Mandarin and Creativity and Rap: And Your Presentations

Language in China is about one written form and many spoken forms. Learning in China is—or at least has been—about repeating discrete bits of information. Painting and poetry in China follow traditional and rather narrow forms. But that is changing. You may have noticed. . .

The wall at left is actually a barrier hiding the ongoing work near the People's Stadium about three years ago, before the Olympics. The writing tells the story of the neighborhood. Parts of the text are highlighted: circled or lined-off on the side. The writing style is traditional and lovely. The topic is the change in the neighborhood. But what does this say about creativity and the strictures imposed by the more-or-less traditional teaching styles of China? We don't know enough about this particular written form. But we can say something about music.

In fact, Sexybeijing.tv has said it for us. Here goes!


By the way: project presentations will happen on Saturday this coming. We'll start with a bit of a group-review and exercise at 8am. Then move into 30 minute presentations (with an additional five minutes to allow set-up between groups). We'll carry this up until noon, then start again at 12:30. I may stretch things to 35 minutes; no more.

If you have questions about the presentations, give me a holler.

Workshop on Ethnography & Business in Bolivia

It isn't China. I isn't the United States. Its Bolivia.

I wanted to post here because there is such a high level of interest in Santa Cruz de la Sierra Bolivia in China and in ethnography.

There was so much interest that there were 30 participants in our workshop on ethnography, business, and design during the past three days. The results, this time, were design specifications for products or services linked to specific areas where teams conducted a brief ethnographic study: a market place, a sugar wholesaler, a pirate DVD street-vendor and associated formal retail store. (In the photo is Karime, associated with the Art Gallery that co-hosted the invent!)

The results were innovative, fun, and well documented. Rather like the projects this class is working on for China, no?

Thanks to all who have turned in their diaries. I look forward to seeing more of those, and look forward to getting home from this long Andean trip, in a week!

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!

Shanghai Beauty

Shanghai people are used to seeing foreigners but they only once in a while get a glimpse of real American 美丽的年轻姑娘. I'm sure that both these young women, our own Tusha and her daughter, Jasmine, were turning heads. But the young man in the subway was particularly interested in Jasmine. Jasmine, eagle-eye shopper, (in addition to killer-smile girl, as you can see) spotted just the right boutique in a subway shopping spot.

I don't know who had more fun, Jasmine or the shop-girls. The shop girls said they want hair just like Jasmine. Envy of a delightful kind in Shanghai, where fashion is the main thing (right after the food). Will Beijing have shops like that? Will the subway be quite as much fun? Will the young man in the subway start planning his college career in America, looking for a smile to match the one on the Line 2 地铁, the subway, just beyong the People's Square?