MBA Journal: Year Two May 11, 2008, 4:10PM EST

To Vietnam, and Graduation

"Many people say an MBA is pointless or a waste of money. …When I think about what I know now vs. what I knew in 2005, I know it was worth every penny"

by Rachael Klein

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Rachael Klein
Georgetown
MBA Class of 2008

On Feb. 23, about 60 of my classmates and I made our way to Ho Chi Minh City for our Global Integrative trip that every Georgetown MBA student is required to take—the other 180 people in my class were heading toward Johannesburg, Shanghai, or Dubai.

My group was traveling to Vietnam to meet with clients we had been assigned to back in November. These clients—major Vietnamese corporations or international companies that sought to enter Vietnam—had sent my school various business projects to work on. We spent November through February meeting with professors several times a week, speaking with our clients over the phone, conducting research, and applying everything we could possibly think of from our education.

At school, each group had given presentations to their class and it was more or less agreed that all the groups had created quality business plans or business solutions that were worthy of being presented to a senior executive of a major corporation. Our professors approved each presentation and the corresponding idea as sufficient for a client presentation. Then we landed in Vietnam and we saw a few of our assumptions about finance, marketing, and economics fragment.

Plans Did Not Hold Water

Now, I obviously only speak for myself and a few other groups with whom I've spoken. But I can safely say no matter where we are from—we have an internationally diverse program—we applied certain business notions to our plans that simply did not hold water in the economies we were visiting and researching. And that was the beauty of the assignment—to learn the necessity of flexibility, of shaping what we learn, and fitting it to environments or situations entirely new to us.

One of our groups gave a presentation to MBAs at a business school in Vietnam. Their idea was a marketing plan to encourage Vietnamese consumers to get and use credit cards. One of the marketing approaches was mailing fliers. Simple—it seemed. Then a Vietnamese student raised his hand and said: "That's a good idea but no one uses the post here. How are you going to send ads in the mail, let alone the credit-card bill? And the Vietnamese consumers don't trust banks. They keep their money in their homes. How are you going to convince them to take their hard-earned savings and hand it over to some stranger with a business card and a desk in some impersonal bank?"

We were, well, stumped. We assumed banks implied stability. (Note: This was before Bear Stearns (BSC) was assigned a value less than its own building.)

Stumbling Through Our Answer

My own group was assigned the task of figuring out the logistics of a rental car business in Vietnam. We thought this would be easy since there wasn't much of an established industry and the competition was fragmented, mostly mom-and-pop, and limited in scope. Only people with Vietnamese drivers' licenses can drive a car in Vietnam so a driver would come with the rental car. We decided on a nice high price point since there was no competition and we were practically first-movers in this market space. We would offer a convenient, easy-to-use service, with English-speaking drivers.

"Well," asked the senior executive who listened to our presentation, "how do we find English-speaking drivers?" We stumbled our way through an answer to which he nodded thoughtfully. As silence crashed down while he nodded, we cringed and nervously shot each other quick looks that conveyed: "Say something! Anything!" Finally, one of my teammates said: "We, uh, realize there are several elements that still need to be addressed. We are happy to research them further if you would like us to."

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