Reflective Journal #2 Week 5

    For the past 2 weeks, I feel that I have had fruitful CDE lessons which allowed me to gain new knowledge after every lesson, and I am very satisfied about this fact. Our main task for the few weeks was to present on how a Chinese company with great success in the Chinese market but limited success in the US market should break into the latter.

    My group decided to do a presentation on Xtep, a famous sportswear company in China but not so in the US. We worked together quite well, assigning different parts of the slides to different group members so that each member can do a deeper research on a certain topic and create a more all-rounded presentation. Fortunately, all of us did our job properly unlike past experiences like when my group members and I were doing our project work. Our teamwork was so poor that we had to rush everything at the last minute. Through this assignment, I also got to understand my classmates better, like on their work attitudes, their habits, etc., since we interacted and discussed about this assignment together. This assignment has also allowed me to understand more about the US market and the Chinese market and their similarities and differences. This will indeed benefit me in the future.

    On the day of the presentation, we mustered all of our courage and displayed our oratorical skills as we presented our slides. This was a good practice of our speaking skills and also our question-handling skills since there were some questions from the audiences we had to answer. There were of course parts of our presentation that had rooms for improvements, like the layout of our slides, our coherence and clarity and so on. Nonetheless, although there were some slips and errors during the course of the presentation, I think that we still managed to do a good job.

    Not only do we have to be presenters, but also be part of the audience. Being part of the audience has indeed allowed to me to learn a lot of new things from other presenters that I did not managed to learn solely from doing my group's presentation, like more on the Chinese and US markets and so on. I also managed to learn from the other presenters' good presentation skills like appropriate hand gestures, eye contact at the right time, loud and clear voice, etc. that I could use to improve my own presentation skills so that I will be able to be a better presenter in the future.

    After listening to all of the other presentations, I realised that there is a common problem every Chinese company trying to break into the US market is facing, which is the fact that Americans think that Chinese brands are inferior to US brands. Having this mindset will cause Americans to want to buy a domestic brand product and not a Chinese brand product. Hence, directly setting up stores without doing enough pre-work will eventually cause the stores to close down sooner or later and in turn, cause the company to lose money. However, finding a way round this mindset is not impossible though extremely hard. Lenovo is a good example.

    In conclusion, the past few CDE lessons have been rather enriching. I gained a lot of new knowledge about the current world which will surely benefit me in the future. I look forward to learning more in future CDE lessons.

Reflective Journal #1 Week 2

   The pass few lessons of CDE have been rather fulfilling. The lessons gave me a chance to explore on aspects of the world that I would not be able to if not for the CDE lessons. The first lesson gave me a brief introduction on the importance of learning each other's culture and traditions, especially between people of different backgrounds. This was done by showing us HSBC Commercials which depicts cultural awkwardness if one does not know the other person's culture. One commercial that left a deep impression on me was the one which shows that in Mexico, the sense of personal space was seemingly non-existent, which is the opposite of most other countries like America, Singapore and Japan.

   The next lesson was on American values. As our teacher, Mr Karplus, presented with the slides, I realised that there were still a lot in the world of values that I have yet to learn. The American value freedom a lot, which I did not know before the I attended this lesson. After this lesson, I have understood American values and the differences and similarities between American values and Chinese values.
 
   The last lesson before I wrote this reflection, we were shown 2 videos that describe to us the life of employees working in Google. They seem to have a very relaxed life, as what a spokesman said in the video, "You come to the carpark at 9am and it is only half-filled." They get to have free and delicious food in one of the 19 cafeterias around the Google complex. There are gym facilities and volleyball courts. There are also company-subsidised massage rooms which will soon "make you addicted to massage". The employees were very satisfied and happy about their workplace. However after the video, our CDE teacher, Mr Karplus, made a very good point that left me pondering over it even after class. He told us, "There is a possibility that the video only showed happy employees that were sure to react in a cheerful manner when interviewed or filmed, but there would be the unhappy ones, the unsatisfied ones in Google that were not shown in the video."

   This is what I would like to expect for the following CDE lessons. I would like to be pondering over interesting issues everytime after a lesson ends. I would also want to learn more new things every lesson, new things about the different cultures of people of different backgrounds and so on, so that they can be applied in my everyday life from now until the future when I am working and meeting a variety of people. Furthermore, the use of more videos and powerpoint slides and less dry talking during CDE lessons will help in our learning a lot as it keeps our mind focused and thus allowing us to absorb more in a certain period of time.

   When CDE lessons come to an end, I would like myself to be able to walk away and think that I have learnt a lot that would be able to benefit me.