China Study Tour: Joint Session with Beijing International MBA students

Wednesday afternoon, we had lunch and a joint session with the “cream of the crop” of the Chinese education system for business. The lunch was absolutely delicious, and for me was much better than the spread last year in India at Christ University, because by the time we’d gotten to Bangalore, I was thoroughly sick of Indian food. I’m still quite happy to munch on Chinese food, so this lunch was lovely.

There were probably a two-thirds/one-third mix of Chinese to international students in the International MBA program. In the Indian joint class, there were thirty plus students, only two women, and all Indian. The gender balance was fairly even in this program. In our group, we had two Chinese men and a Spanish woman. I felt they could have been more prepared and didn’t seem to me to be any more special than we were in terms of our analysis, and yet the expectations had been driven very high for this group of students.

We continued to discuss VanceInfo, and the group came to the conclusion that while VanceInfo didn’t really have the ability, from an internal management expertise level or from an experience level to do so, they needed to move up the IT services value chain in order to service long term. This is especially important due to both of their reasons for competitive advantage. As a Chinese company with whom to form a long-term strategic partnership, a company would want to potentially get more out of the relationship than low-level testing services. Further, as the yuan appreciates against the dollar, the cost advantage enjoyed by China will be usurped by Vietnam and other lower-cost competitors.

Overall, I thought the students were well-spoken, but their English was about a 7 on a scale of 1-10. Most of the English we’ve encountered in China so far has been at this level.

In addition to the joint session with the students, we had a talk from the Chinese entrepreneur running out tour, Jennifer Pan. She has an undergraduate degree in Chemistry, a graduate degree in computer science, an MBA, and is now working for herself setting up tours for business schools in China. Her talk focused on the importance of knowing yourself and following your passion. She said that getting up every day for work in the U.S., and being part of the rat race actually takes more courage than what she is doing because you have to force yourself to do something you hate in order to make the life you want to live. While I partially disagree, in that I don’t really mind my little part of the cube farm (and I have a window), it is true that in the pursuit of so much stuff – the American “dream” of ownership, almost indiscriminate ownership of things, it sometimes seems – we lose track of what it really means to be human.