And Through the Wire

We're getting rolling on our international project, and it's proving more interesting than expected, but not for the reasons I thought it would. On paper, our goal is simple: work with another person from the class, along with two people from sister programs in Europe and two people from affiliated programs in China, to develop a business plan for a new or expanded venture that you'd like to take to a new market. Work together with people you've never met face-to-face, refine your approach and content, and create a 20-30 page paper and a PowerPoint presentation to be delivered in front of the class in May (when everyone from the international programs will be traveling to the U.S. an graduating alongside us).

Although our assignment would seem easy, the implementation of it is hard. For example, how do you effectively collaborate with people in timezones 13 hours ahead of you? (our answer has been to have weekly conference calls at 6am U.S. central time, which is really starting to take a toll on me) Also, what technology to use to communicate? We tried international conference bridges and dial-in numbers, but apparently our colleagues in China don't use telephones, so in the end we settled on Skype (which works fine for the rest of us, as long as we're not trying to use it from work) Next, what technologies do you use to collaborate? Setting up a wiki seemed like a great idea to those of us outside the Communist world, but apparently China doesn't allow access to many of the websites the rest of us take for granted (msn.com, wetpaint.com, etc.) So we are using e-mail for way more than it was intended to be used for.

We began having calls with Skype last month, and we have our first major deliverable coming up in six days: a summary of our topic, our team's approach, and our rationale for selecting the market, product, and strategy we did. Again there have been issues: our Spanish counterpart is on a plane, and our Chinese counterparts seem to always be missing calls due to the need to bring their children to the hospital. Apparently one of our China colleagues also must walk 10 miles from his home to access a computer (these people are in business school, right?)

This really isn't what I was expecting, but I suppose that's part of the genius of the design of the whole project: get us outside our comfort zones and force us to honestly examine ourselves in a cultural mirror.

There have also been the surprising cultural nuances, again largely with our Chinese colleagues. When discussing topics initially, one of them wanted to do a chain of Chinese medicine clinics, because as he said, "everyone knows that Western medicine is poison." (my wife is a doctor, so you can imagine the self-restraint I had to employ on that one)

When it came time to write up our market justification, the Chinese wrote about their country's complete adoption of capitalism and total abandonment of Communism ("Is that so?" I found myself asking in amazement) and about how there was no racism or political strife in China ("Repression of Buddhist monks, anyone?" I wondered). Then I realized that these were people who had likely never traveled outside of China, and who certainly had never enjoyed free access to the Internet or to uncensored news reports. So I've decided to focus instead on fact-based conversations; things like "Can you access flickr.com from China?" that can be verified relatively easily to prove whether censorship is, in fact, in force.

Perhaps the most memorable comment from the Chinese came when one of them saw my Skype profile photo (with my very short hair) and remarked, "You know, you look a little like an American monk." That was how we ended it on our last team conference call-- how can you really hope to top that?