It’s been a few weeks since the last
reflective journal and during these 2 to 3 weeks of lessons, I have learnt more
about the American culture and the differences between the two cultures through
the management consultant project and presentation. During the past weeks, everyone was to do a management
consultant scenario project in groups of 4, to help China companies to expand
into the US market. Making use of the examples of Google and Apple, try come up
with ways and ideas on how the companies can grow and profit in the US market.
Firstly, as a presenter, I have learnt quite
a lot from the research on Google, Apple and Lenovo’s road to success. We
decided to choose Meizu as our company, this company is a phone company that
had much success in mainland China, HongKong and some other parts of the world.
However, it has not expand into the US market. Part of the presentation was to
search about the success Google and Apple and Lenovo had.
From the research, I have learnt that Google’s
way to success was to give employees free time to think about ideas. The company
is very relaxed and the employees have lots of freedom to think and brainstorm
about ideas for the company. This freedom cause Google to come up with many
great ideas like the Google Glasses. However, Apples is the direct opposite.
Apple employees doesn’t have lots of freedom. Their road to success was due to
them making things simple and easy to use, attracting lots of customers. Lenovo’s
success was due to their advertising campaigns.
Thus,
our main suggestions were about managing the company the American way, like
Google, and employ American workers, cooperate with local telcos, make the
phone simple to use and create good advertisements to advertise their products.
These will be able to attract local US citizens and slowly expand out the
market.
Secondly, as
an audience, I have heard a lot interesting ideas from other groups. Many of
the groups gave a detailed analysis of how Google and Apple manages their
company and their road to success, like the freedom Google employees have. Many
groups also gave very good ideas. For example, group 4, doing Geely, ZheJiang
Geely Holding Group Co.Ltd gave a detailed suggestion about the values to adopt
from Apple and Google and values to keep. This is good as it will be able to
attract both Chinese and Americans. Also they analysis the flaws on the company
and how to correct the flaws, so that the company can do better in the future.
However, there is this problem that most groups just copied the way Google and
Apple manages the company, like giving employees freedom to think about
projects. They didn’t have a lot of self-created ideas.
I would also like to comment on group 3. They
choose a sports company and not a technology company. I feel it should be fine
as the managing company part is still about the same. They gave good ideas like
hiring experienced people from Nike to manage the company and make products
that the Americans like, like baseball bats. However, their ‘Great Plan’ is not
very detailed and not clear. A suggestion was to spend billions of dollars in
investments. This isn’t clear as in how should they invest, in making more
products? Invest in research? Also, this would take long time, like many
decades to see the change. Other than this, the rest of the presentation was
quite well done.
In conclusion, the presentations have made me
understand a lot more about Apple and Google and Lenovo, and their road to
success. I have also learnt about some problems the Chinese companies faced
while expanding to the US market, for example, political issues. I have also
learnt about the importance of some of the values in US, like freedom.
For the next CDE lessons, I expect to learn
more about the Chinese culture and values, and how it shaped China and Asia.
