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Tag: G&EE

Published on
Blog post written by Jennifer Swartz

 

“Congratulations on your placement in the Consulting Abroad Program to Vietnam!” I still remember the feeling of pure joy and excitement upon reading the email that would dictate that the next six months of my life. I would be going to Vietnam, a country that I had long been vying to visit. However, the journey to get there was just beginning.

 

Shortly after receiving our CAP placements, I was put on the Cinestar team with three other amazing classmates. Our task was to work together to identify how we could assist Cinestar, a local Vietnamese movie theater, with expanding their market share in Vietnam. Our first line of business was to establish team norms – everything from expectations to communication to division of labor. This proved to be exponentially helpful and allowed us to operate efficiently and effectively throughout the semester. Our next task was to establish norms with our client.

 

There were many factors to take into consideration when approaching our client. While our contact does speak English, there is definitely a language barrier. On top of that, they are from a completely different culture and time zone. Given all of this, we wanted to utilize technology to the best of our ability to ensure that all parties were on the same page throughout our project.

 

Because of the time zone difference (originally 12 hours, but eventually 11 hours with daylight savings), we opted to have a limited number of phone calls via Skype. Any phone calls we did have were to fully talk through the project, such as when we first were trying to understand the issue at hand, and when we wanted to review our project’s final recommendations. We would follow up all phone calls with a comprehensive recap email. This included a brief summary of what was discussed, as well as next steps and any upcoming deadlines.

 

Our main form of communication thus became emails. To avoid any gaps in communication, we established an email schedule where we would send a project update email every other week. This reassured our client that we were diligently working on our project and provided our team with some structure to go about our project. It also paved the way for an easy platform to ask questions and get further clarification for all parties.

 

One way in which technology was not as beneficial as we would have liked was in our research. Because of the government restrictions in Vietnam, there was a lack of information about the Vietnamese movie industry on traditional search engines. However, we were and still are working closely with our client to determine the best ways to find pertinent pieces of information we need to provide substantial recommendations.

 

Overall, technology has been the crux of getting us through our CAP experience. It has provided a way to develop a solid relationship with our client, as well as allowed us to maintain that initial feeling of pure joy and excitement.

Published on
Blog written by Visola Shukhrat

 

I am one week away from visiting my dream country and presenting my team’s brainchild, Reputational Risk Framework, in front of the most prominent investment group Peru.  Four months of continuous teamwork, 120 busy days and sleepless nights of research, dozens of hours of discussions, minutes of hesitation, and seconds of frustration… This much effort was put forth to produce a final product that we will present in Peru as a part of Consulting Abroad Project (CAP) in our Global MBA Program.

The motivation that kept me awake at nights during this semester was knowing that at the end I will successfully present a unique project, become a world-class leader, and check another exotic country off my bucket list.

 

My teammates and I were chosen among other highly competitive students to work on one of the most ambiguous yet interesting projects – identifying reputational risks in the mining industry in Peru, and creating an index to measure, assess and monitor them. We were very excited about the project and thought it would be no challenge to create a simple index. HA!!!

 

As we had our first meeting with our client contact, Mariana, who is a head of Institutional Affairs at the corporate center for the Breca Group, we realized that we were looking at the project through “rose-colored glasses”. The project required us to do in-depth research on internal operations and external stakeholders relationships of the mining industry. Using that research, we needed to come up with the reputational risk index. The challenges around this project included a lack of resources on this topic in the world, difficulty in quantifying reputational risks, and simply not being able to find corporate documents in English, as all of them were in Spanish.

 

The project was a huge learning curve for the team, as we not only learned all about mining process and operations in this industry, but also experienced working in teams with different types of people and personalities. As a group leader, I personally learned a lot from the process of coordinating the whole project, allocating responsibilities, and delivering the message to the team properly. I realized that not all people absorb information equally and not everyone has the same priorities. As a team, we went through several stages of misunderstanding and miscommunication, which ultimately lead to an unsuccessful presentation in front of internal judges. This experience gave me the courage to pick up extra responsibilities, allocate work more productively, and start having an open conversation with teammates. One of the main takeaways from this stage was that it is essential to keep calm, even when you feel that everything is falling apart, and most importantly, to address issues when they arise and discuss it with everyone openly.

 

Professor Giridharadas gave me guidance on how to approach this type of problem, and I’m working to overcome them. I am looking forward to travelling to Peru and working on the final presentation stage.

Published on
Blog written by Jessica Goodman

 

Our team faced challenges that consultants face on a regular basis. How did we want to present our team’s recommendations to our client in a compelling way? What data points and case studies from our internal and external research should we include in our presentation? What questions did we anticipate to receive about our ideas and findings?

 

We certainly needed to have answers to those questions by “Preliminary Findings Presentation” day on April 26. This was the day when all of the CAP Australia teams had an opportunity to present deliverables to a panel of faculty and industry experts. In the weeks leading up to our presentation, we practiced storyboarding our recommendations with one another and a group of second-year GMBAs.

 

Storyboarding is the practice of using the headlines of a slide deck to convey a central message and insights from an engagement with a client – that way, your client’s colleagues can follow your recommendation despite not having the benefit of hearing your presentation. As you can imagine, white boards and dry erase markers were prized resources as we fine-tuned our ideas and brainstormed our recommendations.

 

The morning of April 26 was here before we knew it. CAP Australia teams presented to a panel of professionals from George Washington University, KnowWho, Inc., Fannie Mae, and The World Bank. By 9:00AM, the halls of Duquès were packed with tired GMBA students buying coffee at Point Chaud Café, practicing our presentations, and putting finishing touches on our decks. We received some great feedback, including which parts of our presentation included “Americanisms” – like “playbook” and “bootcamp.” Some of my CAP Australia classmates said this about the experience:

 

  • “It was a great opportunity to practice presenting in a professional and supportive setting, and we received insightful feedback that will help us rethink and refine parts of our presentation. It was a great feeling to be done with the presentation and amazing to see how far all the teams had come from our first day in January!” - Adam

 

  • “The external panel review was both intimidating and rewarding; presenting for the first time in front of an audience of subject matter experts proved to be a wonderful opportunity to see how the story of our project flowed throughout the presentation, better understand how our information is received by an outside audience, and how to prepare for tough questions from our clients. The feedback we received on presentation day was incredibly helpful to fill gaps in our presentation, while also helping us understand areas where we might have too much information for our clients to digest. Our final deliverable is so much stronger, thanks to the expertise and insight of our panel.” - Ashley

 

We now have great feedback in mind and more work to do! On to Australia!

 

Published on
Blog written by Alyssa Passarelli

 

Throughout our Global MBA experience, congregating in Duquès 151 has generally meant hearing big news of some kind. It was where we first reported on day 1 of our MBA orientation. It is where we learned which classmates were in our academic learning teams. Keeping with tradition, it is also where we learned about which projects that we could participate in for our CAP experiences come Spring 2018.

Duquès 151 is where we GMBAs have often been provided key updates from faculty. Our CAP projects were no exception. Image source: Foursquare

Back in November 2017, Professor Yu took center stage at the front of the large lecture hall to highlight that those who would participate in CAP China would have the opportunity to work with one of two possible clients: JD.com, the second largest online retailer in China, or Shenzhen Energy, one of the main power generation companies in the region. Each of these clients offered exciting strategic work for the participating students. On country alone, I was curious about the opportunity to work in China having never traveled to Asia before, but the intrigue of the projects confirmed my interest.

 

Across four teams, there are sixteen of us participating in CAP China. Three of the teams are working with JD.com, and the fourth with Shenzhen Energy. It has been interesting for us to see how the scope of work for the projects have each changed to varying degrees from the time that Professor Yu first introduced the projects six months ago. However, it was an important lesson to learn for future consulting projects, as it reflects the evolving nature of client priorities. While each of the projects differ, they actually all share a central theme: benchmarking best practices to take their organizations’ missions into the future.

 

 

Here’s what we have been working on over the course of this semester, and what we will focus on with our clients when we arrive in country:

  1. Benchmarking best practices and operational expertise for energy companies in the United States and market analysis of favorability to enter the United States (Shenzhen Energy).
  2. Identifying industry best practices from retailers on how to prepare its workforce for the implementation of automated technologies, particularly for innovation that is occurring within the supply chain (JD.com).
  3. Creating a strategy to motivate converting consumers from cash and credit card purchasing to using a local, Thai-branded e-wallet while capturing market share (JD Finance - JD.com).
  4. Analyzing the model and practices of industry competitors’ development of private label products and brand to recommend a viable strategy for the Chinese market (JD.com).
CAP China 2018 participants suited up with Professor Yu and our panel of coaches (Warren Dewhurst of Dewhurst Group, Bonnie Pierce of ndp|analytics, and Chris Min of Under Armour) in front of Duquès Hall after finishing preliminary client presentations on April 26th.
Image source: GWSB Office of Global & Experiential Education

So close to departure, the sixteen of us are eager to arrive in Beijing. It is very exciting that we will be able to finally meet the client contacts with whom we have been WeChatting for the last several months. Stay tuned for updates once we are in country!

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