(Taipei, Taiwan) Knowing when to let go prevents one from living in the past.

I was upset by the behavior of a certain friend, which inspired two posts (this and this) musing about the nature of people. After discussing this with another friend (pseudonym May) last night, I am better able to accept what happened. May pointed out that in the earlier semester, the friend could have been scouting out for the clique he or she wished to join. When they do not find that clique, they take whatever friendships they can get. Once they find the clique, the person’s life and behavior revolves around his or her new friends. Since I do not belong to the clique the person now belongs to, I am no longer part of the person’s life, and will be forgotten.

I appreciated May’s viewpoint because it emphasizes the positive aspect of fit. Some people prefer a smaller network of really close friends, over a larger network of weak ties. These people, after finding the clique they feel most comfortable in, choose to interact largely within their clique. They found their social niche, and are comfortable staying within that niche. I should be glad that such people found the friends that “fit” them. People are heterogeneous, having different interests and needs at different stages in their life (for example, some of my closer friends on campus are juniors). Friendships are formed because the right people meet at the right time, creating the right “fit”.

I was initially upset as I believe strongly in friendships, value my friends, and sought to find out what happened. However, May’s view allows me to close the chapter on a friendship, and move on knowing that “fit” simply was not there. The person moved on when the right clique was found, while I stayed rooted in the past friendship. It is time to move on, if I do not wish to become Tony Leung of 2046.

I just attended a WH 191 class on presentations. Some takeaways:

Presentation

1. Move a little more (especially with my feet)
2. Don’t speak when glancing at notes
3. Project voice, pause when need be, and vary speed and loudness
4. Start with a story (?) – stories make it easier to present, and helps me smile

Content and Structure

1. State upfront my objective (i.e. I want to talk to you about X to convince you of Y)
2. More structure is good (introduce points X, Y, Z and how I will present them. Build on these points. Conclude by restating these points.)

Also related are: this, this and this.

(Zhu Town, China) Where I started working on development.

I have decided. I will take a semester off in spring 2008, to pursue research and studies at Tsinghua University in China. I will still need to apply and be accepted. I have been asking myself why I wish to go abroad so soon, and guess it is the urge to reinvent myself in an environment away from the Wharton crowd and Huntsman clique that drives me. I hope to eventually be a public policy adviser on development, and there are many paths I can take to this dream. This period will allow me to think clearly about what I wish to do after graduation, as the foundation for my eventual goal. Spring in China will also be a time for me to reminisce by meeting with old friends and retracing my life through Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China. It will be a good time for me focus on things that matter a lot to me.

What are the things that matter to me? I guess the first thing I will do is to meet with old friends, find out how time has treated them, and learn more about their working lives. We will talk about the past, and think about the future. I will remember past possibilities of relationships that could be, but never happened because of conscription. I will relive the past that has shaped me, returning to that village in Nanjing where I helped built a school, and remember the joy that set me on this development-oriented path.

I will engage in development economics research at the World Bank, and take interesting classes at Tsinghua. This will be the start of the big research project that I hoped to begin, and finish before I graduate. Alongside my research, I hope to continue my work as a social entrepreneur by working with fellow Tsinghua students on development-related projects, hopefully in some public policy advising role. It will also be the best time for me to meet new friends, and to bring my Chinese up to the level that I always hoped it would be at.

(New York City, NY) Communication is important.

I am a little upset with the Penn bureaucracy at the moment. I was invited, by nomination from the Penn faculty, for a discussion with the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Windsor on solving urban problems. This was a good opportunity to discuss the work of EduHealth. More importantly, the Prince runs a foundation studying integrated healthcare, which shares some similarities to EduHealth’s model. It would have been a good learning opportunity for EduHealth to get in touch with that organization through the Prince. I also thought it would be a great way to showcase the incredible amount of talent on the EduHealth team, and to reward the team for their efforts in building this organization.

Due to poor communications, this discussion will not be happening. There is a lot to learn about good communication from this, because I have to accept some of the blame. Penn received my contact information, but for some reason, I-house (the organizer) did not contact me, although Penn claimed they tried to reach me. There is nothing in my email or on my phone. At the moment, I still do not know where the communication mishap occurred. Perhaps Penn forgot to forward my contact to I-house, or some emails got caught in the spam defense. On my end, what I should have done was to constantly remind Penn to act on it. This is failure on my part.

I am disappointed because this presentation was something I promised to my team, to showcase their work, and to create new learning opportunities for our members. It would also be good publicity for EduHealth that would help us in applying for funding and in recruiting members next semester.

Actually, I was devastated. I owed this promise to my team and organization. But that effect has worn off after the last two hours, because I managed to channel it into building new opportunities for EduHealth to grow. In the past two hours, I have talked to MedIntake, another student group, about implementing the healthcare portfolios and healthcare guidance counseling ideas. I also wrote a pitch to Professor Harkavy, about creating a new international healthcare class at the newly built International Studies High School. This work has helped me recover emotionally from my disappointment.

Bottom line: When faced with a failure, I should not dwell on it. Instead, I should channel my disappointment into motivating myself to create new opportunities.

(Muju, South Korea) Friends for life…

I was working on drawing up the meeting schedule with various partners EduHealth is involving in its work, when I received a call from my dormitory phone. The person on the line spoke with heavily accented English, and kept repeating the line “are you Wu Gu Hao?” I told him he had the wrong number, but he just kept repeating the line. I almost slammed the phone down, and would have been terribly ashamed of myself if I had done so. I recognized the name as being Chinese, and switched to speaking to the person in Chinese. I found out that the person was looking for his son, who was studying at Penn. His son never contacted him since his expected arrival at Penn, and the father was worried about his son’s safety. I promised to help him look for his son, and contacted the university administrators who located the person’s son. It was one of those moments I was really glad to be able to speak some Chinese, and use my language skills to help others. However, this incident fascinated me as it made me reflect on how people are often polite and helpful to those whom they have weak ties to, but occasionally take for granted their strong ties. This neglect leads to strong ties becoming draining rather than nourishing.

Some people treat their closer friends with less respect and appreciation than they would a recent acquaintance. Such behavior stems from how these people expect their strong ties to always be around to take such abuse, while realizing that weak ties would gladly absolve themselves of such poor company. These people insult their close friends, demand more from their close friends, and give little in return for such support. They use language that is dismissive of their friends, and belittle the capabilities of friends, in order to boost their self-worth, or to prove that they have “character” around acquaintances.

These strong ties end up draining, as a “friend” becomes treated as a substitutable “toy” meant only to amuse its owner during his or her solitude. Some people seek out the company of a “friend” when their usual posse of weak ties was away. However, once the person’s posse returns, the person would ignore his or her “friend”. Strong ties become a “toy” to amuse these people when they are bored, and the companionship is not reciprocated by such people when these “toys” seek solace in return. Such people grumble when their “toy” cannot find the time to amuse them in their periods of solitude, but fail to return the favor to their substitutable “toy”. This substitutability is expressed in language, when a person says “I do not wish to join you in your activity, unless my real friend A, B, or C is around.” Of course the words are seldom that tactless, but the meaning remains.

In observing these behaviors in college, I seek to remind myself how I should appreciate my true friends, and avoid taking their presence for granted. It also makes me regret incidents in the past, when I might have failed to be less understanding and appreciative of friends than I should have been. On the other hand, “friends” who behave in such a manner should just be forgotten. Friendship is meant to bring stability and happiness, and should not be subjected to discomfort of mood swings, whims and manipulation of others.

(Miao Li, Taiwan) As Sagar says, interviewing is the integration of skills as varied as logical thinking, presentation, organization…etc.

I went for the academic program manager interview for my dorm this morning. While I felt that I did alright, it was definitely far from the best I could do. Interviewing is definitely a skill that I must work on, and I will schedule it as a key development area in fall 2007.

Some things I need to do:

1. Prepare a list of items I want to put across, and how I will put them across (i.e. the interviewing strategy)
2. Psyche self before interview to be prepared to give answers with a lot of elaboration and illustration, and to be confident of myself

During the interview

3. Consider starting with something interesting or funny to control the mood
4. Think before answering, and organize thoughts (e.g. pyramid principle style) to be more coherent in expressing ideas
5. Elaborate in each answer (take as long as I want and need)
6. Control the interview to get my main points across

Ultimately, preparation is key.

To read next semester:

http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/wharton/intguide.html

Also, attend interview practices:

http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/wharton/workshop_wharton.html

(Zhu Town, China) Coordination on a “small scale” in rebuilding a school in rural China. Now I am coordinating a bigger project here in Philadelphia.

Since I started EduHealth, one of the major difficulties I faced was in coordinating the complex partnerships that we needed to accomplish any of our work. Our different partners have different needs, interests, and incentives, and we need to understand these in order to establish a meaningful working relationship with them. For example, the teacher at Sayre who runs the healthcare class might not necessarily see the need to link her curriculum to work at the health center, or to take time away from the class to work on healthcare portfolios for the students in her class. The after-school programs which we hope to partner in implementing after-school healthcare internships for Sayre students might also be unwilling to divert resources to a healthcare-focused program.

The difficulty of managing partnerships extends beyond figuring out the interests of our partners, and how we can meet them. There are times when we don’t even know who all the partners we have to work with are. For example, we were asked to teach a healthcare class, and started recruiting to fill a department with people interested in teaching. However, the person who asked us to teach that class later revealed that another group will work with us on this task, which meant that we only needed to focus on the curriculum planning stage for that class. There were other tasks which we were asked to work on by one group, only to find out that another group had overlapping responsibilities on that task (e.g. healthcare pipeline study). This was not due to any malice on the part of partners, but simply reflects the difficulties involved in managing a large scale project requiring coordinated efforts.

Initially, I found all these overwhelming. After meeting and talking to Derish Wolff, Chairman of the Louis Berger group, I felt inspired to take on these challenges. Mr Wolff is an inspiring leader of an international engineering consultancy that handles post-war reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in other developing countries. I asked him how he handled the various demands from all the donors funding the projects, and he mentioned that I had stumbled onto the most challenging aspect of his job. Knowing that even great corporate leaders have such difficulties, on an even larger scale, made my job so much more humbling.

One of the key tasks for now is to rationalize everyone’s role, and how the partnerships should work out. In addition to the countless meetings I attended to work all this out, our Operations department is also working out a strategic map of all our partners (implicit or explicit), the interests and roles of these partners, and how we can support their operations

(New York City, NY) Friends come and go, and you cannot stop it. True friends are the ones who stay with you until the end.

The people whom you would think of as friends change quickly. A person can cozy up to you quickly simply because he or she is lonely and wants company that day, but after they find someone more rich/smart/popular/good-looking, they are just as likely to dump you for their new-found friend. College makes this process easy, because the wide-range of people you can meet accelerates this process. Perhaps this is a cynical way of looking at things, but it has been played out empirically, and I have lost some friends to such a process.

While the loss of a friend is to be lamented, perhaps it is better to think of it as a gain, as the people who are the worst friends eventually weed themselves out of my presence. At the end, I will find the people who will stick with me through thick and thin, people whom I can share life experiences with.

However, this also contradicts my belief that friends are made, not found. It is a question of making the effort to understand others, to relate to them, that creates friendships. I guess these two theories can be reconciled by viewing them as a conflict where one wins out over the other. Some people just require a little understanding to become a friend; while for others no amount of effort can create friendships that overpower their popularity-seeking nature.

Friendships in college have been about ups and downs. It is easier for me to relate to others, than others to me. My experience under conscription has changed me, as have my subsequent travel and new life. Few here have come close to understanding the fear for one’s own freedom daily, or the pain of power wielded so arbitrarily by a few over every action of another, or the yearning for a dream that cannot be fulfilled simply because one’s life is not one’s own to live. It is this set of experiences, that make me who I am. It is a lonely path that cannot be shared, when I have to leave my peers to their glamorous parties and jockeying for popularity, to forge my own path in life. I wish I could be like them, and enjoy such aimless youth, but that is not possible. Who my friends are will only be known to me at the end of this road.

(Shanghai, China) Rising prices - rational or not?

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences recently released its 2007 Yellow Book on the World Economic Outlook. It warned that the

“…mainland property market could be headed for a crash like the 1990s collapse in Japan because Beijing has not gone far enough in reining in the overheated market…”

-South China Morning Post (Accessed Jan 13, 2007)

This made me recall a comment from a friend staying in Shanghai, who moved in from Nanjing. When I asked her if there was a bubble, she said yes. When I asked why she was still buying an apartment, she answered that the government will not let the property market crash, as too many people depend on it, and a hard landing would result in social unrest. This was in 2004, and maybe she had changed her mind since then. If this thinking is representative of the general Chinese public, the government will have to signal clearly it’s commitment to fighting asset price inflation. This commitment has to be expensive and irreversible to be effective.

Korea’s fight with property prices over the past year could provide some insights into China’s upcoming battle. The Korean government lost this battle over prices, despite hard measures, such as preventing resale of houses, and soft measures, such as raising the tax on property. On the supply side, it raised the supply of housing, by proposing a new housing district. Is the government behaving irrationally in trying to curb asset prices, or is the market being irrational in its valuation? In China, it is also possible that government policies in other areas, and market failure in other parts, are the cause for asset price inflation. If these are true, it will be expensive and possibly ineffective to fight the inflationary pressures.

Bubbles are most easily observed in retrospect, as the value of an item is theoretically the price given to it by the market, and valuations can change over time. There are no fixed rules that determine over-valuation. However, markets can over-price an item, resulting in a crash as the market reverses its opinion. It can misjudge demand for its products, and create excess capacity. We do have some rules of thumb to value property, such as the ration of rental income to property prices. However, these rules of thumb are based on historical averages, which may not adequately predict a future that is rapidly changing. The World Economic Outlook suggests that the upcoming Olympics is the cause for irrational exuberance in the property market. Perhaps the historical average is wrong because of better growth prospects, and the markets could be right.

It is also possible that the inflationary pressure is due to China’s exchange rate policy, or to its dysfunctional financial system. The insolvency of state-owned banks, lack of investment options in a well developed stock and bond market, and capital controls, means that there are few escape valves for local money. Domestic liquidity is channeled into the property market. The exchange rate policy also encourages an inflow of foreign capital, as assets are undervalued by a depressed Yuan, and prices have to adjust domestically to balance this disequilibrium. Obstfeld points out how goods prices adjust slowly to international prices. I suggest that property prices adjust the fastest as it is an asset as well as a consumer good, which allows locals to view it as a good store of value guarding against inflation.

For all the economics lovers and public policy wonks out there…

Related Macro-Finance Links: