Back to Work

Not too much to write about this week. Work started again on Sunday after the week-long break. I was a little sad to go back because I was enjoying all of the free time, but this past week wasn't very stressful at all.

I've had a lot of down-time since the end of the Urban Safari so I've basically been doing a lot of research. At this point, most of the Chinese workers in the company have little to no formal business education so my work is pretty basic. I read American business educational material and summarize the parts that are most important to understand when working for HighTeam. Then I present the info to the other members of my R & D Team. It's pretty easy work and I'm learning a lot, which is quite nice. Over the past week I read 3 books on marketing and got paid to do so. I love learning, at this point I'm basically being paid to do something that I would have liked to do anyways.

In addition to that reading, I'm reading a couple of books at home. The first is Wild Swans, an amazing history of 3 generations of Chinese women growing up through the 19th century. If anybody plans to come and visit me, I would recommend that he or she picks up that book from their local library and gives it a read before coming by. There are lots of references to Beijing because it is the political capital of China, so I've seen many of the places mentioned in the book; pretty cool. I'm also starting The Pride and The Prejudice just for kicks. I bought a membership at a place called The Bookworm, which is essentially an English language library that charges membership fees. I haven't really gotten into it yet because I want to finish Wild Swans first.

Back to work. They are seriously running out of structured things for me to do, since most of the proposal writing that is going on right now is in Chinese. Hence, I've started to define my own projects. The company in the past has been a loose association of very talented and driven people who each built their own mini-businesses in HighTeam, and when they left, they took their work with them. So the company doesn't have a lot of base knowledge which everybody can access. So my first self-created project is to profile the major industries that HighTeam services. Right now Erica and I are profiling the high-end auto industry. Basically we're preparing the company for any type of project that they would need to do by breaking the industry down into manageable sub-industries (eg. we look at all of the high-end luxury sedans, find the different cars that are competitors based on price and style, and then determine the relative international positions of the cars in the international market. i.e. Volvo is a "safety" positioned brand; they sell based on the fact that their cars are very sturdy and safe, whereas Jaguar is a youthful image-based company; they sell to a crowd that is younger in age and enjoys nightlife, and is very concerned with style). All-in-all the project is very ambitious, but the project managers that I have talked to up to this point have been very excited about the possibility of centralizing some of the knowledge in the company. One told me that it would be "great not to have to stay up to 3:00 a.m. writing proposals anymore because of repeat work."

So that's my life right now. I enjoy the researching more than the event management for two reasons. First, it's far less stressful. I get to work at 9:00 a.m. and I leave at 5:00 p.m. Then I don't have to worry about whether I have taken care of all of the details in the project, because I set the level of detail. Second, I'm much better at it. I have always enjoyed and been good at working with very abstract problems which require me to synthesize large amounts of information into something more simple that gives people insights into what they should do in the future. So I like it. Still don't think I could do it for the rest of my life, but I like it.