Key Leadership Experiences - Personal Statement Example

Describe your key leadership experiences and evaluate what leadership areas you hope to develop through your MBA experience. Leadership is also considered as a process of handling the crisis effectively as it is in this moment of crisis that your real character emerges. It was during August 2006 that my mother suffered a heart stroke and doctors suggested her a long period for recovery. This event in her life also threatened the very existence of the company she founded and managed with so much of hard work and dedication. She asked me to help manage her company. Due to my relative inexperience with running a business, I decided to follow a buyout model for the company under which managers were to acquire the firm. However, I realized that due to my relative inexperience, I would be facing two immediate problems. First, I had no experience of how to allot shares and at what prices. I approached managers of the firm to know their intentions and discussed with them the different parameters to be followed in the proposed buyout. I than approached a Merger & Acquisition expert to work as our consultant. Through formation of dynamic and multi-dimensional team, I succeeded in defining criteria for allotting shares as well as their prices. Secondly, due to my unknown business characters, I was unaware of how to acquire bank loans to finance the acquisition of shares by the managers. I had to coordinate with the local municipal government to facilitate us through banks and pursue them to provide necessary finance for buyout. I pursued them because my mother grew in reputation because of her contribution to the local society and government. Finally, we were able to sign off the deals with the banks to get bank financing for our managers to get the shares in acquisition. I felt that I was able to demonstrate leadership in the times of crisis and were able to deliver when it was needed. The second occasion when I was able to demonstrate leadership was during 2007 when I was working at IBM's China Development Lab. I served as the project manager for the renovation of the Next Generation TPMS (Translation Planning and Management System), a tool for managing the IBM globalization and localization processes. The previous generation system, developed by a team in Egypt, had failed to deliver what users really needed, which translated into super-low customer satisfaction ratio at 26 percent. My background investigation suggested four important variables which were the main cause of the failure of the system to deliver the results. This included the fact that system was slow, did not cater user requirements, too complicated as well as difficult to use. Building on that information, I thought that an upgraded system should be built around with more of the customer focus rather than technology driven as it should attempt to reflect what actually end users require. During our investigation, some of the users required us to develop a web based application whereas some of the users demanded that the system may be developed as a desktop application therefore we also decided to build a system which serve both the purposes. We begun our work around this idea and succeed in developing a systems which was hybrid of a web application as well as desktop application and which catered most of the needs of our end users. Subsequent testing by most of the users across different countries appreciated our efforts and due to my strong presentation and persuasion they agreed to test the application and provide their feedback on the new system after thoroughly using it. Both of these situations were unique for me however I believe an MBA would have provided me a better understanding of both the situations and I would have been able to address both of these issues with much more details as well as professional maturity. An MBA would also provide me more theoretical as well as practical education regarding the nature of leadership and how it can be effectively used to get things done through others. I also believe that an MBA will make my responses to such situation as more robust and proactive in nature. 4B) Leadership demands an extra effort in the form of some work done outside your traditional work area. At IBM's China Development Lab, I led the team of IBM engineers to get in touch with the high school and college students during IBM Engineer Week Shanghai Campaign. During that week I faced many challenges most important of which was getting more engineers being listed for volunteer work who were willing to share their experiences with the young students and were also ready to get time out of their busy professional schedules to interact with future leaders. However, building on my that success, I also initiated an idea of revising the IBM's curriculum delivery project and persuaded many engineers to volunteer to teach students hands on training for this. We have been successful in enlisting 250 engineers as volunteers for this new initiative who were successful in reaching 2600 students from different schools and universities. I think I have done something different and accomplish other than my professional work as this effort taught me how leaders can emerge in a social settings and how teams could be build to achieve social aims and objectives. 4-c) After doing my Masters from Yale University, I persuaded my parents to angel invest into a new education product distribution company founded by my friend. My recommendations were based on my detailed cost benefit analysis and an in-depth analysis of the market and I recommended a Valuation Adjustment Mechanism, under which the value of the shares of my parents would increase if company fail to reach certain profit targets. However, things did not worked out the same way as I calculated and company failed to perform according to my expectations. There were many issues in it. Firstly, I thought I failed to take into account other variables such as market cycles, economic conditions of China and specifically the market in which the firm was working. Based on the subsequent analysis, I found out that what was lacking was a clear team based strategy to approach this problem. We failed as a team and not because of our investment strategy. This analysis prompted to me to build the sense of trust into the team and develop it according to the market needs. This clicked and our firm started to become a market leader in our chosen niche. Based on this, I believe what others admire most in me is my ability to socialize and pursue people to join hands on any task. My team building abilities are considered as excellent as whenever needed I was successful in demonstrating that how through effective team building we can achieve any results. Read More