Cultural immersion and leveraging MBA skills
By Sindhu
I’ve had healthcare-related projects prior to this class, but I did not anticipate the level of depth understanding about a different culture that this project would provide.
One of the ideas, that our team came up with initially, was to provide monetary funds to the people of the low-income communities with the intent of encouraging community champions to take charge of programs that our client had initially put in place. The client was looking to find ways of measuring impact of their initiatives and ways to ensure that they would be easy to continue after leaving these regions. After bringing up the idea with the client, they told us that they’d considered this idea but were concerned about unnecessarily inflating the value of their currency in those areas, which would make it difficult for the other families to effectively take care of their own families. I personally wouldn’t have realized that consequence had I not run the idea by the client team first.
When my team presented our findings to the client, I was initially nervous as to how feasible and applicable our work would be. We did have several client calls and run some ideas by them, but I was worried about whether they would find our ideas feasible. Because we weren’t able to visit the client in person, we had a videoconference call with several team members instead. As expected, the presentation was more of a conversation between our team and our client’s. During the slideshow, we encouraged them to ask questions about the content or to rephrase what we were saying if there was any confusion due to the slight language barrier. In my past experiences with clients, I’d found that they prefer being interactive during a presentation to allow them to better understand the content, so the team felt it would be better to encourage the format in this situation as well. At the end of the call, they noted the recommendations they felt were easy to implement sooner rather than later, and our team definitely appreciated the feedback. Reflecting back to our first class session, we had a professor come in to talk more about doing consulting work with clients based in another country. As she had experience specifically with clients in Brazil, she was able to speak more to the cultural differences and how that may affect our client interactions. The overall gist was that Brazilian clients would be friendlier and more conversational than we might expect. After our presentation to the client, they asked to meet with us anytime if we were in the area, which I was not expecting because it was such a personal idea, that they didn’t have to offer.
Thinking about the project as a whole, I felt anxious until the point of presenting our ideas to the client. Hearing their feedback was an incredibly great and unique learning opportunity. I did not think I would be able to leverage my MBA school skills this early in my program, and though we were unable to travel, I have had a great experience throughout the Global Immersion Program this semester.