Doing Business in China Course: Final Meeting Before Departure for Shanghai
May 8th, 2005
Today was the third and final pre-departure meeting for the Doing Business in China course I am teaching.
Twenty-five Smith School MBA students and I will arrive in Shanghai in two weeks. We will meet with a variety of PRC government and business leaders, packing many activities into an intense week.
The course includes 9 U.S. classroom hours, divided over three separate Sunday afternoons. These sessions are designed to provide the students with a richer context for appreciating the travel portion of the trip.
The students have been divided into five teams, each to focus on one of the topics we will explore while in China:
- general themes of doing business in China,
- banking,
- insurance,
- stock markets, and
- foreign direct investment (particularly manufacturing in China).
Today the teams assigned to these respective topics made presentations. The idea was for them to give the entire class a background briefing in advance of our further exploration of the topic in China. I was pleased with the quality of the presentations.
I also gave the students a crash course on blogging. The students are going to produce a course blog at this address.