LFM G-Lab
Students Spend Spring Break Around the World
By Stephen Pepper
May 7, 2003
Spring break. College kids cavorting on a beach? Weeklong pub crawls? Not for many LFMs! Trips and treks to factories, offices, and tourist attractions in various parts of the U.S. and around the world are a well-established part of their Sloan MBA program. This year, however, a number of LFM students went beyond visits to serve as short-term consultants in several developing countries. They produced reports and results, and learned a lot about cultural factors in management, but they squeezed in some great touring, too.
Crossing the Digital Divide:
Michelle Bernson, Shion Hung, and Satish
Krishnan, all first-year LFM students, spent eight days with
Digital Divide Data (DDD) in Cambodia. They were eight full days: the
team not only worked ten hours per day but slept in bedrooms above the
DDD offices!
Satish Krishnan, Michelle Bernson, Shion Hung
DDD transforms documents on paper, microfilm and in image formats to digital data, using proprietary software. By doing the work in Cambodia, using about 80 moderately skilled operators, the company offers a low price to customers in North America and elsewhere in the developed world. But DDD is a non-profit, with a goal of "releasing the power of people" as well as "unleashing the power of data." Operators work just six hours per day, so that they can take advantage of free onsite English and computer classes; they also enjoy free access to the computers after hours. A staff member coordinates health care and numerous social events for employees, most of whom are young people disadvantaged in Cambodian society by amputations, spousal abuse, or other traumas.
DDD, founded by Sloan alum Jeremy Hockenstein (MBA '99), hopes to open new offices in Battambang (northern Cambodia) and in Vientiane, Laos. Through connections with Professors Simon Johnson and Richard Locke (15.389 Global Entrepreneurship Lab), the company brought Bernson, Hung, and Krishnan to Phnom Penh to document its current operations so that they can be replicated in the new offices. The students captured 40 pages worth of information during spring break and have been filtering and discussing it with Hockenstein, Johnson and Locke since then.
Why did these three engineers give up their chance to relax over spring break? All three had an interest in travel; for Satish, who had lived in Indonesia, it was a chance to return to Southeast Asia. They wanted to do something socially responsible, and Michelle and Shion had particular skills that fit this assignment.
Of course, the three shared both challenges and delights. Their travel to Phnom Penh took 48 hours, including transit through Dubai on the first day of the war with Iraq. Then they went to the wedding of a friend of a Cambodian staff member on their first day in the country, where everyone stared at them as they struggled to overcome jet lag. The best way to counteract the intense heat, they found, was to consume several milkshakes per day. Toward the end of their stay they finally found the best in the city, a coffee-flavored one. And they enjoyed lunch every day at "The Bodi Tree", an inexpensive restaurant serving delicious food amid lots of greenery. The restaurant, however, is across the street from S-21, a notorious Khmer Rouge torture site now preserved as a memorial. Experiences like this, along with much conversation with DDD staff members and their families, all eager to practice their English, helped the team learn what Cambodians are like.
Coffee, Cooperatives, and Computers:
In search of warm weather, but also of a setting in which to apply their
analytic skills, another team spent their spring break in and around Santa
Maria de Dota, a mountain town of 12,000 people two hours' south of San
Jose, Costa Rica. Matt Gates, LFM '04, Andrew
Kvaal and Othman Laraki, both MBA '04, joined
Juan Carlos Barahana, a Ph.D. student in Media Studies,
to create a new project in an area where the Media Lab has been working
for 15 years. Building on previous teams' work, these four explored how
digital technology could be applied to improve the economics of a rural
community in a developing country, where infrastructure is minimal and
marketing techniques must differ from those in the developed world.
Othman Laraki, Juan Carlos Barahana, Matt Gates
(not pictured, Andrew Kvaal)
Coffee growing dominates Santa Maria's economy, with more than 700 small producers organized into several cooperatives. However, the world coffee market has been shifting toward Vietnam and other newer growers subsidized by international financial institutions, away from Costa Rica, with its higher labor and material costs, even though Costa Rica boasts the highest productivity in the western hemisphere. The challenge, says this Sloan team, is for Santa Maria and communities like it to "think outside the box", to seek connections with different markets, using available technology.
Partly because of the Media Lab's sustained involvement, Santa Maria de Dota is relatively prosperous: literacy, income, and other social goods have all improved over the last 15 years. Computers, cell phones, and other IT are in place, but the team believes the technology is not being used to full capacity. "Different elements of the community have pieces of solutions," says the team, "but nothing huge has happened yet." They hope to prompt some next steps that if successful will be a model for other areas.
For example, they talked with Santa Maria's equivalent of "the ice cream man"—a man who not only sells ice cream from his car but broadcasts commercials for other businesses from his car stereo system. He gets copy for the commercials over his cell phone, but he refuses to let his teenage daughter sign up for web access ($15.95 per month), where he, too, could be building his own business. Cultural factors may well be at work: in other towns computers have been disconnected after community elders discovered that users were viewing contraceptive information. On the other hand, one coffee coop manager gave a piece of software to a competing manager because, as he said, "I like him," and it would benefit the whole community.
The bulk of the team's work was in talking with people wherever they went. At the end of their stay they made a presentation to local business, government and university leaders. They outlined ideas for specific changes using IT, and promised to deliver a more detailed report once they returned to Sloan. Barahana stressed the need for continuity of technical assistance: many developing areas, he said, receive plenty of information, but most of it is a one-shot deal, sometimes with contradictory suggestions. More effective is "building a market of ideas," where developing country citizens can themselves evaluate expert advice and test out their own ideas.
The team began by living in a so-called dorm at INCAE, a masters-level school of management and economics; the dorm was actually a house with two bedrooms and a full kitchen. Later in the week, as they traveled the coffee farms, they stayed in mountain cabins run by women innkeepers. They found clean water almost everywhere. And, like the Cambodia team, these four took some time to relax: they all learned how to "sample" coffee beans in the field, Andrew and Matt got to one of Costa Rica's world-renowned beaches, and they spotted three rare quetzals (birds that will not live in captivity) in one of Costa Rica's many national parks.
Meet Me at the Infoplaza:
A third team, composed of Bevin Barberich, LFM '04, Brian
Bowers, LFM '03, and Greg Dibb, LFM '04, also
worked on a Media Lab project in Central America. (Carlos Gonzalez, LFM
'04, provided long-distance support and worked with the team after their
return.) They spent the last week of January in Costa Rica at one site,
then took spring break in Panama, in each case studying government-funded
efforts to provide web access to the entire country. Over the past two
years, Panama has created 43 "Infoplazas", beefed-up internet
cafes that offer basic and advanced computer training as well as public
access. With government subsidies, current rates are 25 cents per hour.
The team's specific goal was to create a business model for making the
Infoplazas self-sustaining, diminishing government funding, while maintaining
their outreach to rural and poor urban areas.
Bevin Barberich, Greg Dibb, Carlos Gonzalez, Brian Bowers
While they lived on a converted military base just 400 yards from the Panama Canal, the team traveled to seven sites around the country, spending at least 14 hours over the course of the week in the van with Ignacio, co-director of the Infoplaza project. Some sites, like Infoplaza La Pintada, host the only web connection for miles around; others are in crowded favelas in Panama City. Luis, the Infoplaza Foundation director, said to the team, "Tell us how to be better," which they agreed to do, though they said the Foundation was already doing a great job compared to similar efforts elsewhere.
At each site the team interviewed the manager and many users, soliciting their recommendations for improvement. Greg is fluent in Spanish and Bevin was taking a class, so they were able to communicate fairly well (Brian learned some key words over the course of the nine days). On their final day the team made a presentation in English to Media Lab staff, then repeated it in Spanish to the Infoplaza staff. Greg, who gave the Spanish report, says Luis was "livid" at first when he heard that 40 percent of Infoplaza's 50,000 users were first-time visitors, shouting that the figures must be wrong, but with discussion he understood that this was good news, pointing to a growing market.
Luis and the team agreed that their time was well spent. The Foundation staff is too busy opening new centers and running daily operations to step back and analyze the big picture. The team enjoyed the satisfaction of knowing that people will be helped by their efforts. They also gained confidence by applying their Sloan academic preparation and realizing its usefulness in just a few days.
This team also got to relax a little, of course. The Foundation's campus near the Panama Canal was ideal for jogging, and they sampled typical Panamanian foods and entertainment, as well as learning in Costa Rica how to make a Piña Hawaiiana with pineapple, ice cream, and strawberry puree. They also saw "the largest scorpion ever found" -- in a computer lab, of all places!
The LFM program, traditionally oriented toward hard manufacturing, is broadening its scope and working increasingly on global issues. Its schedule, with IAP devoted to factory tours, has made it difficult for LFMs to participate in 15.389, G-Lab. But Professor Richard Locke helped make modified arrangements, and Carlos Gonzalez is now the head of the LFM Globalization Committee, working to make things easier for next year's class.
LFM may be based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but increasingly it is learning and teaching around the globe.