Online Class Notes (Jesse)

New Year’s Eve with complete strangers

One winter at my middle school, at the table in my home, I celebrated New Year’s Eve with a group of truck drivers I didn’t know. The dining room was extremely crowded with a dozen drivers. I shuttled back and forth among them, to help my mother set the table.

That was the year when the worst snow disaster in history happened in southern China. My hardly-ever-snow hometown was almost buried by the blizzard. Traffic was interrupted, and blackouts were frequent. The highway was full of trucks that couldn’t get home. My family decided to accommodate those drivers, and invited them to celebrate the New Year together.

While those drivers were expressing gratefulness to us, I thought of the heavy snow outside and of all the people trapped in this snowstorm. Our living room could only accommodate ten people or so, and I wished I could stop the blizzard, so that everyone trapped in the snow could go home.

A girl programing 2,000 lines of code

“The best atmospheric modelers are mostly men.” My undergraduate university professor once said. He wasn’t directing it at me, but his words kept echoing in my mind for years to come.

I was in my dream college, the best college for atmospheric science in the country, researching on simulating the atmospheric flow over the Pacific Ocean, based on statistical models run by supercomputers.

Temperature, humidity, wind speed, thermal balance, to taking all these into account, my model reached 2,000 lines in a whole semester. By the time I had finished my daily line-by-line debugging session and walked out of the lab, midnight had long come and gone. As the cool night breeze swept across me, all that I thought of was the hydrodynamic equation that the wind’s trajectory conformed to.

Every time I passed by the supercomputing center, I would look at the giant, dark buildings with large computers there, running day and night. Among all the code tasks submitted by countless male modelers, there is also a copy from me somewhere in there.

I was the first one to publish a paper among my lab peers, and even represented the entire lab at the Asian Oceania Geosciences Association Conference to present the research outcomes.

“I made it”, I said to myself, as I stood on the podium of the China National Convention Center, I knew that I would no longer believe what others said – that the best modelers were men.

“A billion dollar phone call”

One of my biggest accomplishments as a project leader in my early days in consulting, where I found myself in a situation that changed everything for me. Almost half a billion USD was at stake / on the line, and I was faced with what seemed like insurmountable number of obstacles, from missing data, an understaffed team lacking experience in the task at hand, and a difficult client with unique requirements and internal conflicts – as the project leader it was on me to solve each of these conundrums and close the deal. It was to be the greatest learning experience of my professional life.

Short of manpower, I arranged the priorities of the tasks and mobilized interns to carry out a blanket search, resulting in finding the appropriate policy section and digging out the hidden data from the historical database.

450 mn USD – an amount that below the China representative’s expectation, but seen as risky by the conservative and bossy CFO.

The very last day before the final presentation, the tension was unprecedentedly high. I made separate calls to both sides of the client, listened to their own standpoints and concerns, mediated their expectations, and finally convinced both of them that we’ve found the most applicable benchmark, going along with both industry outlook and client’s own business vision.

Hanging up the phone was the moment I realized my own unique power.

Not only finding hidden information, managing project within the stringent timeframe, but also the ability to be reliable and trustworthy, and therefore able to negotiate different stakeholders to reach consensus.

This project was fruitful for both LEK and the client. It won a strategic client for LEK, and the client has planned a 300 million USD initial investment, and cumulatively 1 billion USD investment in China in the incoming 10 years.

“L.E.K. Insurance girl”, the senior partner has called me this since then.

I smiled at this name, knowing that I am not just a GIRL. I am a mature, capable woman, and am ready to take more responsibility.

Wind turbines, or wings

For me, it’s amazing to find the environmental science is not only temperature, humidity and wind speeds, but also solar energy, biofuels, and wind energy.

Worldwide, the clean technology market is worth more than 2.8 trillion USD a year in 2019, and it is expected to more than double in size by the mid 2020s, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of ~10.

Driven by….

• 能源需求增长vs能源与资源depletion加速
• Regulations政策支持
• Technology maturity and increasing applications of cleantech

[China]

China has pledged toward cleantech development. Renewable energy, alternative transportation vehicles, and energy efficiency sectors have been identified by the Chinese government as key investment areas.

By 2016, China’s green investment had reached RMB 1.85 trillion (approx. USD 269 billion), which constitutes 2.5% of the GDP.

China’s 13th Five-Year Plan mandate is a key market driver for cleantech adoption. [TO UPDATE DATA]

• RMB 5.3 trillion investment in the power industry
• 16% reduction in energy consumption per GDP
• 60-65% reduction in carbon dioxide per GDP vs 2005
• 20% renewable energy in energy consumption by 2030; (15% in 2020)

Cleantech investment ecosystem in China is notable.

• 480+ deals
• $40+ billion invested

I am no longer the little confused girl, standing in front of the window, wondering how to save the people from the snowstorm, nor the naïve college student, sitting among a group of boys, doubting whether I am as capable as the male modelers.

The wind turbines are the wings of the time, also wings of mine.

The wind is rising.

 不管电脑如何精确模拟出了风云变幻的地球，从我加入consulting开始，我意识到it is business that enable all technology to contribute the most of its capability to real life.