Interesting Intern

Guess what? After a 2-week holiday back in China during the 58th National Day with family & friends, I got the opportunity to do a pre-MBA intern with a retail bank in Mauritius, thanks to my future classmate Sonal's recommendation.

The Environment - Sunny & Shiny, Spoken French & Written English (here I experienced first time at meetings where all have to speak English because I am the only 1 present with basic French). Waterfront office, beachfront house with a 1-hour trip in between, luckily I don't drive.

The Team - a Uganda girl studied in Canada, a Zimbabwe guy worked in the MD's office, and our boss brought from India his 15 years experience heading the Products & Strategy (3 other trainess from Zim & Ghana who're at different projects). So bascially we've covered all the foreigners in the bank except South Africa.

Challenges / Opportunities - New field (exciting), Emerging market in a small island country (exclusive), Communication with different parties (explicit), Inniative to improve or innovate (edgy).

People / Projects - mostly are nice & warm Mauritians and I'm learning What to say after "Bonjour", diverse projects including incentive scheme, press conference, products launch, etc. - So far, So interesting!

Deal or no Deal - Banks ABC

Yesterday I watched the Singapore TV version of "Deal or no Deal" for the first time. Since I played a simple online game before, the whole process didn't seem to be very exciting, probably also because I was just a spectator:-)

The more exciting "Deal or no Deal" being talked about these days is obviously the take-over bidding of Dutch bank ABN-AMRO. Now there's an interesting twist with two Asian powers backing up the London based Barclays bank, one of which is China Development Bank.

Following is the full-report: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9549590&fsrc=nwl. Along this chain of interests, Bank B is trying to catch A but not enough capitcal, C & some others are behind B, in the hope of gaining some share of interest once B bought A. Sounds like the Chinese parable "螳螂捕蝉、黄雀在后" (tang2 lang2 bu3 chan2, huang2 que2 zai4 hou4) The mantis stalks the cicada, the oriole is behind. Luckily, there's a more appropriate business term called "Win-Win". We shall find out the result soon, after the "commercial breaks"!