X-Culture Project: Taking on a Challenge

I am Jean-Baptiste, a Florida Tech student. I anticipate in graduating with a Master’s of Business Administration in December.

For my international business class, I am working on a project with students from around the world: one woman in Slovakia and one in India, one man in Turkey, one in the United-States ( New Jersey) and one German in South Korea. (I am from France.) The woman from Slovakia seems to be very good at organizing team work.

We will write an initial business plan for BP to install and run solar panels in Morocco. There are two goals. We expect first to turn BP image into an environmentally good looking company and second to gain expertise on running solar panel installation in Morocco, in order to be ready to make it big when it becomes financially profitable. (BP would run that business at a loss for a few years, but it could become very profitable around 2020. Not only it is almost always sunny in Morocco, but that country has a rapidly increasing population and there is already a transmission line between Morocco and Spain, which allows reach all the European market).

I sometimes have second thoughts about that choice, although I really championed it. As I have no idea about the proficiency of my team members, I think we might have been able to get a better grade had we chosen something easier, as a new burger for McDonald’s Corporation. At least, we won’t get bored doing our project.

We did not start writing the business plan, but I have already done some communication blunder. One woman did not pick a part. Someone assigned to her the payment arrangement part. I wrote an e-mail indicating it did not have to be very long for our project. I was just suggesting that had the person really vanished from the team, I could quickly do the payment part at the end, and that, otherwise, she could help other people on longer issues. Apparently, someone understood from my e-mail I was not considerate enough to that woman. I sent another mail to make it clear I think the arrangement part is indeed important, but maybe I just made it worse by writing again about it. Anyway, I hope anybody I could have offended will forgive me and that we will as a team successfully complete the project.