International Business

One lesson I learned from the group project was that when one is working in a group with a decent number of people problems will arise. In our case this came in the form of a group member not doing the work that was assigned to them. This was very frustrating to the rest of the group because his shoddy work reflected poorly on the whole group and several times we were stuck with rewriting his portion of the project. Having a member not do their share of the work was new to be and I had to struggle with the rest of the group on how to approach the situation as Christians. By working with the same group for a full semester we got to know each others strengths and weaknesses and then we could appropriately assign tasks to each member. The other main point I learned from the group project was that it takes a lot of work to take a company into another country. This became apparent as the different sections of the project became due. When we had finished all of the information needed for the group project I looked back on all we had done and I was amazed at the work we had put into the project and how it really showed by the amount of data we had gathered. Even though we did not use most of the information in our presentation, we did use all of the information to come to the conclusions that we presented.

I believe was had success in multiple areas of our group project but we had particular success in our financial information. Since it was our goal to come up with an investment opportunity that would make a lot of money we decided that it would take a large investment to generate a large return. We asked the investors for 141 million dollars and we would have been able to pay them back in 2 years with a 12% interest rate. Simply having the financial information fairly realistic and workable I believe was a great success for our team.

There is always room for improvement in a group project and our project was no exception. Our biggest problem was that we did not rehearse the presentation completely as a group, some of our members did meet and review the basics of our presentation but we were never able to get everyone together in time to properly rehearse our sales pitch. This resulted in a bit of confusion during the presentation which took away much of our professional feel. Aside from not practicing together I think that many members of my group did not practice enough on their own, my self included, and our presentation suffered when we rambled in front of the class because they had not gotten their information into a practiced succinct pitch.

Overall I thought our presentation was very professional but we could have taken it to the next level if we had practiced as a group several times and our individual members had taken more time to rehearse their own points. If I were to start this project all over I would make sure that my group had clear communication of what was expected of each member including quality of work and time at which the work should be turned in. Throughout the project I would like to see better communication between my team to make sure that everybody is on the same page. Lastly I would begin to prepare for the presentation in advance so that there would be plenty of time to rehearse as a group and perfect the presentation.

Throughout this class we learned many international business lessons and one of the earliest lessons was that the four Ps, product, price, place, and promotion must also be used at the international level. We also learned that knowing the culture is key to the success of business that are going international, and by giving us examples such as Disneyland in Japan versus Disneyland in France we saw real companies misunderstanding the culture and as a result losing millions of dollars. Learning the difference between P time and M time is very practical and could save large amounts of time if I ever go take my career into a P time society. The most crucial thing I believe I learned in this class was the importance of knowing your target market because this is what will make a business succeed or fail. Knowing ones market in a foreign country can be difficult because one must overcome different languages, social structures, and attitude patters. When I go into my future career I will remember the importance of knowing my target market and respecting their culture.