Finally our Special Project 2012 course has proceeded to the point where things start to fall in their places. Our study trip is no longer some unclear plan, but now it’s really starting to take its shape! The excursion in Kuala Lumpur will take place on March. Exact dates are 11.3 – 19.3. The planning of the trip is in full spate. At the moment we are looking for a hotel and flights for our group.

During the study trip we are going to visit some company offices and organizations, for example Vaisala and Comptel. We have also been contacting a local university, so hopefully this collaboration will give us a chance to visit the university and see a glimpse of Malaysian university life. We are excited to get familiar with the local business life, and of course generally with the Asian way of business.

We also hope that we get as much out of Malaysian culture as possible. Since Malaysia has got an interesting history, its culture is also multifaceted. Malaysian culture is a mix of different cultures, which makes it an even more interesting destination for our excursion!

-Essi

Our new partner is Comptel. Welcome to join the project!

Ethnic and religious division
Malaysian contemporary history is an interesting mixture of conflict and harmony. People in the Malaysian society are highly aware of one’s ethnic origin: there are deeply rooted cultural conventions and a traditional societal role for each ethnic group in the country. The Malay make up the main ethnic group in Malaysia, consisting roughly 50 percent of the population. The Malay and other indigenous peoples of the area (roughly 60% altogether) are granted the status of “bumiputra” which gives them numerous privileges over ethnic Chinese (25%) and Indians (7%).  The definition of bumiputra differs from one province to another, but generally it works as an umbrella term for indigenous people that practice the Muslim faith.

Racial segregation
The bumiputra system was created after a long period of civil unrest that culminated in the riots of May 13th 1969 that cost the lives of almost 200 people. The reason behind much of the unrest was that the Malay felt deprived of the economic prosperity that other groups, especially those of Chinese origin, seemed to enjoy. Until recent decades, the country’s business and commerce community has been predominantly Chinese. This distortion has been greatly diminished by recent policies, but the flipside is that the laws segregating bumiputra and other groups do have a clear racially discriminatory cling to them.

The Ali Baba practice
The benefits that the bumiputra get are wide-ranging: they get for example a 7 percent discount on houses, and face easier entrance requirements to universities than other groups. In addition, most of the publicly financed projects require that the companies submitting tenders must be bumiputra owned. This has lead to a practice called “Ali Baba” where “Ali” (a bumiputra) works as an intermediary and gets a certain sum of money from “Baba” (a non-bumiputra – derived from Baba-Nyonya, Straight Chinese) who in reality is responsible for the project.

Somehow, it works
All in all, despite many strange curiosities that are generated by these policies, Malaysia has managed to integrate multiple ethnic groups into a functioning society that at least recently has been capable of providing comparably high levels of stability and prosperity. It’s an achievement that should be applauded.

-Henri

We have our first collaboration company confirmed, as Vaisala participates in our project! We will visit Vaisala’s office in Malaysia in March.

Welcome to join the project!

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Read more about Vaisala from our ‘Partners 2012′ page!

‘Special Project’ That sounds quite special right? Well, I really think it’s quite a special project. I think the concept of it is all in all well designed and good. Students get valuable experience from project and team work and from real life business cases -all this in an international context. Companies on the other hand benefit from student’s work contribution -a contribution that offers companies extra resources and a fresh viewpoint from outside of the company. Companies will also have a possibility to represent themselves as employers to the students of the School of Economics.

Our project consists of roughly three stages: 1) planning and fund raising, 2) doing business cases to our partner companies and 3) going to a field trip and visiting our partner companies. We are now at the end of the first part of the project; we have some excursions and cooperation with companies confirmed, but we are still negotiating about business cases with our potential partner companies. I would say that this negotiation part is the nasty one in the project! We have already worked hard in project planning and company contacting, but the negotiations are unfinished and we don’t yet have final confirmations to cases. We are still in the schedule, but the uncertainty of this project stage makes everyone a bit anxious.

But then again, I think that coping with uncertainty is one of the key learning takeaways of the project. In today’s business life, one has to know how to deal with uncertainty. This will be a good skill in everyday work and especially in project work. And the bigger and the more special the thing you want to achieve is, the more there will be uncertainty and anxiety in the process. We must do balancing act to deal with this uncertainty. We must see the realities of the project and act accordingly, but we must also be optimistic and believe in what we are doing. To quote something our team leader has once said: “It’s better to be ashamed for a while than to regret the rest of your life.” That’s a good motto!

Going back to the word ‘optimism’ -> that’s where we are now! The current financial situation brings its own interesting challenge to the project and this stage of it, but we have taken the challenge and believe that we will get over the uncertainties. At this point, we have already learned a lot about project and team work and there is more to come. It has been a good first half of the project and we believe that the next one will be excellent!

-Senja

The actual career of a management student is not that known by the general public. First thing that usually comes into people’s mind is “a manager?” Someone who has a bit more knowledge might suggest “an HR-specialist?”. Luckily those are not the only possible areas or professions. Next I will briefly share some thoughts of four interesting fields of management. (Official descriptions you can check e.g. from Wikipedia.)

Strategy

Believe it or not, today’s successful strategy is not made among management team and put into safety box so that no-one knows about it. Actually, quite the opposite is true: management would like everyone to be involved in the strategy creation process but a tricky thing is how to do it. Unfortunately it doesn’t happen just by setting up a corporate discussion forum.

Human Resource Development

When companies are moving towards more agile business and scattered into service units it’s a must for management as well to develop service oriented mindset. Also employees working in client-interface need to learn new skills since they have an important role in creating value for customer.

Organization Development

It’s not always enough just to train and develop people’s leadership capability in order to achieve changes. Organization’s structures, routines and policies need to be created or eliminated to make it possible for members of the organization to develop their thinking, attitudes and values.

Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility

This is not one right answer issue but I believe it’s our duty to take responsibility of our society and planet. Sustainability is an urgent topic since if and when non-renewable energy resources will be finished we need to have a plan what to do. Again if and when there will be changes in people’s values in the future e.g. towards consuming less companies are facing demand to come up with new ways of creating value.

Susanna

Sources of the pictures:

http://lou.econ.uni-hamburg.de/2010/01/strategy-safari-–-oder-strategisches-management-als-elefant/

http://www.tcstrain.com/img/puzzleAllPieces250.png

Disorderly economic situation in Europe can be seen when conducting this year’s Special Project. Companies think through the pros and cons of entering into collaboration with students. Unfortunately, the collaboration with students is many times the first activities that companies cut when we meet hard times. Co-operation between companies and students is important for both for several reasons.

Through collaboration, the companies can have contacts with their future employees and enhance their employer image. When students are doing case studies or workshops the companies can also hear fresh and innovative ideas which company’s employees have already gone blind.

For students it is inspiriting to get contacts with actual work life and have collaboration with companies in which they would like to work after graduating. Many students also assimilate new things much better through practical learning like case studies than just listening to theoretical teaching at lectures.

During last couple weeks we have done hard work contacting the possible partner companies. At the moment, we have preliminary negotiations going on with a few companies and hopefully they are willing to become our partners. I hope and believe that there are some exceptional companies who would like to invest in the co-operation with eager student group in the middle of this messy financial situation as well

Outi

Last Thursday we had our first non-official meeting and we decided to meet over food. The idea was to go in a Malaysian restaurant – as Malaysia is the final destination of our project – to get to know each other more in person and to strengthen our team spirit. Since we had some problems with our reservation to a Malaysian restaurant, we ended up in a Chinese restaurant called New Bamboo Center which also serves Malaysian food.

The night was definitely a success! Firstly, we were all delighted how good the food was in New Bamboo Center: the curry dishes, spring rolls and noodles were just like back in Asia. Besides, in an Asian style the prices were well suitable for a student budget. The atmosphere in NBC was also surprisingly authentic Asian: the decor was slightly shabby and the lovely Asian lady working as the main waitress was not only very qualified but also hilarious. You could really forget for a while that it is actually chilly November outside and the winter is yet to come…

Secondly, it was great to notice that our project group is really starting to hitch together. We show interest in similar things on several fields e.g. HR work, business and strategy development, political history, languages, other cultures, corporate sustainability… Also sense of humour is something we have in common. The fact that we already have some companies involved in our project (about them you’ll definitely hear later!) made the atmosphere cheerful and optimistic.

Our mission was to talk also about something else than the school stuff, but time after time we found ourselves talking about the project and its details, which are starting to find their shape little by little. I can tell that our project group is very excited about the project and hungry for interesting cooperation with companies!

After the dinner in New Bamboo Center some of us had drinks in the drink bar Shaker’s. Since everyone had a lot to do on the following day, even the most persistent of us left for home at 10 p.m. However, drinks such as Paris Hilton, Ultimate Mojito and Daim Anne were the perfect ending for a great night out!

Looking forward to new experiences with Special Project 2012 crew,

Maiju R.

Something else for a change?

In spite of all the work we’ve done so far, I think today has been the most rewarding day of our Special Project. We participated the ARENA Career Fair in Aalto School of Economics and contacted company representatives face to face.  We started our day at 9 am by having a breakfast at our school restaurant Rafla and then began the mission of the day. The main objective was to get companies interested in our project and become our partners. We told the company representatives basic information about our project, but most importantly we told them, what we can offer them, if they become our partners. Because of our excursion to Kuala Lumpur, we contacted mainly companies, who have some business in Malaysia or Southeast Asia.

Outi and Anni networking

We worked in pairs and contacted almost 30 companies altogether, including familiar companies from the previous years’ projects. We were super excited to notice, that most of the companies we contacted were very interested in co-operating with us and students in general. With some of the companies we even discussed the potential topics for projects and excursion to their offices in Kuala Lumpur. I’m sure that we are going to get amazing partners this year and that our co-operation will be extremely rewarding – both for the companies and for us.

Girls enjoying some ice cream after a long day of networking

I think that the positive attitude from the companies towards our project surprised us all and also gave us new energy and ideas for the project. Yet what I consider at least as important as this is that today I found out what an amazing group of students we have in this project. I can’t wait to see the results this hard-working and skilled group can achieve! It is nice to know that the people that you will work (and travel) with for the next few months are the kind of people that you can also have fun with. I have a feeling that this project will be very special.

Sunlight for your days!

Roosa

It’s getting cold and dark as the Finnish November commences, but the Special Project 2012 group is cosying up to the corner sofa of the bar&restaurant Nolla, thinking about the tropical warmth of Malaysia and perfecting our marketing strategy.

Our priority number one right now is contacting companies and getting started with the negotiations on cases. We’ve been preparing marketing material, scanning possible partner companies and events where we could meet representatives from these companies. All members of our group have had different tasks to perform and companies to contact.

So far, working on this project has been a nice change to the usual study routines: you get to discuss freely (wandering off the point is okay, it’s not strictly academic), the group is motivated and committed to the same goal (getting to KL! ), you get to apply all your knowledge in practice, develop your interpersonal skills, plus you get to know better the interesting and inspiring people you are working with.

The next major step in our project will be taken next week, when we will be doing some legwork at ARENA Career Fair.

We are excited about our future partners and look forward to getting our hands on the cases!

Have a nice weekend!

Anni