The business factory

``I'm running a project for the Wall Street Institute English Language School (WSI). Michel, the managing director, has hired me to lead a project called Business Factory (Bizfac).''

``What is it?''

``Bizfac is a one-month, full-time, action-learning internship. The programme is a pilot project designed for 14 WSI students who have just graduated, ready for the right careers.''

``What do you mean by `action learning'?''

``Students will be assigned a task each week. The four tasks cover customer service, recruitment/interviewing, selling and finance and business research.

``For example, the first week of service will start with Day 1 on service quality workshop. Then, on Day 2, they will go out as `Mystery Shoppers'. The 14 students will be divided into two teams. Each team will visit two of WSI's competitors and another two service establishments. On Day 3, they come back to report what they found and propose service initiatives to WSI. On Day 4, they will do pilot training for WSI staff on the service initiatives they have recommended. On Day 5, we will train them on professional presentation skills. Khun Dow from WSI will teach them professional business personalities. Then, they will prepare the presentation for WSI's management.

``All training and discussion will be done in English except the part where they have to go out and do Mystery Shopping or contact outside people.''

``It's quite an intensive programme, isn't it?''

``You're right. On Day 5, they were exhausted. Some of them said they had not learned this intensively at universities. But these young people are smart. We selected 14 from 40 applicants. I told them in the beginning that we want to train them to be the best, not the average. So they have to learn and work very hard to be ready for their potential employers.''

``Did you assign them to do Gallup's StrengthsFinder?''

``I did. All of them were given the book Now Discover Your Strengths and also a PIN code to do an online test. I know all of the top five talents of these 14 young people. Their profiles are quite unique by the Thai norm. Seven of them have Focus, six are Learners, five have Futuristic values and, most surprising to me, four have the quality of Competition.''

``So they must compete a lot in each task.''

``You're right. Once they learned from the concept and from Mystery Shopping about best practices in services, they came up with recommendations to WSI. The first group proposed a standard greeting for Service Officers (SO) and the other group proposed how to introduce a new student to existing students for Educational Consultants (EC). They presented their plan to the WSI management first. The management was pleased with their recommendation. So, the management instructed one SO to learn from Team 1 and one EC to learn from Team 2 on the next day.''

``Did they worry about having to teach experienced people?''

``They did. They were afraid about seniority _ how can they gain trust from the people who are more senior than they are, both in terms of age and experience? So, I taught them that you don't actually teach them. You share your opinion and role-play with them. Then they will ask for feedback from the SOs and ECs prior to the formal presentation to WSI management.''

``So it went smoothly. Didn't it?''

``Not exactly. For Team 1, the SO was pleased with the recommendation. For Team 2, the EC was reluctant. They noticed a sign of resistance. The EC said that this initiative was good but she didn't have time to do it _ she's busy selling to new prospects.

``I turned this challenge into an opportunity to teach them about change management. I told them that in life it's just like this. You have a good initiative that management also agrees with but when you try to execute the plan, people resist it.

``At the end of that day, I asked them about the feedback. Some said the experience was very good. What they learn from textbooks is not easy to implement. A student said, `It's easy to make complaints about a service. But it's not easy to propose a solution _ not to mention implementing it'.''

Kriengsak Niratpattanasai is the founder of TheCoach, specialising in executive coaching in leadership and cross-cultural skills. Copies of previous columns are available at www.thaicoach.com. He can be reached at 0-2517-3126 or coachkriengsak@yahoo.com