managers specific questions to better understand the degree to which the manager understands these drivers and the risks taken within the portfolio to achieve success or failure over a specific time period. The package ultimately serves as both a decisionmaking tool and a historical benchmark for future manager performance and positioning. INVESTMENT DECISION MAKING The amount of information gathered throughout this process is massive, and one can easily become lost in the minutiae of each manager evaluated. All managers have positives and negatives associated with some part of the analysis; the goal is to identify all issues, compare managers to an appropriate peer group, determine the future risks, and evaluate whether those risks are worth the investment with the manager. The ultimate goal is to identify managers that will provide clients with alpha over the next several years. There are a few important factors that deserve focus throughout the final decision-making process: the application of a quantitative rating to all aspects of a firm, the involvement of several investment professionals in the investment process and final decision making, and the encouragement of debate among investment professionals on the merits and issues of each manager. The rating of external managers should be standardized across each asset class and subclass. By standardizing the key factors, the manager-selection team is able to cross-fertilize ideas across teams (such as U.S. equities and international equities) and undertake healthy cross-team debates on multi-asset-class organizations. Each category should be assigned a rating-say, of 1 to 4. This scale would help to avoid defaulting to an average rating and force investment professionals to rate managers above or below the average for each category. Possible categories for rating include organization, investment philosophy, investment process, portfolio manager, research capabilities, risk management, robustness of product, user-friendliness, and overall rating. The categories suggested are all-encompassing in order to give a full picture of an organization and pinpoint the areas of strength and areas of weakness or concern. Each category should be fully defined in order to standardize the research product for all managers. The investment process category, for example, could entail some or all of the following subcategories: II Sensible investment process: Vis-a-vis investment philosophy. Vis-a-vis makeup of team, organization. II Idea generation: Screens. Access to Street research. Network-corporate management. II Quality of research: Models. Company evaluation criteria. Access to management. Access to and utilization of tools.