Day 29 – Official closing ceremony, meeting the press, and YES we can!

By bogaert

The time has come to complete our CSC program officially. We gathered in a large conference room with the entire team, our interns, DOT management team, IBM management team from Fujian and from Beijing, the government representatives, the dean of the college and his team, all of our clients, and the press. As prepared and planned yesterday, on the agenda a lot of speeches! Let me just mention three points that came to my attention during the closing ceremony:

First, IBM donated 30 SmartKids computers to local schools in Fujian, helping young children becoming familiar with information technology. This was a great surprise for the local government.

Second, all clients highly appreciated the support we gave them over the past four weeks, and you could sense that they really mean it. Our client Jimmy, General Manager of Lizhou group, was very enthusiastic and passionate in his closing speech and his discussion with the press. Our team was very pleased with his drive, highly appreciated Jimmy!

Third and most important from my point of view is that each of our clients could not believe we have never worked together before as a team. All twelve of us come from different countries, different parts of our organization, and have different job roles. Indeed, we never worked together before; we even didn’t know each other. Twelve individuals flown into the same city and working on common projects. It took literally a few hours to work together as a team. It actually proofed that we share a common believe, value, passion, and drive within the company. I worked with many colleagues before throughout Europe and Northern America, but this project was even for me big experience, it made me understand the value of our corporate culture.

#ibmcsc china

Closing Ceremony

Closing Ceremony CSC China 22

Afterwards our team went for a small dinner and I went quickly shopping with Elizabeth for a well deserved gift.

Back in the hotel I continued packing my luggage. As planned I trashed a lot of clothes: suit, shoes, shirts, underwear, you name it. As usual on this kind of trips I take older clothes with me when traveling. In case my luggage would be lost it is less frustrating and when going back I can save on weight by trashing them. Think most of my colleagues learned from this idea for their next trip. I packed half way, as it was getting time to exchange photos. Copying them took hours; luckily I had an external USB3 drive with me. We hang around in Mukunds' room the whole night, it was fun ... but I was getting headaches and nearly falling asleep. I left to catch a few hours of sleep that I urgently needed, as next day I was leaving Xiamen.

This is the last post on the official CSC China 22 program, as of tomorrow I continue traveling, first heading to Beijing.

The press