For the past several months, we have been contacting businesses who have offices in Beijing, coordinating either having our entire class visit their facility or having representatives from their company visit us in the conference center of our hotel.  (Some companies are not set up to handle a visiting group of 60 people!)  The list of companies we will be meeting with is an impressive who’s who:  Kimberly Clark, IBM, Li & Fung, Lenovo, GE Healthcare, Cummins, Procter & Gamble, and Johnson Controls.

I had a really neat experience setting up my team’s site visit to IBM.  A friend of mine, Mike Payne, has been working at IBM for over 10 years.  Mike and I first met during our days as undergraduates at UW-Madison, struggling through the computer science curriculum together.  Earlier this year, when I asked if he had any contacts at their facilities in Beijing, he was able to connect me with the event manager for IBM’s brand-new Supply Chain Innovation Center.  This is a major score for a bunch of strategic management MBA geeks!