It’s 5AM Boston time and I’m on the last leg of my journey back to Boston. We land in two hours. The conclusion of my first trip to China, after 25 years of having lived in neighboring India. I think it would be fair to say that this has been the highlight of my academic experience here at Sloan so far—though I look forward to besting this over the next two and a half semesters.

Rather than try to weave a fluid narrative in this post, I’m going to jump around and try to cover some of the things I’ve found meaningful on this trip. 

Our project

My Sloan teammate Corrine already blogged about the kind of work we were doing with a small company in Kunming. Like she said, our project was unique in that its focus was on people and HR strategies—which I find particularly interesting. Understanding how to structure organizations and how to lead them is exciting, and can often be a bit of a mystery! Sometimes CEOs get so caught up in the details that a fresh outsider perspective on their organization is valuable—and we hope we’ve delivered that value. 

The project began with our CEO telling us the problem she was facing (maintaining a stable team and improving employee retention) as well as solutions she wanted us to flesh out. Instead, we took a different approach: we spent time in the company understanding the nature of the problem through detailed interviews with almost every single employee. We then analyzed the data and outlined practical solutions that we thought were more pertinent to the problem she was facing—which included systemic as well as leadership suggestions. 

I signed up for China lab looking for an intercultural business experience, and a project like this fit the bill perfectly since it involved working with people to understand what they valued at the workplace.

My team

I couldn’t have been blessed with better teammates for this project. Our teammates in Kunming, Shen and Licy, were outstanding in every way—whether project related or just being perfect hosts throughout our stay there. They drove the on-site research through interviews with employees, and established a warm relationship between our team and the company’s CEO—which was essential to our project. 

When the time came to present our initial analysis and recommendations, it was always going to be a little awkward to sit down with the CEO and tell her everything we thought was wrong with the way things were being done in the company. But Licy and Shen navigated that challenge tactfully and smoothly, without any problem. She was remarkably receptive and pleased with our work, and gave us some suggestions for refinement of our recommendations—which we’ll be working on over the few weeks. Licy also went on to present our work to Yunnan university, and did a splendid job. 

Corrine was my invaluable guide through the trip. She’s fluent in Chinese, which made me the only person in our team who didn’t understand the language. She did a fabulous job of translating for me during social occasions as well as during the company interviews—where she was literally typing out subtitles in real time as people were speaking! I have also rarely seen anyone with her skills at crafting a story and a presentation with amorphous data, and consider myself fortunate to have worked with her. Oh and she also introduced me to Hong Kong style waffles, which I will miss when I’m back in the US.

The food

Being vegetarian, I was a little nervous about the food situation in China. On the China Southern Airlines flight there, the vegetarian meal consisted of boiled vegetables—which, I thought, was not an encouraging sign. Little did I know!

There is plenty of absolutely delicious vegetarian food in Kunming. Our hosts everywhere were always accommodating of our dietary preferences, and we were treated to fabulous meals almost every day. I found the Chinese to be extremely social around meals—more so than any other culture I’ve lived in. The meal itself is designed in a way that brings people closer: a dozen different dishes placed on a table, and people dig in to the dishes with their chopsticks to help themselves. There tend to be a wide variety of dishes at every meal, and we’ve had some where there were 15 courses!

China Southern Airlines really needs to step up its meal options, because they don’t do justice to the richness of Chinese vegetarian cuisine. On the positive side, though, their in-flight entertainment has a great selection of movies to watch.

What’s next?

The next few weeks will be busy at Sloan, as I try and remember what we were doing in the classroom two weeks ago. I trust it’ll come back to me in a few days. This week I’ll be one of the coordinators for the2014 OpsSimCom (shameless plug here) which will be exciting as well as a lot of work. 

But next month our Chinese counterparts come to visit us in Cambridge, and we’re going to have to put our heads together to come up with a plan to match their hosting skills. We’re looking forward to the opportunity to give them as wonderful a trip here as we had there!

After two weeks of T-shirt weather in Kunming, I’m bracing myself for “springtime” in Boston…