Day 11 – Unexpected hick-up

By bogaert
Translation took our interns till 03:15 in the morning … we met back at 07:30 for breakfast to get the bilingual version of our presentation. Megan and I worked during breakfast to do the final cleansing of the presentation. Just in time, to meet the client Lizhou at 08:30! It was perfect teamwork and a perfect timing. I was still very nervous, as it was unclear how our preparation was going to meet the client expectations. We prepared primarily on how to improve the management of the sales process and how to engage in trade shows. The session with the client happened in an enjoyable atmosphere and we left with a positive feeling. Unfortunately we could not complete the entire session. We were running out of time and had to get back to prepare two sessions for tomorrow, a work session with another client and a lecture at the local school. We will continue the work next Wednesday.
For the preparation of the lecture sessions we were meeting with the other team back at the hotel. We spent a lot of time on the preparation, but half away an unexpected surprise popped up. We were informed by the DOT program manager that the school did not obtain the approval duly on time from the local government to run the session, which means we had to postpone the session and squeeze it someway into our agenda for next week. It was totally new to us that approval was required for a voluntary lecture session. Having no other option the team worked on a proposition to merge the lecture with the one scheduled for next week.

It took far more time then expected to complete that part of the preparation work. Amit, Megan and I continued afterwards with the preparation of tomorrow’s client meeting. The precise expectations of that meeting were still not clear to us. We knew some of the issues that rose during the previous session on partner and channel management, but not enough to start working on the engagement. So, based on the little information we had we started to prepare a draft high level view on best practices in partner and channel management. We completed around 20:00, dropped the presentation for translation to Cecily and Christy and went for dinner. Hanging around in the area around the hotel we passed several small restaurants. We found a nice looking place with a lot of people inside and decided to give it a trial. Ordering wasn’t easy, we picked according to the photos on the menu and the waiter kept asking us persistently something back. I couldn’t understand what he was meaning. He showed us something on paper with nice looking Chinese characters, no clue what he kept asking for. I called Christy and we passed the phone to the waiter, we found out that his question was if we want our food served ‘hot’ or ‘not hot’ … problem solved. It was Japanese restaurant with live cooking at the table. I enjoyed a quite pleasant dinner, feeling relaxed! After dinner time to get back, fixed the last questions on the translations.

 
#ibmcsc china
Xiamen

Gathering around a table with colleagues with laptops and a few bottles of water to prepare the community workshop.