“Business is all about capturing intellect from every person.”
- Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric
The above-mentioned quotation by one of the greatest corporate leaders in modern history embodied the spirit for the iLab Sharing Session held on the rainy afternoon of 26 June 2014.
The Fudan MBA iLab program is designed to foster an experience that cultivates experiential and dynamic learning. For many students, it would prove to be the highlight of their MBA study in Fudan and an invaluable opportunity to put theories into practice, to learn by doing, and to sharpen their knowledge through application to a real-world problem. The iLab Sharing Session seeks to further amplify the learning effect by having selected teams share their experiences so that students would not just learn from their own project, but also from each other’s experiences. This year’s iLab had 21 projects, partnering about 15 companies. On this day, we had 9 groups to present their experiences.
As was expected, every team had unique experiences and takeaways to share. Windy from IBM Smart City team shared their tough road from always failing their client’s expectations to finally being able to identify the value-add that they could provide to the client. Maria from CreditEase team spoke of the need to “think of the business from the perspective of leaders”. Ye Lei from Zhongyou team highlighted the “power of data analysis”. Flora from Springland team, the only student-sourced project, shared how they ended up with their 5 members working on 5 small projects as the client didn’t know what they wanted from the program.
Amidst the diversity in experiences, there were 2 most important takeaways:
1. Understanding and managing client expectations was commonly identified as one of the most crucial skills and often the biggest problem. Clients often had expectations that were too high, too wide, or totally uncertain. It was crucial for the teams to communicate appropriately with the clients and agree on the expectations and goals. Teams can expect to meet the clients’ needs only if they knew those needs.
2. The best way to add value to the clients was to help them with tasks that are hard for them to perform. For many teams, this was to conduct consumer research through surveys, interviews and focus on groups. This is because not every company is structured with heavily-armed marketing departments to conduct such research, which provides important information for strategy information. There are other ways to add value following the same principles, such as making store visits, providing connections with prospective clients, speaking with industry experts, etc.
With the invaluable sharing, the session came to an end with a show of appreciation to all the team leaders, whose service facilitated the success of the program. Most of the teams would face the most gruelling test – the final presentation – in the coming weeks. I am positive that the sharing session would have provided new perspectives and ideas for each team to improve on their work as they prepare for the final test.
(By Xinyao NG from 2013 IMBA class)
