Lee's MBA Application Essays for Harvard

Identify someone you regard as a hero, a leader or role model whom you admire. Describe how this person has influenced your development.

My personal hero is Lao Tze, a great philosopher and influential thinker who lived in ancient China some 2500 years ago. The essence of Lao's thoughts, to perceive the world in a balanced way, has profound impact on my personal and professional development.

My curiosity about Lao was aroused when I was an undergraduate at Peking University, where my physics major always challenged me to think about nature itself, and inspired my interests in Tao Te Ching, Lao's autobiography in which he elaborated on how to understand the world around us. A striking similarity exists between the Einsteinian Theory of Relativity and this ancient Oriental philosophy, both of which seem to deny Newtonian "cause and effect" as the ultimate measure of the physical universe, but revealing the inherent balance of any system and the interdependence and interplay of each part.

This comprehension of Lao's balanced perspective influenced significantly my personal development. Applying this balanced approach to myself, I concluded that I should also be a balanced person, a person of both academic excellence and extracurricular achievements. During my five years at the university, through exploration of the broad spectrum of course offerings, teamwork and competition on the university soccer team, hosting a photography club and active participation in the volunteer blood donation to the Red Cross Organization, I kept a healthy balance between academic accomplishments and extracurricular contributions.

This balanced approach also nurtured my leadership skills on the job. In the PC Product Marketing team I'm leading, I try to play a balanced role-- not only as a team leader, but also as a team player. Leading the team in a balanced way, I can change my paradigm from that of a leader to that of a team member, which often helps me fully understand my team members' concerns and thoroughly evaluate their opinions, thus ensuring accelerated solutions to disputable scenarios. The balanced approach taught me that sometimes "followership" is just as important as leadership.

Describe your three most substantial accomplishments and explain why you view them as such.

In reverse chronological order, my three most significant accomplishments are as follows:

1. I attended one-year of Military Service and served as the squad leader from 1990 to 1991.

Required by Peking University, as a freshman I spent the first year in Xin Yang Institute of Arn in Central China, where I was assigned the leader of a squad of twelve co-students, due to my open and mature character, which was apparent in the first few days. Building horizontal leadership among twelve top intelligent people challenged me. But backed by my inherently strong desire to excel, by creating common goals and internal healthy competition, some leadership tactics I tried, unskillfully but seriously, I led my squad to take three gold medals home out of a total of four at the end of the challenging one-year program. My leadership and efficiency were also rewarded. This unique life experience led me to discover a new ego in me, not only as a team leader, but also as a good one.

2. In the spring of 1998, as the volunteer leader of a small Sports Club at China Hewlett-Packard, I set myself an aspirational goal: to turn it into the largest and most welcomed one in China HP's history.

I broke the daunting job into several strategic steps. First, I organized a Club Committee and conducted a club member survey to make sure I involved all stakeholders and truly understood their concerns and evaluated their opinions. Then I led the Committee to implement a series of creative actions to promote the Club's awareness and quality. I motivated my Committee members by assigning tasks according to their core competencies, such as asking a technical engineer to publish our Club's event agenda and new features on HP intranet to enhance communication with employees, and sending an HP salesman to negotiate with potential vendor; for favorite services to increase the Club's attractiveness. As more attention was paid to the Clut leveraging the authority and credibility of the HP Labor Union among employees, we jointly announced a series of awards games and matches to further enhance the Club's image and awareness.

My passion was well rewarded -- three months later, the club enrollment number rose successfully from the initial 50 to an amazing 250. At the end of my one-year term, the Labor Union conducted an employee survey, showing a 90% satisfaction rate with the quality of my jc and 95% of the club members recommended extending my tenure by one more year. This extracurricular experience indicated my abilities to manage not only a project logically, but also a diverse team to achieve an aspirational goal.

3. My most memorable cross-cultural experience, the two Hewlett-Packard PC Product Manage exchange programs in which I spent two months in Singapore and Grenoble France, integrated me more into the global cultural and business environments. The heterogeneous environments challenged me and it seemed I could never reach a consensus with my foreign colleagues. Why? It turned out that, because of the cultural diversity, everybody took a different approach to the same problem. Realizing the impasse, we agreed that whenever there was an argument, all of us must change roles - when the challenger is standing in the shoes of the challenged, the paradigm shift would bring something totally different. We argued and changed, argued and changed again, and soon we gained a truly valuable paradigm harmony. Flexibility was added to systematic approach, and western methodology was merged with eastern ways of thinking. Amazingly, we found diversity was not an impediment any longer, but it nurtured creativity and efficiency.

This event nurtured my understanding and manipulation of diversity, which enabled me to efficiently leverage the powers of Oriental philosophy and Occidental methodology within a diverse team. The combination of the two represents both effusive imagination and cohesive logical reasoning, without either of which a complex business issue may only be half-solved.