An Insight on International Career Planning with Mr.Frederick Young

There’s talent within each of us, all we require is the right guidance to make the optimum use of our talent and knowledge. And, in order to provide our students with the best guidance and mentorship, INLEAD recently organized a session with the noted, Mr. Frederick Young, Managing Director, Global Education Management, United Kingdom. During the session, Mr. Young provided great career insights on International Career Planning to the students.

Mr. Frederick Young had an interaction with INLEADers on their international career prospects. He provided some very interesting  and important details on cultural aspects, international work culture, and certain attributes that needed to be inculcated while working abroad, as also some basic mannerisms that one should adopt. He had a lively interaction with students and gauged their interest areas as well as found out from them the countries where they wanted to work in.

Mr. Young started his talk with inputs on certain fundamental attributes and mannerisms that are essential while working in a foreign country. Some of these include smiling, maintaining eye contact, polished communication skills and virtues like patience and positivity. He exhorted every student to maintain a small journal and keep making both written and mental notes. He insisted that gaining respect from coworkers and customers was essential. He kept on reiterating that students should look at a long career with any organization, which will give them an opportunity to travel the world.

Post this introductory session, Mr. Young asked some questions from students related to their choice of career and their experiences if any of them had travelled abroad. From the answers he received he was able to gauge that students were extremely keen to study the diversity and work culture across nations. He encouraged them to follow their passion, maintain enthusiasm in all they would do as also explore the country where they would be posted. He asked them to keep treating their career dynamically and be prepared for changes that might happen in their sector, especially with the increasing role of Information technology.

The session concluded with Ms. Khushboo’s (Senior Vice President, INLEAD) views on   students’ expectations and she even put forth some questions to Mr. Frederick Young on   behalf of the students regarding job preparedness and cultural awareness. Mr. Young answered the questions by making the students wary about all kinds of career upheavals, work politics and work pressures. He stated that students would have to conform to certain norms (social as well as work) in any country. They should ideally find a mentor who can be their friend, philosopher & guide. This would make their stay pleasant & comfortable. The session cleared many apprehensions that students would have carried about international career prospects. All in all, the session was a huge success with the students taking home truckloads of knowledge about how to fulfill their International Jobs dreams. 

China Rout (Revisited) 2.0

Almost all headlines across all Financial papers, economy-related discussions, whether online or offline start with ‘China’. It’s like the world’s sneezing just because China has caught a cold. A very, very bad cold at that!

In my earlier blog published in late August 2015, titled “Is the Chinese Dragonlosing fire?”, I had traced China’s growth path over the past 4 decades and the bottlenecks thereafter it faced that eventually stalled its growth. The fallout then wasn’t as severe for the Rest of the World as it is now. Yes, there were losses to the tune of billions of dollars due to Shenzhen and Shanghai stock market crashes, but prospects then didn’t seem as bleak as now in 2016.

So, what’s wrong with China?

The world’s most populous country has a growth rate even now that’s still faster at 6.5% than USA’s 2.5%. The Chinese numbers, the world feels, is significantly inflated and either the top leaders are incredibly good at meeting the targets or the analysts in China are too scared to reveal the truth. The Shanghai composite indexes plummeted 15% at the start of 2016 and since then stock markets world over seem to be under a Bear grip.

China's industrial production slowed last year. Yet borrowing jumped a further 5 per cent as banks pumped more and more money into less and less economic factories, housing schemes and loss-making businesses. The message that the government sent was investment in real estate is fine even if the world does not have the appetite for its manufactures, according to Sydney Morning  Herald. China aimed to keep inflating its GDP even if the houses they built went unoccupied. Unfortunately there’s more capital outflow from China than inflow. Investors are not as keen on China, and local Chinese are stashing their money abroad. China’s president, Li Xinping’s authoritarian attitude isn’t helping either.

Solution to this persisting conundrum:

There’s a possibility, according to Bloomberg Asia that reserve requirements of Chinese banks may be cut which will increase liquidity of banks who can therefore lend more. The question however remains, are there companies who have the appetite and the need to borrow more? Inept communist policies have to be redrafted, private debt within the economy needs to be reduced, and more importantly market needs to have a free hand to work the Yuan

The world went into turmoil with the US subprime crisis in 2008, followed by Eurozone meltdown. Now the Chinese seem to be riling the world with its worst economic performance in 2 and half decades. All major stock markets will get shaken since the correlation between their performances is quite high. Well, let’s sit this one out and wait for reassuring financial news sooner rather than later.

               

-         -Ms. Monica Mor

Sr. Faculty, INLEAD

INLEADers @Parle-G Industry Visit

There was an air of excitement in the INLEAD Campus on 27^th August, 2015 as the International Business Management students of the new July 2015 Batch were all geared to go for their first Industry Visit. The venue for the visit was the Neemrana Parle G plant in Rajasthan.

The Parle brand has been one of the largest manufacturers of biscuits and confectionary for almost 80 years now. It is the brand behind Parle-G, which is currently the largest selling and most loved biscuit in the world. The company has about 145 factories in India and many more located internationally, especially in southern Africa. The main aim behind the visit was to get INLEADers acquainted with the daily working of a big brand like Parle.

The visit started with Ms. Shweta, HR Officer, Parle, Neemrana, giving a presentation to the students about the history of the Parle G brand and how it has evolved from just one brand to the current 89 brands. She also explained the students about the logistics behind the Neemrana factory and the reason behind the success of the spread of their brands into the national as well as international market.  

This was followed by a tour of the plant, where the students were shown the way the biscuits were being baked, cooled and finally packed in the plant. They were then acquainted with the machines and technology being used in the process. Parle uses machines from Germany, but the packaging technology being used is Japanese. The students were then taken to another factory about a kilometer away where candies were being manufactured. INLEADers were also gifted bags of candies after the tour.

The Industry visit proved to be a great learning experience for the students where they got  a practical view of all that  they had studied inside the classrooms. 

The Mantra of Brand Positioning and Personal Branding

 Mr. Peeush Tomar, Head Strategic Alliances, PVR India Pvt. Ltd.

Apple, BMW, Starbucks, McDonalds are all class brands that first pop into our minds whenever we think of buying a phone, car, coffee or  a burger and French fires combo respectively. Such is the power of their branding that they remain on our lips and minds even without being physically or virtually present there. In order to get our International Business Management and International Hotel Management students acquainted with this power and perils of good and bad brand positioning respectively, we, at INLEAD yesterday organized an Industry Expert session on the same by Mr. Peeush Tomar, Head Strategic Alliances, PVR India Pvt. Ltd.

“It’s all in the mind. Out of sight, out of mind.” is how Mr. Tomar introduced the concept of Brand Positioning to the students. He further elaborated, that Brand Positioning helps a brand to distinguish themselves from the sea of companies operating in the same domain as theirs. Hence, the prime motive of Brand Positioning is for the brand to carve a unique identity for itself in the minds of the people.  Along with this, Mr. Tomar also introduced INLEADers to a variety of Marketing Jargons like PIS (Proposition, Intent and Support), USP (Unique Selling Point) and concepts like how a bad review reaches out to ten people, while a good one reaches out to only three.

Mr. Tomar held the students spellbound for two long hours (without the students even realizing it) by making the session extremely fun and thought-provoking. In order to impart a better understanding of the concept, he also included various current examples of good and bad brand positioning by big brands throughout his session.

The session ended with Mr. Peeush Tomar treating the students with the inspirational Steve Jobs “if today was the last day of my life speech” video and encouraging them to think something new and out-of-the-box in order to make themselves and their brand stand out from the crowd.