A Strong Multi-Disciplinary Expert Team - Admission/Application Essay Example

Essay2 Describe a setback or a failure that you have experienced. What role did you play, and what did you learn about yourself? (500 words) A manager executes a plan; a leader “resets” the execution contexts for the plan. I learned this lesson the hard way while leading a key project team for my employer, Accenture. The project was expected to account for almost 50% of 2007 revenues for Accenture. Initially, we used a standard approach, dividing the project into different processes supervised by a strong multi-disciplinary expert team. But the sheer size of the project was much more than what we had ever taken on. It encompassed the headquarters and over 20 subsidiaries of a global Fortune Top 30 company. Our conventional approach seemed to break down as we struggled with a series of unique processes and requirements. For supply chain management, an important function in any enterprise, I found not even one division that could act as a stakeholder to initiate the change in the organization. How to overcome this challenge? It seemed impossible to change the culture, mindset, and management of a firm of this magnitude in such a short time. We had to go back to the drawing board to the rethink our approach. I needed to act fast, but without taking any drastic step that would disrupt the situation and jeopardize the progress of the project itself. I needed to “reset the execution context”. I realized that it was a large community of people with different backgrounds and I should be cautious about the impact of a major cultural change on these people. Keeping that in mind, I decided that instead of trying to sweep changes into divisions as a whole, we needed to take it from the grass root level upwards and take the people into our confidence. We analyzed the firm’s processes further, drilling down to basic elements that could be benchmarked, and broke best practices into smaller solutions that could be executed quickly without major disruption. These small positive results created a confidence for the client in our team. Then we began to implement more advanced supply chain practices, setting forth a path away from the traditional logistics-based thinking. Although we could not yet reform the organizational structure, we could gather support to change the prevailing mindset and that helped accelerate the progress of the project. Then we met the client’s mid-level management and had much less trouble, creating consensus, as “change” now seemed less threatening. The impressive results we delivered, won their confidence. With the newfound enthusiasm in the decision makers, I had little trouble presenting and convincing them, shifting away from a transactional approach toward a more transformational vision of what was possible with a broader scope of redesign. This was perhaps my most stressful engagement, but the lessons I got to learn were invaluable and made it really worth the efforts. One thing I learned during this project was that, to implement change in a traditional organization you need the support of the people and we must be open to change ourselves before we can expect others to change. Change is a step-by-step process: we need to evolve, not revolt. Finally, one’s team can extend far beyond those in the direct chain of command. When we assemble a grander team through belief in the viability and rationale of the project goals, then we can benefit from the flexibility of resetting execution contexts. The project was a grand success and proof of that came when that company invited Accenture to expand the scope of the engagement, undertaking a five-year supply chain rebuilding program based on a vision that is now more broadly shared across the organization. Essay3 Where in your background would we find evidence of your leadership capacity and/or potential? (500 words) During my three-year tenure at Intel, I was in charge of an engineering team responsible for designing new products and improving the existing ones. But I led the team to achieve far more than that. At Intel, I was successful in pushing the innovation mindset deeper into the core of my corporation, making my team at Intel—and Intel itself—an agent of growth and innovation. Initially, as the team leader, I absorbed the prevalent Intel culture and understood Intel’s organizational concepts and vision. While overseeing the launch of six divisions and the activation of four country sites, I spent three-months touring and delivering over 20 cross-departmental training sessions that helped open up new internal lines of communication for Intel’s employees, garnering me a “Best Buddy” award directly from Global Headquarters. This was a fine time, but I realized that there was room for improvement. I decided to look beyond my job of simply delivering the company’s message of innovation, and to practically apply this message thereby showing the endless possibilities of a brand new culture of innovation within the company. I decided to be a change catalyst. I took a fresh look at my team and re-analyzed our engineering process. I created a team forum for training and empowering sessions to create an innovative culture. The results were amazing. Within a year we had rolled out over thirty technical innovations, which won many accolades from the top management. Then suddenly, we hit a roadblock in development, which took me back to the analysis table. In this problem, I saw an opportunity. It was a book about Columbus that helped me realize that we had to explore the unknown to discover the unexpected. I created a cross-departmental information sharing system for senior engineers and orchestrated a sort of multi-department brainstorming. Eventually, it was from an advanced electrical engineering technique—something that no one would have considered—that we got our solution that not only resolved the snag but also increased our efficiency. This fresh interaction between the departments resulted in several cutting-edge solutions for the company. These efforts won praise from managers and made me the youngest Chinese person to win an Innovation Award from our United States division. Later, when I was in the team responsible for setting up the companies facilities in China, I pushed for a local technical center which was in contrast with Intel’s “copy exactly” strategy. To get my point across, I traveled to the United States and Philippines to meet the creators of Intel. Leveraging Intel’s culture, I re-established innovation as our lodestar and developed international consensus among engineers and managers on a program of best-practice localization in China. This new multi-site model helped my team issue ten articles at the Intel disclosure forum that year—equal to my department’s three-year total. Leadership is more than problems and solutions. It is embracing change as a cornerstone of progress. Thanks to Intel, I learned to take change to heart, give equal voice to all, communicate vision and inspire passion. My initiatives at Intel helped the company discover a new level of integration and utilization of human resources on a cross-departmental platform. I consider this episode of my career as a significant evidence of my capacity for leadership. Essay4 a. Describe an experience you have had innovating or initiating, your lessons learned, the results and impact of your efforts. (500 words) A real leader finds solutions and converts people to follow willingly without fighting and bloodshed. “A cavalry defends, but a priest converts” was one of the slogans of the computer game “The Age of Empires”. I had an opportunity to apply this while working with Accenture. I used to serve on the Staff Care Board, which addressed work and life conditions. One perennial issue we faced was stress and the associated symptoms of irritability and reduced productivity. The board had discussed the issue at length and came up with ideas and proposals, many of which were tactically and financially unworkable. The idea that was picked as the best of the lot was that Accenture offer low- or no-cost confidential stress counseling to all employees. Then, I suggested “Tennis Camp”. Then, everybody laughed at me. I had good reason to believe that counseling was not the answer. In college, my major was physics, but I had passionately audited psychology classes. As a founding member of the psychology club there, I had experience trying to address student stress through counseling. Counseling seemed to work on some students but only for a short time. I knew that counseling alone would just not suffice. We needed improvement that would last. When my suggestion of conducting a tennis camp was ridiculed, I had a choice. I could be a cavalry and shout all these things in defense of my idea and more or I could be a priest and convert. The co-worker who had originally suggested counseling was short-tempered and a vocal critic of my idea. So I let it go. Soon I would get my chance. It was my turn to organize the weekend activities for all the employees and I knew what to do with that. Playing Tennis demands a high level of involvement. Unlike other physical activities that let the mind wander into negative or the work related thoughts, tennis needs utmost concentration, focus, situational awareness and a relaxed mind. Tennis coaches are aware of the mind management techniques. The next weekend, I brought people to the tennis courts and before sending my colleagues for coaching how to play, I arranged a discussion with the coaches about stress, concentration and performance. Soon everyone could quickly see these were broadly applicable to the problem at hand. I followed it up at the next board meeting, where I encouraged the group to work through our normal problem-solving techniques, as we reconsidered the stress issue. Having received first-hand experience with the combination of physical and mental aspects of playing tennis, my idea was supported by several board members who had experienced it last weekend. Putting myself in the shoes of my antagonistic peer, I added some psychological advice service into the Tennis Camp activities. This created a sense of inclusion and helped ensure short-run effectiveness. I had successfully defended my idea. With this new crop of converts, Tennis Camp immediately became a viable proposal and was implemented on a permanent basis. Eventually it became a stress management tool for hundreds of employees, providing fitness and community atmosphere as well. By handing a first-hand experience for the critics, I put my point across diplomatically, avoiding destructive confrontation and converting opponents into proponents. Further, the entire board embraced my successful conflict management methodology. This experience reinforced my belief that diplomacy is key part in the art of change management: how do we best build consensus? Often instinct pushes us to meet an attack on our ideas with a frontal defense, to push back, to debate and argue. Usually, all these are self-defeating. The experience helped me to expand my leadership to three dimensions - manager, artist, and priest. Read More