My Career Progress: Wharton MBA - Essay Example

Essay Describe your career progress to and your future short-term and long-term career goals. How do you expect a Wharton MBA to help you achieve these goals, and why is now the best time for you to join our program? How has your candidacy improved since the last time you applied? (1000 words) My professional career got a grand opening as I joined Arthur Andersen, one of the global leaders in auditing of the time. After being in the list of best ten students of Fudan University, I chose auditing, as it would be an intact foundation to my career. My experience with the firm helped me to master the accounting principles across the globe and expand my knowledge over the fields of telecom, logistics, and manufacturing. As I could prove my leadership skills as a project manager, it took me only two years to attain the position of senior auditor. As I wanted to make more contribution towards a specific industry, I moved to Intel as a Financial Analyst. The experience with the multicultural team helped me to develop cross-cultural management skills, as my jurisdiction as financial advisor was spread across Shanghai, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Malaysia. I could restructure the financial strategy of Intel which helped them to save fifteen million dollars. This effort was well acknowledged as I was promoted as senior analyst and honored with a number of prestigious awards in the industry. A year ago, I made another major career achievement as I joined GE as the Greater China financial analysis manager. My team nicknamed ‘finance talent pool’ initiated a web tool for billing compilation which gained high recognition of GE Asia’s Chief Executive Officer and later was replicated in other Asian countries. As an honor to my team’s performance, I was twice awarded with Hong Kong’s and China’s industry awards, and was referred to join the advanced finance management training to get ready for senior manager’s promotion. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)quality service was a real lacking factor in China and to setup such a BPO evolved to be my long term career goal as my experiences in GE could help me foresee the scope of such a firm. While I was leading the team in GE to develop the financial web tool I realized that often it happened that the management in the trial to take care of the essential but non-revenue generating basic functions, get distracted from the main core strategy of the company. This also caused added cost. With all these concerns, Chief Financial Officers (CFO) would much prefer to outsource those non-innovative, time consuming and routine work process in order to save cost and to focus on the core competency development. The companies in China as well would try to explore the scope of outsourcing. But there were only limited companies in China which provided these services and they could not be expected to render the high standard services as demanded by market giants. Even though larger firms like IBM and Accenture provided high quality service, they were not affordable as far as the cost was concerned. My long term career goal targeted this resource gap. I reviewed my feasibly as an entrepreneur managing a BPO. I always had an entrepreneurship mindset well blended with a sales personality. It was this mindset which helped me during my university studies to be the runner up in the ‘Zhangjiang High Tech Zone Business Plan Contest’ which tested my teams’ entrepreneurial skills. My sales personality was also proved as I went through the personality test at Maersk Logistics after my graduation. My family background also inspired me as an entrepreneur as my uncle had the record of having the first registered private corporation in Shanghai which later grew to one of the biggest machinery corporations in the area. However I lacked experience in handling multi-business operations which would be the routine of a global class entrepreneur. To acquire experience in handling these multi-business operations, I set my short term career goal to be the CFO of multi-businesses of GE. As this role would cover business involved in services, entertainment, commercial finance, industry etc it would not only help me to further understand the multi businesses’ operation, but also would provide insights from a customer’s perspective. Risk management, Sourcing, Value addition and others of the kind could be operated envisaging similar circumstances which could come my way as a business owner. However I would need further professional training in management to cop up with the ever rising requirements of the market. Wharton MBA will provide me with the opportunity to expand my leadership skills. The variety of courses, including ‘Foundations of Leadership’, which focuses on horizontal and vertical leadership, team building and performance, and team leadership will help me rise up to the global standards. Wharton’s ‘experiential approach’ and ‘leadership in action focus’ will shape my character while enhancing my social intelligence development as a leader. ‘The Global Immersion Program’ will enable me to develop an understanding of a specific region’s cultural, historical, social, political, and business environments, which will be vital in expanding my business throughout Asia. Entrepreneurship is about getting hold of opportunities at the right time. As it would be the right time for the launch of a quality-finance BPO into the Chinese market, it wouldn’t be wise to wait more to get trained towards the goal. With the past accumulated experiences in auditing, financial analysis and regional financial analysis, I think now would be the right time for me to pursue the MBA study and to get further readiness for my short-term and long-term goals. As compared to the years which passed, I have acquired more clarity on my long term and short term goals. More over as my supervisor left his position, I could get a chance to be in charge as ‘Greater China CFO’. While serving this role, I had to face with situations I could meet while being a General Manager of a BPO organization. I could visualize the demands of the market and subsequent efforts required to ensure quality deliverables. Further the assignment being with GE could expand my network and leadership knowledge and thus has made my candidature to Wharton MBA more relevant with regard to the expected outcome. Essay 2: Describe an experience you have had innovating or initiating, your lessons learnt, the results and impact of your efforts. I could envisage the major cost difference to be caused, on innovation of a different sourcing strategy. This thought resulted from a glance on an irregularity in the general transportation report. It was a routine documentation process to calculate the synergy rate of what is supplied by the regular route. One fine morning in 2005, while going through this process, I noticed that China - Hong Kong route despite being shorter than the Malaysia - Hong Kong route involved a higher transportation cost. Intel was losing huge amount of money which was really not ever noticed. The challenges before me to bring in an innovative change were enormous. First of all a change in the supply chain was beyond my job scope and strategy planning too was not my department’s piece of cake. The real challenge was how to inspire the concerned department to initiate the innovation without them getting a feel that I was interfering in their business. I formulated a strategy to communicate my idea individually with a planning officer. I shared the proposed innovation with a friendly planning team member. However my rough data sheet and the projected results couldn’t convince her as she doubted the integrity of my idea. I did further research to bring forth a clearer picture within a week and the same was presented before her and her manager. I could successfully highlight the possible cost saving relating it to the revenue generation. My data analysis was this time well backed by logical reasoning. To further motivate them, I suggested them to co-lead the project and include the targets into their individual ones, as a successful result could be highlighted during their individual performance review. With all these efforts done, I could finally win their trust to cooperate in the innovation. The implementation required severe strategy planning. After scientific evaluation, I broke the entire project into several sub projects. While one of the projects was to change the supply chain to have Malaysia to cater China, the second one was the use of cross-border trucking instead of air flight. Another parallel project was to identify alternate vendors. Each of the projects was assigned to different teams and their leaders reported the progress regularly. The effectiveness of the work was well monitored using set benchmarks. Eventually each team’s analysis put forward an alternate solution. Finally after several rounds of discussion and reconfirmation, we decided to have most of China’s sourcing support from Malaysia, whereas Hong Kong would continue to cater southern China and Hong Kong. The innovation resulted in a saving of ten million dollars over a period of five years which would be almost equal to one year’s net profit of a mid-size factory. The innovation taught me to not to overlook even minute business details. The innovation gave me the confidence to strive in new domains and fight over challenges. Positive impacts of the project on my analytic ability, planning and leadership would help me perform better ever after in the industry. Essay 3: Where in your background would we find evidence of your leadership capacity and / or potential? (500 words) Looking back into my personal development, my leadership capacity and negotiating skills were proven to be efficient all along. One of the incident which has left proof of my leadership skill dates back to my University study times. I was given the responsibility to lead a team in ‘Zhang Jiang High Tech Zone Business Plan Contest’. The target was to estimate the finance and market occupation picture of our unique product. The major challenge I faced was the difference in opinion between the marketing officer and the finance expert. Sally, the marketing officer demanded a large market promotion where as Kathy, our finance expert opposed this strongly on the grounds of fund constraint. They had fierce arguments resulting in no solutions. I drew an integrated picture considering both aspects and asked Sally and Kathy to think about alternatives, but still they were in no position to have a united stand. My communication skills came handy in leading the team towards an integrated goal. I talked to both the girls in person. Before doing that, I managed to analyse the nature of each team member and ensured to be friendly with them. Kathy was very smart and serious but also very reasonable. I could realize that she got biased while ensuring to negate Sally’s point to maximize the market occupation. I told her not to care too much about Sally’s position and persuaded her to think of a solution. Kathy quickly showed her understanding, and worked hard on finding the breaking point in finance part. As Sally, found me and Kathy working hard, she also could not stop from putting the hardest of her efforts. I could successfully inspire my team to follow me towards an integrated vision which provided us with glorious results in the competition. I did prove my leadership skills in my present assignment with GE as well. Jane, who joined our team as an intern was a finance master but desired a career in auditing. However, I could realize her skills as a finance person during her internship in GE. I boosted her confidence by giving her opportunities to work with multiple teams in Hong Kong. I helped her to device a career vision and analyze the results of transferring herself to other businesses. Encouraged by the positive team spirit and inspiring leadership, she decided to continue in my team. Similar were the cases with other three interns. Further my leadership skills were proved as I could successfully lead a multicultural team even with members senior to me. I evolved as a leader even for the senior members as I ensured due respect to their experience while on the other hand gave short but clear directions on what I expected. . I fully trusted them and delegated the job, making the leadership much easier. Through out my past experiences, whether be it in the professional career or in other spheres of life, I could entrust evidence for my leadership capacity where ever I dealt with a team. Essay 4: (Optional) If you feel there are extenuating circumstances of which the committee should be aware, please explain them here (eg. Unexplained gaps in work experience, choice of recommendation, TOEFL waiver request, inconsistent or questionable academic performance, significant weakness) Though my business skills could successfully be reflected to the admission committee, I believe that my commitment towards the society too must be made aware so that a complete picture of my personality is revealed. My passion towards community service was passed on to me by my parents. I used to volunteer for ‘Hands-on-Shanghai international organization’ and visited sick children and comforted parents. I met Li Min during one of those visits at the Shanghai Children’s Medical Center. This boy was ectrodactylous, and had no thump. I tried playing with him in every visit, inspiring him to rejoice but failed miserably as the boy lacked self confidence. I could identify Chinese Calligraphy as a common interest of me and Li Min. I volunteered to teach him the art but faced serious challenges as he couldn’t hold the brush for even five minutes. I didn’t give up and inspired him constantly. I made some further study in psychology for this cause and took him for refreshing outings. Gradually his skills and interests won over his disabilities. He even represented the sick children to exhibit his calligraphies in the hospital’s annual party celebration. For me, community service brings continual self-growth and maturity in turn positively affecting someone’s life. My feeling of social responsibility would attribute more towards the Corporate Social Responsibly of the industry which I would be managing in future. I am confident that my times in Wharton would aid me with chances in developing this feeling in a corporate way. Read More