Instructions:
We are interested in learning more about you and how you work, think, and act. For each essay, please provide a brief overview of the situation followed by a detailed description of your response. Please limit the experiences you discuss to those which have occurred in the past three years. In each of the essays please describe in detail what you thought, felt, said, and did.

MIT Sloan MFin Essay 2:
Please describe a situation in which you were able to use persuasion to successfully convince someone to see things your way. (300 words or fewer, limited to one page)

“Listen, everybody, we have to do it differently.” I said, looking into the eyes of everybody around me. To emphasize, I added: “Otherwise, we won’t make it.”

It was the orientation training of the newly-recruited employees, and as one of them, I was made responsible for acting as director for rehearsing a simulated task “How to Develop Prospective Major Clients”, in the form of a situation drama. The task required each employee to act several different roles to dramatize subtle and effective marketing measures in developing major clients. As each employee wished to become the center of attraction and be impressive, he or she tried to play as many roles as possible (investment advisor, client services manager, marketing personnel, etc) and demonstrate the importance of each role in developing potential clients. As director of the rehearsal project, I realized that such a condition of disorganization would result in our failure to make our full presentations within the fixed time.

In persuading all members to contribute to the overall success of our team, I proposed first to settle on a particular situation and due to the limited time for the show, everybody’s role should be well-defined and the performance succinct. While each role should be acted to the best of its effect, it was essential that all the roles, as separate steps of a unified process, should be well coordinated and integrated. Most importantly, the measures applied must be appropriate and effective.

My colleagues all agreed that my proposal met the requirements of the show, easy to operate, balancing the interests of individual members and the overall objective of the team. We rehearsed methodically, creating an intriguing scenario of “Marketing at a Coffee Shop: Developing Senior Clients” and the panel of judges gave our performance the highest ratings among all teams.