Emerging Asia

Chen Lou, 2011

My supervisor’s name is Mr. Adil Husain, he graduated from Middlebury in 2001, and was a political science major. During my first meeting with him, I learned about the company’s history, its objectives, customer bases, and some cases they did for the past two years. It is a very young and ambitious company that aims for the emerging market in Asia, mainly for China. I also signed a confidentiality agreement with Emerging Asia, so that I would not let out any important information about the company or its customers even when I finish the internship. After the meeting, Mr. Husain kindly invited me to lunch with other three staff. Since the office is in the busiest district in Shanghai, there were numerous restaurants and shopping malls around it, so there wouldn’t be lots of troubles for me to have lunch for the next five weeks.

The first week was a little hard for me with the jetlag and stomach sickness. I had to get up at seven every morning so that I could save the time for bus. Although the company was small, it had a very organized system for staff to exchange information efficiently, and I even got my own email account at Emerging Asia. Since there was no projects going on at the end of the year, Martin, who was the company’s senior consultant, put business development as the top assignment to do. The company aimed to expand its business with local Chinese firms as well as global corporations that owned business in Asia. They started to put down a contact list of Fortune 500 companies with Asian branch, and I was asked to participate in this process. It took me a while to digest all the information and to learn how to find the contact information of a company’s executive or manager, so I did not make a lot of progress on the business development project on the first day.

On the next day, I noticed that the Fortune 500 list Martin gave us was dated back to 2006 when many investment banks were still on, so I found the latest version of Fortune 500 list online. Martin and Jessica were glad about the new list. Jessica and I worked through the list alphabetically in order to make it more efficient. As I started to gain more knowledge on internet searching, my working progress improved a lot. I used ‘google’ and ‘linkdin’ to search for the executive’s name and email address, and tried to be as specific as possible about the company’s information and industry field. Jessica helped me a lot on finding names as well as improving my Excel skills.

Martin assigned me another two assignments besides business development for the second week. He told me that since I studied abroad the longest time among all three of us, he wanted me to train Merry, Mr. Husain’s assistant to standardize the using of English for phone calls and so on. I was flattered about his request to apply my language skills, so I spent an hour with Merry and used my past experience at CCAL office as a student receptionist to teach her some common telephone languages. The next day, Martin gave me another project to do, translating all the company’s introductory materials into Chinese. Since Emerging Asia only worked with English-using corporations outside China in the past, Martin thought it would be very helpful to have a Chinese introduction of the company if they wanted to expand within the Chinese consulting field. The introduction was in powerpoint format, and there were over 10 pages, including the company’s structure, its services, customer bases, and some successful portfolios. Martin wanted all in formal business language, which means short sentences with clear and exact meanings. I wrote academic papers in English in the past, and didn’t know much about Chinese business language. Therefore, I spent a lot of time on polishing my translation as well as with Microsoft powerpoint.

During my third week at Emerging Asia, Mr. Husain was also back from his vacation, and he assigned me a new project. He wanted me to do a 6-page English introductory slide show for one of his customers about a business strategy called war gaming. Mr. Husain lent me two of books and asked me to put in a draft before formatting it into powerpoint. I read the chapter regarding the war gaming strategy, and did some research on the internet. On the next day, I handed him a brief version consist the theory and an example. Mr. Husain was satisfied with my summarizing skills and asked me to put one of the cases Emerging Asia did into the example, and to specify what services we could offer as a consulting firm. This was a little more difficult than simply generalize what I read from the book and from internet. I spent two days developing the powerpoint file, and in order to make it straightforward to the audience, I used bullet points and graphs a lot, which challenged my logic thinking as well as language abilities. When I emailed him the first draft, Mr. Husain was not very satisfied with my page layout and the illustration on our case. I realized that this project was very different than a slide show presentation at school. When I presented a slide show for my class in the past, most of the time there would be just some general points about what I was going to talk about, and I often insert images in to make it look more interesting. A slide show for a customer, on the other hand, should be very carefully proof-read, and the format should be perfectly designed. It was about how to make each slide carry as much as information possible yet clear to read and easy to understand, and the language as well as page layout should be very formal in a business way. I made changes according to Mr. Husain’s comment, and sent him the second version, then the third version. It was until the forth version that he approved my work.

Meanwhile, I saw Martin and Jessica did telephone interviews for their last projects, and learned a lot from it. Interviews were called primary research for consulting firms, and it was one of the most often things that consultants do. Especially in China, since there wasn’t a well-developed database as US did, most consultants get their first-hand information by making phone calls. Telephone interviews were very hard to proceed. First of all, the interviewer needed to have the precise information about the company and the interviewee, by undertaking enormous second-hand research through internet, newspaper and so on. Interviewees consisted people from every field that possibly knew about the targeting information, and they were put in different categories considering how difficult would it be to ask them questions. For instance, former employees were more likely to tell the interviewer about their past experiences of the company rather than the current ones. The consultant brainstormed all the potential interviewees who might be useful for the information, including insiders, customers, consumers, dealers and so on. The next step would be to design a sheet of questions to ask different groups of interviewees. After the preparation, the consultant would start the interviews. It was very tricky to get the ideal answers; therefore the interviewers needed to react quickly and wisely depends on different situations. Moreover, it required patience and persistence. Most people were not willing to be interviewed, so consultants sometimes go around the corner and act different roles such as dealers, customers, etc. Although I didn’t perform a telephone interview by myself, I learned a great deal by observing Jessica and Martin’s work.

During my fourth week, Mr. Husain had a new project for Jessica, who was a junior consultant to take on lead, a competitor intelligence service for medical device manufacture. Mr. Husain asked me to participate in the preparation process as well. The targeting company was a multinational corporation which had extremely complicated operating branches in China. The customer wanted to know in details about this competitor’s structure, its marketing strategy, and its dealer and customer information. We started off with secondary researches, such as visiting the target’s websites, and tried to build up a contact list. The large medical devices market in China was overseen by the government, especially the purchasing and selling market. Only large public hospitals had the resources and abilities to utilize these medical machines such as CT, MRI and X-rays. The contact list was especially hard to find since most of the information that we need were either missing or wrong from the internet. Martin then found a great way to obtain the correct information; he went to the largest human resources database in China, and discovered that most people’s working experiences in their resume contained very useful information for us. As a result, I started to go over people’s resumes that were related to the targeting company, and the outcome was surprising. I came out with a long list of hospital names and dealers contact information. For this human resource database, the headhunters or companies could look up for their desirable candidates anonymously and paid a limit amount of money to receive their real contact information. Again, I learned a special ‘Chinese’ way to perform consulting researches from Martin and Jessica.

On my last two days, Mr. Husain asked me to do 4 briefings for him in order to prepare him for the coming meetings with the potential clients. The briefings were my last assignments at Emerging Asia. Although it was not as challenging as the ones I did, I put in a lot effort to meet Mr. Husain’s requirements as best as possible.

By the way, Mr. Husain also asked me to “take charge” of finding a good restaurants for Emerging Asia’s annual dinner and after-dinner entertainment because I live in Shanghai. It made me feel really warm that they treated me as one of the members in the company. We had a great dinner and I also met Mrs. Husain. They were both fabulous people. Mr. Husain asked me to contact him anytime for future references, and he said he was more than willing to write me a good recommendation letter, and I really appreciated that. The past five weeks had been a wonderful experience for me, and I became friends with everyone in the office.

Contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship.