Suggestions for Group Reporting

Here is something I handed out to a few of you who were not going with the group on the noon bus, and which you on the noon bus did get. Hope it helps! And hope you are not too jet-lagged.

A Simple Four Part Outline for your Group's Presentations
Beijing, March 21 UMKC EMBA

Here is a suggestion for the four-plus-two groups, to help you organize your presentations to the class, and a note about your journals.

Presentations

The point of group-work is to leverage your individual learnings and take a broader view, to share what you have learned with one another in your group, and to make some synthetic statement that links your individual projects to wider questions about doing business in China.

It may be helpful for you to think in terms of the four dimensions of human experience as you look at this four-part outline. You may understand that to mean the past, the present and the future. China's daily life is lived in only one of those dimensions: the present. But ideas and stories about the past continue to live in the physical and social structure of Chinese business life. And ideas about the future are all around, often conflicting, sometimes contested, but always there nonetheless.

Here is a simple outline that I hope the groups will follow.

I. Introduction
Within your groups you may split up the reporting duties in any way you like, but I expect that you will not make of your presentations a simple repeating of your individual work. I would suggest instead the use of a single slide that lists the names of your group-members along with a single-sentence statement of that person's individual project. That's the introduction.

II. Opportunities
Here, you can discuss what you see as the major business opportunities. Where are they? What are they? How do you know that they are there? You may use some images if you have some, but please don't use video as we'll not have time to insure that all can hear and see it in our limited time.

III. Challenges
What are the barriers to achieving success in the opportunities that you found? Where are those barriers—at what level in the world of business are they: cultural, governmental, geographic, or what? If you find it helpful, you may combine this section with section IV, laying out strategies along with each challenge, or you may list them separate as:

IV. Strategies
What strategies can you imagine that will help a business overcome the challenges you mentioned? How might they be done? What is needed, what resources should be expended (time? people? money) to make them work? What cultural or ideological or mind-set strategies, if any, will help you move forward toward the opportunities.

V. What You Might Need to Know More About
Because our knowledge of reality is always, and always incomplete, what bits of information, skills, or knowledge do you wish you had to answer any questions that your strategy can not, so far, address? What more do you wish you knew? What are the conundrums or puzzles that remain, even after you apply some of your strategies.

The timing of presentations will be mention in the blog (and this document will be posted there, too). Good luck! And don't hesitate to send me an email if you have questions. Its up to you to get with your groups, determine a presenter or presenters, and organize your presentation.

Journals

I have not heard a question about this but I have not been explicit, either. I expect that everyone is keeping a journal of some kind. Some of you have written "scratch-notes." That counts as a journal. Some of you have kept a blog. That counts as a journal.. Others may want to write up their thoughts in a word-document. I will need to know that you have done these things, one way or another. If you keep a journal, it does not, by the way, need to be a complete day-by-day diary. That is asking too much. But it should contain the highlights, the important moments, the times when you learned some thing new or found something unexpected, or where something you had heard was confirmed by your own experience. That's the journaling!