A cheque presentation of RM19,069 to the representative of Rumah Hope in March 2018

The dragon has been poked and the gauntlet dropped. Beware when playing with fire! As part of Business Leadership BOH4M, two of our major course components are practical, holistic, real life activities. Namely Sales Day (for charity) and Dragons’ Den, which build on each other. For sales day, students create a product or service to sell over the course of 2 days or eight hours in the name of a selected charity with all the idiosyncrasies, pitfalls, and accomplishments along the way. This activity is married with Dragons’ Den. Some of you may be familiar with this reality/game show. It appears on BBC/CBC and the Americans also have their own version called Shark Tank. The purpose of these major assignments are to get students into the habits and responsibilities of what a manager does on a daily basis.

Last semester (Fall 2017), 90 odd students undertook this challenge. Our selected charity was Rumah Hope or House. Rumah Hope is an orphanage set up by a local school teacher to raise, house and educate three dozen or so children. This particular orphanage receives little government funding and relies solely on their own efforts and the kindness of society at large to raise funds for operations. We decided on this charity for their support of education and their holistic and nurturing manner towards the children. This particular orphanage truly stresses the value added benefits of education and has even had several children go on to receive scholarships from The Jeffrey Cheah Foundation and are now attending or have graduated from various Sunway Higher Education Institutions. 

As many of our students are very privileged with respect to their families and home lives, it was time for them to step up to the plate not only by achieving course requirements but also by paying it forward to society. According to goal-setting theorists, Drs Locke & Latham “Goals energize, excite, and motivate. The more challenging a goal is, the more it motivates and pushes the goal-setter forward.” As a class, we set a sales goal of RM750/group, which was up substantially from the previous semester. We actually achieved RM901/group - Success! By pushing students to achieve higher goals, students achieved their second highest total to date. The four BOH classes raised a staggering RM19,069! For the last two semesters, the total raised for needy charities is RM39,811.15! Outstanding accomplishments by ALL students involved. Particularly as many of these students were first semester college students who had never taken a business course before nor had even held a job. Well done gang.