This class was the most interesting I ever had. I had the class on Tuesday and Friday from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. and the whole idea was to improve local business. In the beginning we created groups of four students. My fellow group members were from United States, Czech Republic, Germany, and Belgium. We picked local restaurants for our company study. We went there and observed how things work, communicating, taste of the food etc. Then we met as the group and created about 40 questions and we went to to interview the owner and staff. Also we created a surveys for the customers and restaurant staff to fill out, so then we could compare the differences.
Next step was a presentation in front of the class about the problems we identified and how we plan to solve them. Since we had roughly 9 different groups and one presentation was about 45 minutes, the whole classes were only presentations. The next step to ways to solve the problems and create the final presentations about how much improvement we have made.
In our case, we gave the waitresses a presentation how the serve customers from different countries. For example in Chile it is normal to wait one hour and half for a bill when once ask for it, which is unacceptable in Europe or the United States. Also, we created an incentive program for loyal customers and customers that spend more than an average, because they did not have any. Lastly, we showed them the results of the surveys that the customers filled compare to what the personal thought.
I thought it was very valuable because my whole class was about communicating with Chilean business owner and just generally experiencing “real life” business culture. It was completely different business type experience than in regular business class where I would be studying formulas and reading a lot of books. It was very “real life” oriented class.