China

PKU Visit

Today we went to Peking University to meet with the students and conduct an intercultural negotiations exercise.  The exercise emphasized techniques for increasing the overall available value through integrating issues and seeking common points of interest.  GPMBA students outnumbered the PKU students, so I was assigned an observational role during the exercise.  While this was sort of an exceptional case, the pair that I was observing didn’t share a common language, so I ended up translating for them.  I was very careful not to influence the results of the discussion, and I want to say from my bicultural perspective that my GPMBA classmate did extremely well exploring issues with her counterpart.  I think the techniques we picked up in our previous negotiations and culture course were quite applicable.

I thought that the visit to PKU was great because we got a chance to meet and interact with the students there.  PKU very much belongs to the Chinese “Ivy League” universities, so I think it’s important to note that as a networking opportunity it was also quite valuable.  We had a guided tour from one of the PKU students that took us by the lake and pagoda area at the center of campus for pictures.  We also ate lunch together at the student cafeteria.

 In the evening some of my classmates also went to sing karaoke.  I suggested that we go to “Cash Box” because they tend to have a wider selection of English songs, but everyone seemed to enjoy watching me sing in Chinese too.

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