Shawn's Graduation Speech

Shawn’s Graduation Speech for the GSU
Global Partners MBA Class of 2008

The four things I learned from my MBA program.

1. I’ve developed a physical dependency on PowerPoint.
2. I learned a new language.
3. I learned that anything worth learning can be conveyed in a chart
4. I learned to take existing models, charts, concepts and ideas and apply them to new sets of data.

I have elected to not simply tell you about these new competencies, but also to demonstrate them to you during the course of this speech. Item number one, my adeptness at PowerPoint that has been carefully honed over the course of the program, is best illustrated by the creation of this presentation. Number two is that I have learned a new language. To enter the global partners program, it is a prerequisite to know another language besides English. We were told that this was so that we would be able to quickly adapt and understand in the cultures and countries that we visited as part of the program. But we were lied to.

The REAL reason is that our professors wanted to make sure we would be able to learn a brand new language: the language of business. As MBA students, we have learned a brand new language, complete with its own vocabulary. I apologize to those who are in attendance who have not yet learned this language, because I would like to deliver the next segment of my speech in b-school-ese.

“4Q and 1600 ICH ago,
We determined that the FV of our WACC
Could be improved by exchanging CA for FA
and leveraging our IP.

After a SWOT analysis of our OTB,
We chose an MBA with GSU in the program called GP.
In Oct. 07 in CS 600, the Cof’08 began.
We met P-Y and KDL. And also Robin M.

We learned Econ and Pol Strat, Comm Dip and Int Bus,
Bus Law and Bus Mark, and Cost and Info Sys
In our IT class we read how HDVD
Would go DOA thanks to PS3
And in P-Y’s Ops class at IAE
We learned to streamline Mfg using JIT

We saw RDJ and flew to CDG
We changed our USD into RMB
In PRC we toured the BOG,
Then grabbed some US food at MickeyD’s

After all that, we’re back at GSU
Here in ATL with 1 thing to do,
To cross the stage and receive our degrees
And add 3 new letters to our CVs.”

The third thing that I learned was that anything worth learning can, and SHOULD, be communicated quickly and easily with a graph or chart. I would like to demonstrate the truth of that too you with a few examples.
· A Pie Chart About Pie
· A SWOT Analysis of the SWAT
· The f(x) = excitement x effort
· The Brown Cloud and
· The Classic Marketing Matrix

The fourth thing that I learned was how to apply existing models and analysis to new data sets to reveal new patterns and models. I feel that this skill can be accurately demonstration by taking the comedic model of Jeff Foxworthy’s “You Might Be a Redneck” and applying it to our own particular data set.

You might be a GPMBA…
1. If you’ve ever tried to calculate your student loan debt in Euros.
2. If you know the right way to pronounce “Strategy” and “Tactic”
3. If you’ve ever used the word “widget” to describe a theoretical product line.
Or if you’ve ever looked up the translation for “widget” in French or Portuguese.
4. If you’ve ever checked with a fellow student to know not only what class you have tomorrow, but what country it’s in.
5. If you’ve ever sat in a class taught in English and had to think “What language am I hearing?”
6. If you’ve ever lost 150 thousand dollars in a virtual margin call on the virtual stock market.
7. If you’ve ever accidentally started a nuclear war in Brazil or depleted the world’s oceans of their fish population.
8. If you’ve ever spent more than 8 hours in the DC airport. Twice.
9. If you’ve ever begun a question with the phrase “I was reading in the Wall Street Journal…”
10. If you’ve ever bragged that your new suit was made in China
Finally, If you’ve studied 20 subjects across 4 continents and traveled around the entire world in 432 days as part of your international business education…

Globalization's Patent Medicine

Translation Services are today’s Snake Oil and Magic Dust. I have just completed an over 15-hour translation project turning this company's over 75 product descriptions from English into the material for a Spanish/Latin America Catalog. About half of that time was spent with a Native-speaker who is also an industry-insider. At the completion of our translation, I still feel like there may be some confusing descriptions, but at least I've straightened out my terms for "pan" and "tray." You see, the trick in translating Industry-Specific terms, is that even when you have an exactly-right literal translation, it can still be utter nonsense to your expert readers.

So, a Translation Service offers translation into German and is doing the same translation that I just completed, but has no industry experience. She says she has access to an engineer that she uses as a resource to improve the accuracy of her translating. She states that it took 7 hours for the first 2 pages of the document (out of 8 total) and claims it will take 40 to 50 hours to complete the translation. There is no reason given for this time estimate. We pay by the hour.

We have no way of checking that the translation she has provided so far is correct or of verifying that it has taken her as long as she claims. Essentially, our options are:
1) to allow her as much time as she estimates and pay her as much as she requests,
2) to bargain and negotiate based solely on my experience that the Spanish took 1/5 the time she is estimating (and still no guarantee that she is providing usable translation),
3) to find another source that is somehow verifiable and perhaps works faster/cheaper.

She has us at her mercy. Basically, we are going to take whatever she gives us, and we are going to pay her whatever she asks. It's Doc Terminus' Magic Dragon Elixir. The only way to test it is to try it. And if we get back pages full of German words, we have to go ahead and pay her. If only we had someone that knew our industry and was fluent in German?

In October we are going to begin sales into France. We don't speak that language either...

Building Up for Beijing

Shawn Butler waving in front of a hazy perma-fog enshrouded Bird's Nest at the site of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games

China is experiencing a quick build-up of population, infrastructure, and business investment visible up and down the eastern coast. This growth is fueled by the impending 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The awarding of the Games to Beijing on July 13, 2001 was seen by the Chinese as a sign from the world community that China has arrived. Peter Frank, the Olympics program director for UPS, defined the Chinese feeling for these Games by saying, “The Beijing Olympics are really the China Olympics. Winning the bid really vindicated China as a world power. The people here really look at the Games as a Coming Out Party.”

The idea of the Beijing Olympics as a “Coming Out Party” for China is echoed by many organizations across major industries in the country. Susan Davis of CARE, on loan to the Coca-Cola Company in Beijing for the duration of the Games, said “It’s a Coming Out Party—a chance for China’s big appearance on the world stage.” China has invested billions into the building up of facilities and infrastructure to support the Olympics and the forecasted eight million guests and visitors that will hit China’s major cities, airports, and traffic patterns during the summer of 2008.

China’s growth has transformed the once conservative nation “from Miser to Glutton.” China is now the worldwide top consumer of Coal, Water, Steel, Soybeans and Crude Oil. The nation is also facing head-on the very real effects of a shortage of clean air and water, as well as deforestation and desertification of land reserves. Respiratory and heart diseases related to air pollution are the leading cause of death in China. These horrifying statistics reveal the effects of rampant and unregulated growth without regard for the environment.

Coca-Cola & CARE

This issue has particularly come into focus as the eyes of the world settle on China for the 2008 Games. CARE’s Susan Davis states that these Games have already been subtitled “The Green Olympics,” with incredible focus being placed on sustainable or renewable resource usage, recycling of materials, and environmentally friendly practices. Davis says that CARE’s work with the Coca-Cola Company has aimed at “water, packaging, and climate.” All three are hot topics for the green-friendly movement that is late in coming to the Chinese people. Davis enumerated Coke’s goals at the Games “to give back all the drops of water they use, to take back all the bottles they make, and to grow the business, not the carbon.” The final goal relating to being “carbon neutral” refers to the act of off-setting carbon emissions created during the manufacturing and distribution of a product. Coke’s lead on the issue of improving environmental practices and being green-friendly could make great inroads for the Chinese people as they have a chance to see these ideals put into practice for the Olympic Games. But strong, grassroots governmental intervention and public education will still be required in order to create real change. The current environmental issues stem as much from the Chinese culture of indifference to nature as from the lack of environmental protection laws. --Shawn Butler

Room to Grow

I am going to share with you today’s observation of China. Close your eyes and envision a map of the United States. Okay, now open your eyes and keep reading… You’re going to point on that map to these locations as I list them: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose. These are the Top 10 U.S. Cities by Population and Rank. You may have noticed your finger stopped in about every major region of the country and crossed the continent at least 3 times. Further down that list you’d touch Detroit, Memphis, Jacksonville and Seattle at 23.

Now, the Top 10 Cities in China are Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guanzhou, Tianjin, Nanjing, Dalian, Hangzhou, Shenyang and Harbin. If you were to do the same mental map-pointing with this country, you’d find your finger never strayed from the east coast. In fact, you’d find that most of these cities, 8 out of 10, cluster like shotgun fire to within 2 hours of each other.

China is a huge country, roughly the same area as the United States, but with more than four times the population. Across such a broad expanse of people and geography, one expects the country to have developed several distinct and unique cities and cultures. In the US, for example, we have Northerners and Southerners, we have City People and Country People, but we also have Suburbanites, Rednecks, New Englanders, Westerners, Mid-Westerners, Snow Birds, Beach Bums, Grunge Rockers, Cowboys, and Californians. There are lots of different lifestyles with different cultures and values, but these groups are dispersed across the length and breadth of the country. From what I can tell, China does not work this way.

In China, the businesses, industries, infrastructure, government, and foreign political influence—not to mention the wealth and leading founts of culture—are all located on a stretch of the country’s east coast spanning from Beijing down to Shanghai, the rough equivalent of the state of California. Meanwhile, the western portion of the country, perhaps 90% of the land area, is occupied by about 60% of the population and responsible for less than 25% of the GDP.

So, why does this strong disparity between East and West exist in China? Similar to that of the industrial North and agrarian South in the antebellum US, the cause is the drastically different cost of doing business in the regions. “The government is doing things to move China west,” said Randy Creel, a logistics expert at a major MNC in China. “The hesitation is the lack of infrastructure and its effect on logistics costs.” Effects on logistics costs that work out to about 200% more investment per mile for companies to run their businesses in Western China. China is on a self-perpetuating cycle of eastern growth and western lag that will require more than government incentives to Western businesses and FDI spenders. It may require an all-out reallocation of infrastructure build-up that the country has never before undertaken. At least not until the 2008 Beijing Olympics. --Shawn Butler

My First Day in China

Well, it is a beautiful morning here in Shanghai and crowds of nearly-identical brown-haired and beige-skinned people pass below my second-story window of the Charms Hotel in cars, bikes and mopeds. Just as our professor told us, there is English—-or attempts at English-—written all over the place, but there are still plenty of unintelligible signs that feature characters made up of dashes, lines and boxes with no translation at all. This is definitely the most "foreign" of any country I have visited.

There are twenty-two of us including my program director and international business professor. We travel on a chartered bus and remain fairly sheltered from the realities of this, the most populated city in the most over-populated country in the world. We arrived after an 11 hour flight from Paris, on Sunday morning and cleared customs around noon. The time change was six hours from France, but a more convenient 12 hours from EST. Monday morning, at our first company visit with US Commercial Services of our own Nat'l State Dept., our guest speaker told us that Shanghai's population of 20 million people was like fitting the population of Texas into the state of Delaware. He said that this is a problem that many non-Chinese companies have when they come here, that all they see is a bubble of untapped population or an open market of 1.3 billion potential consumers. They don't see the reality that over 3/4s of this giant population is living on around $1 a day. The savage need for survival overshadows the wants for the people of most of this subcontinent.

On that note, we enjoyed a quick lunch at McDonald's; Big Mac, fries, and Sprite for under $2.00, thanks to the PRC's valuation control of the RMB, keeping the Chinese currency's exchange rate artificially low. And MickeyD's proves its core-competency of reproducing consistent "quality" in every venue worldwide. I can attest that the sandwiches served up in cardboard boxes are just as bad in China as they are anywhere in the States.

Yesterday afternoon's schedule took us to a field trip of Shanghai Krupp Stainless Steel, a Joint-Venure of ThyssenKrupp and the Chinese government that manufactures flat-rolled stainless steel for all sorts of stuff, knives, pots, car exhaust systems... Their British GM gave us an overview of how the German company was sorting out issues with Chinese government regulations and the oddly over-priced yet inexpensive Chinese labor. They are some of the lowest paid nationals in the developed world, but they work a full week and require 3 times pay for overtime and holidays. It's definitely an interesting system.

It was during our tour of the pounding and thrumming steel presses on the factory floor at about 3:30pm local time that the earthquake hit. And being less than 100 miles away from the epicenter of a 7.8-measured earthquake, it is lame to report that we didn't feel a thing. The news told us that "Skyscrapers swayed in Shanghai," and there are skyscrapers a-plenty in this city, but we were not in one at the time of the quake. So, sorry, not much to report there. The tour did get exciting when they used an overhead crane to haul a two ton roll of steel past us to load it on the press. I thought, "Hmmm, Jeff might have really enjoyed this little tour." My friend in the program, Jaime LaTorre, a GT engineering grad., said he thought it was a great factory tour. I admit I was rather bored.

Last night, we went to dinner at another Chinese food place that served us stir-fried vegetables, pork and rice that tasted like anything I could have ordered up from any mall-chinese restaurant in the US, but I did drink a delicious lemon-watermelon juice with it. So how's that for exotic Far Eastern cuisine? I’ll have to push my little horizons a bit further for meals tomorrow. --Shawn Butler

The Pearl Tower in Pudong District and Shawn Butler at People's Square

A Small World

This is a quick interim blog just to keep up a with the world from here in Paris. My daughter and I celebrated our birthdays last month in our own pseudo-European style, inviting about 15 people over for a party and birthday crêpes.

asmallworld.netshawn butler

After 5 weeks in France, I've decided that I'm pretty much exactly the kind of person that should be doing the Euro scene. To prove that I am now a jet-setting elitist, I am joining the exclusive group at aSmallWorld dot net, where I will be rubbing "virtual elbows" with supermodels and James Blunt. See you when you get there... shawnpbutler@gmail.com

The World is Still Round…

In spite of Thomas L. Friedman’s best efforts to claim otherwise in his newly revised The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Release 3.0. Just as in his previous books, Friedman showcases his journalistic forte for information gathering, analysis, and insight-laden extrapolation. He supports well his own previous arguments for free trade, market specialization, and classical economic theories regarding absolute and comparative advantage. (Smith, Ricardo, ... Reich)

I’ll pause here to acknowledge that I, too, am a strong proponent of globalization. I have seen first-hand the dissolution of geographic and political barriers to trade and the ensuing benefits to the local economy. I find no fault in Friedman’s historical observations, including his 3 eras of globalization, his 10 flatteners, and even his recommendations for new hybrid fields of study he calls “Mash-Ups.” These ideas are spot-on in our global economy of increasing convergence.

But why all the doom and gloom, Mr. Friedman? Instead of telling your readers how the new “flattened” world will make lives better—spurring the economy of our New America into a greater leadership role as the birthplace of ideas and a nation of entrepreneurs—he focuses on the bad. Friedman follows the M.O. of Lou Dobbs, crying wolf over foreign theft of US jobs and a general disappearance of the American middle-class. Rather than pointing to the strengths of our human capital as inventors, creators, and brand builders, he tells readers that the American sky is falling in competition with Indian and Chinese ITs and engineers.

Friedman leans toward the dramatic, but what do you expect from an Opinion Columnist? He opens with this quote from an Indian software CEO: “The global playing field is being leveled… and the US is not ready.” This is followed by other sensational statements of hyperbole. “Today, people in China and India are starving… for your job!” he warns his children. But then, you are given to flights of the inflammatory if you are to make your living as an op-ed writer. The Title The World is Friendlier to International Business because of Improvements in Technology and Transportation doesn’t sell books.
--Shawn Butler

A Little About Brazilians

Shawn and Charlotte experience Futbol the Brazilian way at Maracanã Stadium

First of all, the country of Brazil is about the same size as the continental U.S. They are the largest country in South America and walk a fine line of being very typical of and also very distinct from the rest of the continent. They have the Latin American sense of time and relaxed schedules, being Polychronic in their sense of time stresses involvement with people and completion of transactions rather than adherence to a preset schedule. For the people of this continent, the future is not firm and therefore cannot be planned. Appointments can be broken and plans may be changed right up to their execution. They are interested in nature and clapping at the sunset. These are commonalities they share with other Latin American countries. At the same time, they seem intent on remaining unique and apart from the Spanish-speaking world. Brazilians are very proud of their country and find unity in their common patriotism.

A man we encountered in Jardím Botánico, Manoel Amorím, who spent 10 years in the U.S. where he attended Harvard Business School and then became Country Manager for Proctor & Gamble Venezuela, and is the current CEO of Ponte Frio, told us that Brazil was too big and Brazilians were too diverse to try and label them all. He said that there are 3 things all Brazilians everywhere have in common.

Number one was soccer. “If there is a World Cup or National Team game playing,” he promised us, “You can go to the busiest street in town and lay down in the road without any fear.” Unfortunately, club teams are just beginning their regular playing seasons right now, so we will be unable to test his assertion during our stay in Rio.

Number two was national pride. He said that all Brazilians agree that they are part of a great country with an exciting culture. Just don’t force them to define which culture that is.

Number three was not given to me by sr. Amorím during our discussion, but I have used my intuition to deduce what it could be: Brazilians love babies.

At the end of my first week in Rio de Janeiro, my wife and our 8-month-old baby girl flew down and to join me for the rest of our residency. During my first week here, I had only limited interactions with the local residents. By “limited” I mean they spoke to me when they were spoken to. The Brazilian people never initiated conversation with me and seemed content to let me wander their country in my own Gringo universe.

This all changed when I was carrying my chubby-thighed, blonde-haired and blue-eyed little girl. People came from half a block away sometimes, children dropped what they were doing, old women crossed the street, and parents of other babies were drawn to us as if by a magnet. We had no lack of attention when we had our baby with us. On more than a few occasions, as I waited to cross the street, I found the person next to me holding onto the hand of or squeezing the little thighs of my daughter while she hung against me in my arms.

I embarrassed myself several times by attempting to respond to an enthusiastic “Oi!” from a local, only to realize that the greeting was not directed at all to me, but to the baby in my arms who is yet to say her first word in English, let alone make any reply in Portuguese. A favorite episode of our experience here in Brazil will be the lady in the Hippy Fair that labored to find a translator when we were unable to understand time and time again the words that she was saying to us about our baby. An exhaustive and stressful search finally yielded an individual capable of translating her missive. And what was this all important, cross-cultural communique? “Your daughter should be on the cover of a magazine." --Shawn Butler

This is Tiny Baby Charlotte in Rio saying, "Well, Of Course I Should."