point for any successful investment process is a sound, coherent, tested investment philosophy that is held as an article of faith by the team of professionals implementing it. Similarly, manager selection requires a set of "first principles" in seeking to research and identify such managers who can be expected to outperform their peers and the benchmark, thus creating alpha for clients in the future. The manager-selection endeavor-its goals, structures, tools, and processes- is analogous to the security selection and portfolio construction process pursued by analysts and portfolio managers at active equity and fixed income investment organizations. In this framework, managers are viewed as businesses and multi-manager structures as portfolios of highly liquid assets. The insights gained from this philosophy form a strong cultural and intellectual basis for approaching the manager-selection problem, and, in our view, will yield a high-quality process with demonstrable investment results over time. In seeking to apply a buy-side research approach to manager selection, any manager-selection team has at its disposal a powerful source of best practices: the asset managers with whom the team interacts each day. How does an asset-management philosophy apply to a manager-selection team? Consider the following generic asset-selection process. The process can be broken into several distinct subcomponents: 1. Universe determination: II Determine the investable universe for the discipline. 2. Idea generation: II Quantitative screens. II Industry sources (conferences, trade publications, referrals). 3. Analysis of securities: II Quantitative modeling (historical and pro forma). II Fundamental analysis (management discussions, industry and business analysis). II "Triangulation" (via competitors, suppliers, customers, and other sources).