FBLA Emerging Leaders Summit--July 19th

Backgrounds

Students who used to take part in FBLA contests could submit two essays to be FBLA emerging leaders. Each emerging leader, including me, needed to attend a meeting (we call it ELA) and performed well in order to be approved by the FBLA official. This year, the ELA took place from July 19th to July 21th.

The meeting on July 19th

This meeting includes two parts, one is the analysis of FBLA contests in the next year and the other is an icebreaking game.

The analysis of FBLA contests

In the next year, FBLA China decides to hold contests with these 15 topics:

• Entrepreneurship
• International Business
• Marketing
• Business Management
• Banking/Financial System
• Hospitality/Event
• Sports/Entertainment Management
• Business Plan
• Business Financial Plan
• Business Ethics
• Sales Presentation
• Social Media Strategies
• Introduction to Business Presentation
• Data Analysis
• Economics

FBLA China judges its contests with these five aspects: Knowledge familiarity, Easiness to win, Academic support, Event attractiveness, Skillset simplicity. The official gives each topic its points in each aspect in order(out of five).

Entrepreneurship (3,2,5,4,3)

• It is a traditional topic which has the longest history.

International Business (3,1,5,4,3)

• It includes a lot of macroeconomic knowledges.

Marketing (4,1,5,5,3)

• It is hard to win in this topic.

Business Management (3,3,3,2,4)

Banking/Financial System (1,4,5,3,4)

• It is hard for Chinese students because this topic related to knowledge about the US banking system.

Hospitality/Event (1,5,3,4,5)

• A new topic.
• It includes many jargons.

Sports/Entertainment Management (2,4,3,4,4)

• A new topic.
• It includes knowledge about journalism..

Business Plan (2,2,4,5,2)

• It is similar to the topic Entrepreneurship.
• A report topic.

Business Financial Plan (1,2,4,4,2)

• A report topic.
• It focuses on accounting. e.g debit

Business Ethics (3,2,3,4,4)

• It includes the business law. e.g Antitrust law

Sales Presentation (3,4,3,4,4)

• Not difficult.

Social Media Strategies (3,3,3,4,4)

• It is similar to the topic marketing.
• Students didn’t perform well in the past.

Introduction to Business Presentation (3,4,3,3,5)

• Not difficult.
• Only students in Grade 9/10 could take part in it.

Data Analysis

• A new topic.
• Do presentation in this contest.

Economics (5,3,5,4,3)

• Each candidate in other topics needs to do the economic test.

Icebreaking activity

We traded with each other in a virtual aluminium future good market. In this market, each team (10 members) had 1500 dollars originally and the initial price of per unit aluminium was 100 dollars. In each turn, the FBLA official told us information related to the aluminium. And we needed to trade with others by evaluating the price of aluminium future good.

I have learned a lot during the activity. First, I used a lot of economic knowledge to analyze the price of aluminium in the future. Besides, when other members in our team had different ideas, we communicated with each other to justify ideas. I learned how to do the teamwork effectively. I was impressed by the third turn in this game because the information (the change of oil industries) in this turn was not related to aluminium. I realized that we should know how to distinguish useful information from useless information.