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BiMBA International Forum & Networking Night

Apr 18-2013   



 

By CUI Aibo

 

On the night of January 20th, 2007, students from various countries gathered at the Zhifuxuan classroom of China Center for Economic Research, Peking University and enjoyed a pleasant “International Forum and Networking Night”. Participants included about 100 current or former BiMBA students, especially some international students. It was the first time for BiMBA to hold such an activity, and the purpose was to provide opportunities for information exchange among students, establish a bridge of friendship between students from different countries, and help them to find potential opportunities for business and employment and set up a larger stage for their future development. Embassies of various nations lent their support to this activity by providing information.

 

 

At the beginning, Professor YANG Zhuang, U.S. Dean of BiMBA, gave a speech. He expressed his happiness at seeing students of different nationalities, majors and years together at the forum, and extended his sincere thanks to the teachers and students involved in preparing and organizing the activity. He mentioned an article carried by BusinessWeek published on January 8th entitled “China’s B-Schools Boom”, which emphatically points out that BiMBA stands out among Chinese MBA programs with an exceptionally remarkable feature: Internationalization. How is BiMBA integrating Chinese and Western cultures? And how do its students undertake in-depth communication with international students and thus find the peculiar value of BiMBA? These questions are all important to BiMBA’s further internationalization. This activity was an opportunity for its students to get a deeper understanding of BiMBA’s internationalization and cultures of different countries and to establish interpersonal relationships. Professor YANG stated that it was extraordinarily significant to hold such an activity on the eve of a new year, which would also be the 10th anniversary of BiMBA (June 29, 2008). He wished all the participants an enjoyable night. 

 

To kick off the activity, HE Yingxiang (FT07) from Guatemala presented BiMBA’s “World Map” and “Industrial Map” to the audiences. As time went by, the BiMBA world map has been growing and expanding. Now the students of BiMBA come from over 20 countries and regions, and have reached a proportion up to 30% in recent years, making BiMBA remarkably international. Meanwhile, its students have diverse educational and industrial backgrounds. The full-time MBA students previously studied various majors, including engineering, business management, literature and arts, law, and economics; and the part-time MBA students are engaged in over 10 different professions like project management, finance, marketing, consultation, and human resources. Sharing their different national cultures and different business backgrounds, the students have greatly enriched their life, and also obtained a greater value from their MBA study.

 

Then the most alluring part of the activity, Dinner Time, followed. Students from different countries all did their best and prepared a delicious exotic meal. Even before the foods were presented, their fragrant smells had already aroused the appetite of the students. They could hardly wait for the host to finish his speech, because their souls had already been conquered by the beautiful, fragrant and delicious meals of various styles: Thai, Russian, Taiwanese, and Malaysian, all kinds of pizza, and so on, which greatly pleased both their eyes and their stomachs.

 

When the meal was going on, a group of special guests, three executives from Caterpillar of the United States, appeared in the hall, and caused quite a stir on the scene. Drawing on his personal experience, Tom Bluth from France explained how talents with a diversified background, were forged. Though he held a MBA degree from the University of Chicago, he spoke highly of BiMBA and showed intense interest in this program. Caterpillar, he said, has transformed from a U.S. enterprise simply doing business around the world into a genuine global company and, in this course, has accumulated rich experience of internationalization, which demonstrates that the ability to work in cross-cultural environment is the most essential factor to an employee of multinationals. The employees of Caterpillar come from a number of countries such as India, Singapore and China, and its markets are distributed in many regions including Japan, the United States and China. Today, it is a valuable ability to know how to coordinate and integrate cultures of different countries and regions and obtain experience of globalized management through working extensively in different countries with all sorts of people. As Thomas Friedman says in his book The World Is Flat, globalization has now become a trend, and the world is set to become ever “flatter”. 

 

Then came a break for the activity, during which the students of BiMBA06 presented a brilliant violin performance. At Zhifuxuan, a room richly decorated with sculptures and paintings, the passionate and pleasant music flowed, enchanting every listener and heart. There was no border for music, or for joy.

Following the music, the main program of the activity took stage: Four BiMBA students from 3 different countries each gave a speech elaborately prepared for the theme of the activity. How would the four cultures clash and what sparks of wisdom would the clash produce? Let’s listen to their speeches:

 

Understanding Is Invaluable—By Wallace Cui of Class FT06

Mr. Cui divided his speech into 4 parts: (1) What is our core value? (2) How to sustain our passion? (3) How to communicate? (4) How to share our experiences?

He first drew a value chart with multiculturalism and internationalization as the core competitive strengths, from which we could see that multidisciplinary knowledge and force integration are indispensable to BiMBA’s success. Then he came to specifics and offered some useful advice for some aspects of international communication. For instance, as to how to sustain learning enthusiasm, he suggested that, apart from making an earnest study of the backgrounds of different countries and cultures, we could also make our study fresh by looking for the differences between cultures. At the same time, we should have a plan about this study and zealously participate in the activities, so as to comprehensively increase our knowledge of foreign cultures from different perspectives. In the course of communicating with other students, one should cherish the attitude described by the ancient Chinese saying “Among any three people, there must be one who can be my teacher”, and always respect and trust others. We should overcome the barriers imposed by age and nationality, update the obsolete information, and obtain from exchanges between and discussion of various viewpoints the information beneficial to our improvement. On this point, he named two key words: effective communication and self-exertion. Finally, it is an indispensable ability to know how to share. It is true that when one helps others, he is also helping himself. To help means to assist others to develop abilities and skills, and also means to warm-heartedly share one’s knowledge and experiences and, in attitude, never look down upon others. Experiences are more valuable than books, and their sharing often brings one unexpected benefits.

 

The Way to Do Business in China—By Crystal Fang of Class FT06

 

China is a major country in terms of both population and economic scale, with its GDP (by the PPP method) reaching 5.4 trillion dollars in 2005. Cheap prices are a striking feature of Chinese economy, as demonstrated by its high PPP index of 3.4 in contrast to that of the developed countries, such as 1.0 of the United States. Another thing worth pointing out is that though China has a large GDP volume, its per capita GDP is not even as much as 1/10 of that of the United States.

 

Any firm to enter the Chinese market needs to be decisive but patient. Crystal Fang expounded her view by citing two famous brands of the car industries as examples. Her talk covered the gradual growth and expansion of Peugeot and Honda and also the massive landing by Chrysler and Hyundai in the Chinese market. The few PPT slides looked rather plain, but they dealt with one after another classical case worth thorough consideration and analysis.

Afterwards, in view of the governmental dominance in Chinese economy, she cited Microsoft as an example to remind the entrepreneurs operating in China to understand the force of Chinese government and actively cooperate with it.

 

    Finally, Crystal Fang shared some carefully chosen details with “Chinese characteristics”, from the implied meaning of verbal expressions, the “no liquor, no cooperation” business principle, the “centralized power” tradition, and the North-South cultural differences to the suggestion on directly seeking business partners in the country, allowing the listeners to learn, while laughing, some tips hardly seen in books.

 

Go to Russia—By Karklina Svellana of Class FT07

 

Karklina Svellana is a beautiful lady from Russia. In a pleasant voice and with a slight Russian accent, she made an introduction of her motherland, Russia, one of the world’s coldest countries.

 

With a humorous tone, she talked about Russia’s national emblem with the double-head eagle, resources, and national specialties such as petroleum, diamonds and vodka, and the history-making figure, Gagarin, Soviet astronaut and the first human being to enter the outer space. She even displayed the pictures of the famous soccer clubs and Russian traditional arts and crafts.

 

Laughter suddenly broke out. One after another Russian beauty, a famous Russian specialty indeed, was displayed with PPT! With white but somewhat reddish skin, Russian girls are the most beautiful landscape of the vast territories of Russia.

 

Ensuing pictures became ever more beautiful one after another, recording the 2004 Olympic Games, crafts and paintings, Russian architectures of the Byzantine and conic styles, beautiful streets, and many others. To be sure, introduction of ballet and Russian literature masters such as Pushkin and Tolstoy would not be missing.

 

The last PPT had the night view of a church as the background and read, “Are you ready to visit Russia”, to which the audience could not help uttering their passionate answer, “Yes!”

 

Doing Business in Korea—By David

Speaking of South Korea, one cannot avoid mentioning the “Korean Pop Culture” in Mainland China. Beginning with Korean TV plays, with which the audience was familiar, David made a detailed introduction of the culture and situations of Korea. After an introduction of Korean foods and traditional clothes to gratify the audience, David switched to the theme of his speech: Doing business in Korea.

In 2007, 14 companies from Korea ranked among the Fortune Global 500 companies, with their champion Samsung, the largest enterprise of Korea, ranking the 46th. In short, said David, smiling, Korea is a small but strong country. The pillar industries of Korea include the IT industries, digital and electronics, semiconductor, automotive, and iron and steel, in all of which the country is very competitive.

Why do people choose to do business in Korea? Besides its state-of-the-art IT technologies and internationalized markets, its high-quality human resources are another important factor to attract entrepreneurs. Korea has a high educational level, with 40% of its population educated at a college or higher level, which is hardly imaginable for many countries.

 

Korea highly values the Confucian moral standards and social ethics. In a Korean family, seniors are respected, and people have a strong sense of responsibility toward their family as well as a strong collective awareness. Besides, Korea is no longer a patriarchal society as misunderstood to be by outsiders. Women are becoming ever more independent, and have achieved an equal status with their male counterparts. 

 

At last, David gave a Bomb Shot performance, which is very popular among Korea youths,. He held his breath and then exploded with a shout, and the small cup containing whisky accordingly fell into the beer mug, so that the beer and the whisky blended and became the strong “Bomb Shot” drink. The three international students each drank a cup of wine, and the last cup, which represented the Olympic torch, was expectedly put in the hand of Professor David Choi, who forthrightly swallowed the wine among happy cheers.

 

This networking night was also organized for an important project called “BiMBA Social Resources Sharing”. Its internationalization, teaching mode, career development service, and rich social resources are all important reasons why BiMBA are attractive to its students. One goal of this activity was to help its students to establish channels for information sharing and build a larger network of social connections.

 

The host made a detailed introduction of the aim, origin and operation pattern of this project, and encouraged the students to become a participant of the “social resources sharing” project. In this way, we can learn more about others, and enable others to know more about us.   

 

At the end of this night, a small game involving all participants was organized. Each participant was expected to look for the rest people holding a fragment of the same postcard to which his fragment belonged, and the group who first restored the postcard would be the winner. The game was simple, but rather original. As the project meant to demonstrate, friends are indispensable to both our life and career. Therefore, let’s advance hand in hand and strive for our brilliant future together.

BiMBA International Forum & Networking Night

Apr 18-2013   



 

By CUI Aibo

 

On the night of January 20th, 2007, students from various countries gathered at the Zhifuxuan classroom of China Center for Economic Research, Peking University and enjoyed a pleasant “International Forum and Networking Night”. Participants included about 100 current or former BiMBA students, especially some international students. It was the first time for BiMBA to hold such an activity, and the purpose was to provide opportunities for information exchange among students, establish a bridge of friendship between students from different countries, and help them to find potential opportunities for business and employment and set up a larger stage for their future development. Embassies of various nations lent their support to this activity by providing information.

 

 

At the beginning, Professor YANG Zhuang, U.S. Dean of BiMBA, gave a speech. He expressed his happiness at seeing students of different nationalities, majors and years together at the forum, and extended his sincere thanks to the teachers and students involved in preparing and organizing the activity. He mentioned an article carried by BusinessWeek published on January 8th entitled “China’s B-Schools Boom”, which emphatically points out that BiMBA stands out among Chinese MBA programs with an exceptionally remarkable feature: Internationalization. How is BiMBA integrating Chinese and Western cultures? And how do its students undertake in-depth communication with international students and thus find the peculiar value of BiMBA? These questions are all important to BiMBA’s further internationalization. This activity was an opportunity for its students to get a deeper understanding of BiMBA’s internationalization and cultures of different countries and to establish interpersonal relationships. Professor YANG stated that it was extraordinarily significant to hold such an activity on the eve of a new year, which would also be the 10th anniversary of BiMBA (June 29, 2008). He wished all the participants an enjoyable night. 

 

To kick off the activity, HE Yingxiang (FT07) from Guatemala presented BiMBA’s “World Map” and “Industrial Map” to the audiences. As time went by, the BiMBA world map has been growing and expanding. Now the students of BiMBA come from over 20 countries and regions, and have reached a proportion up to 30% in recent years, making BiMBA remarkably international. Meanwhile, its students have diverse educational and industrial backgrounds. The full-time MBA students previously studied various majors, including engineering, business management, literature and arts, law, and economics; and the part-time MBA students are engaged in over 10 different professions like project management, finance, marketing, consultation, and human resources. Sharing their different national cultures and different business backgrounds, the students have greatly enriched their life, and also obtained a greater value from their MBA study.

 

Then the most alluring part of the activity, Dinner Time, followed. Students from different countries all did their best and prepared a delicious exotic meal. Even before the foods were presented, their fragrant smells had already aroused the appetite of the students. They could hardly wait for the host to finish his speech, because their souls had already been conquered by the beautiful, fragrant and delicious meals of various styles: Thai, Russian, Taiwanese, and Malaysian, all kinds of pizza, and so on, which greatly pleased both their eyes and their stomachs.

 

When the meal was going on, a group of special guests, three executives from Caterpillar of the United States, appeared in the hall, and caused quite a stir on the scene. Drawing on his personal experience, Tom Bluth from France explained how talents with a diversified background, were forged. Though he held a MBA degree from the University of Chicago, he spoke highly of BiMBA and showed intense interest in this program. Caterpillar, he said, has transformed from a U.S. enterprise simply doing business around the world into a genuine global company and, in this course, has accumulated rich experience of internationalization, which demonstrates that the ability to work in cross-cultural environment is the most essential factor to an employee of multinationals. The employees of Caterpillar come from a number of countries such as India, Singapore and China, and its markets are distributed in many regions including Japan, the United States and China. Today, it is a valuable ability to know how to coordinate and integrate cultures of different countries and regions and obtain experience of globalized management through working extensively in different countries with all sorts of people. As Thomas Friedman says in his book The World Is Flat, globalization has now become a trend, and the world is set to become ever “flatter”. 

 

Then came a break for the activity, during which the students of BiMBA06 presented a brilliant violin performance. At Zhifuxuan, a room richly decorated with sculptures and paintings, the passionate and pleasant music flowed, enchanting every listener and heart. There was no border for music, or for joy.

Following the music, the main program of the activity took stage: Four BiMBA students from 3 different countries each gave a speech elaborately prepared for the theme of the activity. How would the four cultures clash and what sparks of wisdom would the clash produce? Let’s listen to their speeches:

 

Understanding Is Invaluable—By Wallace Cui of Class FT06

Mr. Cui divided his speech into 4 parts: (1) What is our core value? (2) How to sustain our passion? (3) How to communicate? (4) How to share our experiences?

He first drew a value chart with multiculturalism and internationalization as the core competitive strengths, from which we could see that multidisciplinary knowledge and force integration are indispensable to BiMBA’s success. Then he came to specifics and offered some useful advice for some aspects of international communication. For instance, as to how to sustain learning enthusiasm, he suggested that, apart from making an earnest study of the backgrounds of different countries and cultures, we could also make our study fresh by looking for the differences between cultures. At the same time, we should have a plan about this study and zealously participate in the activities, so as to comprehensively increase our knowledge of foreign cultures from different perspectives. In the course of communicating with other students, one should cherish the attitude described by the ancient Chinese saying “Among any three people, there must be one who can be my teacher”, and always respect and trust others. We should overcome the barriers imposed by age and nationality, update the obsolete information, and obtain from exchanges between and discussion of various viewpoints the information beneficial to our improvement. On this point, he named two key words: effective communication and self-exertion. Finally, it is an indispensable ability to know how to share. It is true that when one helps others, he is also helping himself. To help means to assist others to develop abilities and skills, and also means to warm-heartedly share one’s knowledge and experiences and, in attitude, never look down upon others. Experiences are more valuable than books, and their sharing often brings one unexpected benefits.

 

The Way to Do Business in China—By Crystal Fang of Class FT06

 

China is a major country in terms of both population and economic scale, with its GDP (by the PPP method) reaching 5.4 trillion dollars in 2005. Cheap prices are a striking feature of Chinese economy, as demonstrated by its high PPP index of 3.4 in contrast to that of the developed countries, such as 1.0 of the United States. Another thing worth pointing out is that though China has a large GDP volume, its per capita GDP is not even as much as 1/10 of that of the United States.

 

Any firm to enter the Chinese market needs to be decisive but patient. Crystal Fang expounded her view by citing two famous brands of the car industries as examples. Her talk covered the gradual growth and expansion of Peugeot and Honda and also the massive landing by Chrysler and Hyundai in the Chinese market. The few PPT slides looked rather plain, but they dealt with one after another classical case worth thorough consideration and analysis.

Afterwards, in view of the governmental dominance in Chinese economy, she cited Microsoft as an example to remind the entrepreneurs operating in China to understand the force of Chinese government and actively cooperate with it.

 

    Finally, Crystal Fang shared some carefully chosen details with “Chinese characteristics”, from the implied meaning of verbal expressions, the “no liquor, no cooperation” business principle, the “centralized power” tradition, and the North-South cultural differences to the suggestion on directly seeking business partners in the country, allowing the listeners to learn, while laughing, some tips hardly seen in books.

 

Go to Russia—By Karklina Svellana of Class FT07

 

Karklina Svellana is a beautiful lady from Russia. In a pleasant voice and with a slight Russian accent, she made an introduction of her motherland, Russia, one of the world’s coldest countries.

 

With a humorous tone, she talked about Russia’s national emblem with the double-head eagle, resources, and national specialties such as petroleum, diamonds and vodka, and the history-making figure, Gagarin, Soviet astronaut and the first human being to enter the outer space. She even displayed the pictures of the famous soccer clubs and Russian traditional arts and crafts.

 

Laughter suddenly broke out. One after another Russian beauty, a famous Russian specialty indeed, was displayed with PPT! With white but somewhat reddish skin, Russian girls are the most beautiful landscape of the vast territories of Russia.

 

Ensuing pictures became ever more beautiful one after another, recording the 2004 Olympic Games, crafts and paintings, Russian architectures of the Byzantine and conic styles, beautiful streets, and many others. To be sure, introduction of ballet and Russian literature masters such as Pushkin and Tolstoy would not be missing.

 

The last PPT had the night view of a church as the background and read, “Are you ready to visit Russia”, to which the audience could not help uttering their passionate answer, “Yes!”

 

Doing Business in Korea—By David

Speaking of South Korea, one cannot avoid mentioning the “Korean Pop Culture” in Mainland China. Beginning with Korean TV plays, with which the audience was familiar, David made a detailed introduction of the culture and situations of Korea. After an introduction of Korean foods and traditional clothes to gratify the audience, David switched to the theme of his speech: Doing business in Korea.

In 2007, 14 companies from Korea ranked among the Fortune Global 500 companies, with their champion Samsung, the largest enterprise of Korea, ranking the 46th. In short, said David, smiling, Korea is a small but strong country. The pillar industries of Korea include the IT industries, digital and electronics, semiconductor, automotive, and iron and steel, in all of which the country is very competitive.

Why do people choose to do business in Korea? Besides its state-of-the-art IT technologies and internationalized markets, its high-quality human resources are another important factor to attract entrepreneurs. Korea has a high educational level, with 40% of its population educated at a college or higher level, which is hardly imaginable for many countries.

 

Korea highly values the Confucian moral standards and social ethics. In a Korean family, seniors are respected, and people have a strong sense of responsibility toward their family as well as a strong collective awareness. Besides, Korea is no longer a patriarchal society as misunderstood to be by outsiders. Women are becoming ever more independent, and have achieved an equal status with their male counterparts. 

 

At last, David gave a Bomb Shot performance, which is very popular among Korea youths,. He held his breath and then exploded with a shout, and the small cup containing whisky accordingly fell into the beer mug, so that the beer and the whisky blended and became the strong “Bomb Shot” drink. The three international students each drank a cup of wine, and the last cup, which represented the Olympic torch, was expectedly put in the hand of Professor David Choi, who forthrightly swallowed the wine among happy cheers.

 

This networking night was also organized for an important project called “BiMBA Social Resources Sharing”. Its internationalization, teaching mode, career development service, and rich social resources are all important reasons why BiMBA are attractive to its students. One goal of this activity was to help its students to establish channels for information sharing and build a larger network of social connections.

 

The host made a detailed introduction of the aim, origin and operation pattern of this project, and encouraged the students to become a participant of the “social resources sharing” project. In this way, we can learn more about others, and enable others to know more about us.   

 

At the end of this night, a small game involving all participants was organized. Each participant was expected to look for the rest people holding a fragment of the same postcard to which his fragment belonged, and the group who first restored the postcard would be the winner. The game was simple, but rather original. As the project meant to demonstrate, friends are indispensable to both our life and career. Therefore, let’s advance hand in hand and strive for our brilliant future together.