In an opinion editorial, Dr Mato Njavro, Associate Dean for International Relations at Zagreb School of Economics and Management shared that he witnessed Singapore’s almost compulsive dedication to excellence first-hand during his visit to SMU. From a discussion with an SMU colleague, he discovered that the motivation behind SMU’s founding was the government’s desire to inject an extra dose of competition and dynamics into Singapore’s higher education system, which at that time was dominated by NUS and NTU. From inception, SMU behaved like a top European football club, sourcing its talent from all over the world and building its faculty team with the best people, wherever they came from. Nowadays, more than half of SMU’s faculty is international, with Professor Arnoud De Meyer, former Dean of the University of Cambridge Business School, as President.