MBA school, mandarin classes, homework, group presentation prep, overtime (I wrote a sales proposal that I'm seriously proud of this week - proposing to do an IT strategy for an agribusiness)... I also met with some visiting HKU folks, and my resident Uncle - a little bit of respectable balance, but it all adds up to being pretty busy.
Life's full of sacrifices I know, but it's hard to give some basic things up. It's hard not to help those around you, friends and colleagues for example - you can't really be totally selfish. It's hard not to want to nurture friendships, or to relax every once in a while and watch a film. Oh yeah, I watched maybe 5 hours of my fave chinese TV drama 'black hole', a fictional story about a corrupt business and its hold on local police, customs and government. Verrrry interesting, and I like to think beneficial to my mandarin listening skills.
Yah I'm swamped. It's 9pm, a school day, work tomorrow, and three essays to write and a presentation to dress up for school tomorrow evening. Yup I've left much of it pretty late, but heck, doing homework (in english) is not high on my list of priorities. What a drag.
I'm delaying some of my remaining classes until next year, so I'll have more time to relax and study mandarin. Maybe even get back into some sort of familiar shape - kinda rotund as of late(!) I hear classmates and colleagues talking of badminton, I'm itching to play, but that would just be another distraction.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But if Jack doesn't focus, that ain't gonna work either. Mum's helping encourage me, reminding me that a little more hard work now will get it all out of the way quicker.
It's coming up to a year since I arrived in Shanghai. Sometimes I feel as if I haven't made anywhere near enough progress. I'm certainly behind my personal expectations. Well, maybe not that far. I had hoped that within 18 months I would have no problems with business chinese. I don't think I'm that far away now. More client interaction would help - I do rather too much internal & sales work at the moment. I had not imagined that a year in I wouldn't have been engaged in client work, but the truth of it is that the time I joined wasn't really the best of times for my particular situation.
I transferred to Capgemini China some five months ago, since which we've gone through an awful lot of restructuring and strategic hiring. All good stuff for the future, but the disruption didn't really help bag any big clients for me to work on. Furthermore, I recognise that whilst Technology is an 'easy' service to break into, the work I could have feasibly done, was the hardest to sell. i.e. pure business consulting, or high value technology consulting, for big name MNC clients. That stuff just ain't easy to sell until you're well set up. We're well on the way now, so hopefully things will pick up considerably.
It's great to think that 12 months on, I really am 80% through this MBA. Weird, cos it's of course a 2 year MBA, but that's because I've double studied a lot. Front loading my MBA classes I think was a good thing, but now I'm onto electives, it's better for me to concentrate on Chinese when I can. I'm thinking of completing my MBA at London Business School rather than here in Shanghai - an option HKU should be able to provide for me. That would be a nice touch on my CV - "International MBA, Hong Kong, Shanghai, London"
For me to really make good this MBA thing, I need to do some personal study later on. It's exposed me to a lot of material, some of which I think I can look into more. It's a little strange - previously I wouldn't have thought to read academic textbooks to learn. I'd have perhaps bought some commercially authored book with some fandangled title. But actually, these text books are structured and information rich. Not bad.
I'll add it to my list of things to do, which includes of course learning Japanese, as well as getting good enough at Chinese to study poetry or classical texts. Yeah right. Anyway, plenty to keep me occupied, one thing at a time.
