Why you should study China’s technology

Right off the bat, let me establish that the US has the most developed technology in the world. You do see occasional challenges from other countries in specific areas: Huawei and Samsung for smartphones, China for green energy, etc. , but the US dominates in general. Right? Well, that may change.

As I am writing this, the Chinese telecom company Huawei has been called a “threat to national security” by President Donald Trump. The truth behind this may be debatable. What’s un-debatable is that Huawei is a global leader in 5G hardware, and 5G is one of the key technologies of the future. And what’s more, have you heard of Tencent and WeChat? Tencent has successfully developed the mini-app concept which may guide the likes of Facebook and Netflix toward future growth. And surely you know that the internet is heavily censored in China – so how do 1.4 billion Chinese people get information from the internet? What are Chinese internet companies up to?

And did I mention that China has 1.4 billion people, 4 times the US population, with a rapidly growing middle class? How are Chinese consumers different from US consumers?

How are US tech companies trying to get into this market? How they going to be competitive against their Chinese counterparts?

How are Chinese companies trying to expand globally? Do they even need to?

What is the role of the Chinese government in all this? How is this different from the role of the US government in developing domestic technology?

As a future technology leader, how are you going to understand an evolving environment and capitalize on those evolving trends, when technology is changing so rapidly? What can you learn from how tech was developed in China vs in the US?

These are the kind of questions that I wanted to get answer to. And get answers I did through my school UCLA Anderson’s Global Immersion course on Technology in China. This course was instrumental to my understanding of global technology and to my contextual leadership intuition. What I saw and what I learned cannot be summarized in one blog post. More on this in the future. If you’re an Anderson student who is interested in tech, count yourself lucky and sign up for this course – it’s going to be very competitive for good reasons!

-Richard

Why I went to business school

Starting out my blog with the most cliched question possible, eh?

2.5 years ago when I was applying to business school I had to answer this signature question: why business school? I suppose if you go any kind of professional school they’re going to ask you why you want to pursue that particular profession. Business school is slightly different because business is such a ubiquitous thing. There are so many ways of answering this question, consequently.

My approach to business school is an academic one: I went to business school to learn. Not just how to network, how to interview for jobs, but how to run a business, how to use data to make business decisions, how to get a team to work effectively together. I went to a liberal arts college, studying Mathematical Economics and Music among other things, so I didn’t have much business knowledge. My previous career trained me in a narrow field which doesn’t alleviate much of the problem.


But why business vs a specific academic discipline or profession? My reasoning was that eventually when I gained more professional experience I’d have to manage people and develop a vision, and business school is the best place to learn how to do these. Technical skills and knowledge can be self-taught, while business skills cannot really be learned from a book or a pre-recorded lecture. Furthermore, I figured that since the workload in business schools is relatively light, I could also take more technical classes at the mother university. I had a hunch that a Master’s in Statistics student would not be able to take business classes.

It took me a while to decide to go to business school, and took me a longer while to apply to business school for the 2017 intake. Looking back, I am grateful that I made these decisions, because they changed my life in a very good way. If you are curious how, stay tuned for the next posts.

-Richard

A little introduction

Hey yo!

Welcome to my blog! This is not the first time I’ve done blogging. In fact, several years ago I used to run quite a successful blog on personal finance, but I had to stop for personal reasons. Years later, I’m feeling the itch to share my experience and knowledge with the world again, and I have some free time in my hands, so I’m back to this unpaid blogging gig.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Richard, and I am an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management. There is a lot more to me than the degree, but it was the experience I got from Anderson that motivated me to start this blog. I want to share with you dear readers my experience at Anderson and my thoughts on business school and the vast world of business. And I hope you share with me your own experience. Without you this blog wouldn’t exist, because I don’t like talking to myself quite as much. Your feedback is very important to me.

You will benefit from this blog if you are interested in business, if you are thinking about going to business school, and especially if you are considering my school which I find amazing in many different ways.

This is a short introduction because I want to dive in right away. So hang on for my first meaningful post. See you there.

-Richard