Be Firm and Kind and You Will Earn Respect
“My name is Muren. I am Asian but I do not correspond to the Western stereotype of the compliant Asian woman. I am an economist specializing in compliance and over time I have earned the esteem of my professional environment,” says Delgermurun Santini, who goes by the name of Muren, and was born in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. She was the first student from her country to graduate from Bocconi University, and has built a financial career that led her to work in Italy, the United States, Singapore and now Switzerland (where she currently resides). “I started in the field of portfolio management and then moved to financial compliance just when, in 2011, this subject was becoming increasingly important in the wake the 2008 financial crisis. In those years, I managed to gain the trust of the various CEOs I worked closely with. I had my say by seeking to analyze every operation on the table from an all-round perspective in terms of prevention and control,” continues Delgermurun (her original name means Big Lagoon in Mongolian). “In the same way, I never gave up when I was still a girl and I was accompanying tourists on trips to Mongolia. I kept telling everyone, ‘I’m going to study at Bocconi.’ And they all responded in a good-natured way, ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ In the end, I was actually admitted to Bocconi and moved to Milan. My first major turning point, therefore, was being at Bocconi, even if attending classes and taking notes in Italian was not easy at all. I already spoke Italian, however I had to navigate university courses with two dictionaries, Italian-Russian, which you learn in school in Mongolia, and Russian-Mongolian. An Italian-Mongolian dictionary did not yet exist at the time,” Santini remarks. “From the Bocconi period I remember the mid-term exams, very useful to maintain the pace of progress towards graduation and absorb academic notions gradually. Without neglecting the fact that my Milanese experience allowed me to go to Chicago to do an internship at the Italian-American Chamber of Commerce.”
The advice to today's students is to give their best by exploiting their youthful energy, both to learn as much as possible and because this way they understand what they can do, how far they can go, what limits to set for themselves. “Not only at work but also to find one's own balance in private life, with family and friends,” explains the Bocconi alumna, who holds a degree in Business Administration (CLEA). “Today I can say that I have found my squaring of the circle and I am supported by a network of friends and colleagues. I always put my family first and give the right importance to work. It happens to everyone to make mistakes, fall, not be able to meet every commitment, but it is essential not to dwell on failures. You always need to rise up again. My motto is to live, not just survive.”
The manager, who claims she descends from Genghis Khan, already had another goal in mind after her studies in Italy: applying to Harvard. “However, in the meantime I met my future husband and things changed direction. I started a family and had two daughters, and this shortly after I had been promoted to headquarters of a wealth management and financial consulting company. Was it the end of my career? No, on the contrary, I kept pursuing it and subsequently I became head of compliance in wealth management, in addition to completing a Master's degree in Switzerland.”
What was it like to experience the European work culture? “I believe in the law of attraction,” Santini says philosophically, “I tried to be firm but kind and, as a result, I received kindness and respect in return.”
