consultations per year with the School's Career Development Team
• Guidance appointments during vacations for Masters and UG students
• Career mentors through the alumni network
• Careers workshops aimed at recent graduates
• Career webinars with the UK's leading career and workplace consultancy Postion Ignition
• Video content on the entire job hunt and preparing for the recruitment process from Abintegro
• Websites and online resources including 10 minutes with, Resilient Exec, Penna Job spider, Workmaze, TopMBA, and our Online Skills Index.

For more information, or to take advantage of any of our great offers, please visit the ‘Alumni Benefits' section of the alumni website.

The Marketing and Management Collection

The Alumni Relations Team has teamed up with Henry Stewart Talks to give DUBS Alumni Network members full access to 'The Marketing and Management Collection'. This resource is a collection of online seminars in marketing, management, finance, law and more led by leading experts in each field. 

It includes over 700 specially prepared audio-visual lectures, organised into 60 comprehensive series and delivered by leading academics and practitioners. It makes available a wide range of detailed, practical knowledge on subjects as diverse as Change Management, Doing Business in India, Business Ethics, Information Technology, Bargaining and Negotiations, Data Mining, Retail Marketing, Bayesian Analysis, Sport Marketing, Pharmaceutical Marketing, Supply Chain Management and Export Marketing. Examples of these series’ include:

• Strategy Professionals: strategic planners and strategy consultants edited by Prof. Richard Whittington, University of Oxford, UK
• Impact of Chinese Culture on Chinese Consumers edited by Dr. Junsong Chen, China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), China
• Quantitative Financial Risk Management edited by Dr. Stephen E. Satchell, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK
• Managing Organisations edited by Prof. Stewart Clegg, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
• Unleashing Change in Public Services edited by Prof. Steven Kelman, Harvard University, USA

To view any of these resources you must be a registered DUBS Alumni Network member, if you have not yet registered please request your member ID from the Alumni Relations Team then visit the DUBS Alumni Network website to register.