← Home About Archive Photos Replies The Point Engineering Sea and Shore Also on Micro.blog
  • Random Ambivalent Listenings

    The “Albums of the Year” articles are trickling in, including this one from the Guardian on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. In it, there’s a wonderful quote that really hits the mark on how I feel about the album - originally from Sasha Frere-Jones in the NYT: 

    “The duo has become so good at making records that I replay parts of Random Access Memories repeatedly while simultaneously thinking it is some of the worst music I’ve ever heard … This record raises a radical question: does good music need to be good?"

    This hits home on the interplay between composition and production / performance, a wonderfully delicate balance. Of course, a terrible performance can wreck even the best composition - but for me, it’s better to find nuggets of a great composition in the rubble of a poor performance than to be able to appreciate an amazing performance of dross.

    André Rieu and Daft Punk on the same side of the spectrum? Harsh, but one to think about.

    → 11:15 PM, Dec 18
  • Looking at things to drive in

    2CV hub - reminds me of the Tintin books!
    The other museum- Oh. Sorry, I'll have to start that again.

    Over Easter, you may recall, I visited the German Phonographic museum in St. Georgen. We also visited another building full of mostly old stuff - but it wasn't a museum.

    We went to the Autosammlung Steim in Schramberg. This collection has been built up over the years by Dr. Ing Hans-Jochen Steim, with the express intent of being driven. And what a collection it is! Much more compact than equivalents like Sinsheim, it initially comes across as being small and stuffy - but the quality of the cars in there speaks for itself, as do the occasional tell-tale tyre marks along the otherwise pristine floors.

    Definitely worth a visit, as the (again, smartphone) photos below will attest.

    As an aside, Herr Dr. Ingenieur Steim was chairman of the Kern-Liebers group of companies. These make such "dull" products as springs and stampings. However, one look at the range of products they produce shows how intrepid a traditional engineering firm can be when it looks at and develops its products in the right ways: from automotive injection systems to the textile industry right the way to pacemakers and hearing aids, their products are there. And when you next desperately try to avoid the flailing cable retracting at great speed into your vacuum cleaner, you can admire the strength and consistency of Kern-Lieber springs, too!

    1932 Auburn Boat-tail Speedster

    1963 Auto-Union SP100 Speedster


    1968 McLaren Formula 2









    → 9:20 PM, May 13
  • Looking sideways

    Travel often doesn’t happen quickly enough, even if you’re travelling fast. Often it’s a case of losing perspective, losing the perception of speed. We all know it from driving on the Autobahn - our brains trick us into feeling that overtaking lots of cars slowly in a traffic jam is swifter or more effective than cruising along at the same 140 kmh speed. Similarly, sitting in a train with others in a carriage is torture for me - there is no feeling of progress.

    I had this feeling recently when cycling home from work one pleasant evening (weather-wise, at least: work-wise it had been a crappy day) and suddenly felt that I wasn’t proceeding fast enough. It was creating a tension: I wanted to be on my bike, pedalling away my stresses from work - yet, I wanted to be at home straight away, knowing that I would then be in the vortex of kiddy dinner times and puttings to bed.

    Then I looked sideways. My shadow was fair flying over the fields between Eppelheim and Grenzhof. Looking sideways radically changed my perspective. I was no longer monitoring the imperceptible angle and distance changes of the road ahead, but seeing the turned soil and the remaining maize stalks sweep my complete field of view in sub-second times. I was experiencing speed again (yes, I wish to reclaim this word) - and it was refreshing.

    → 6:07 PM, May 11
  • Looking at things to listen to


    Timing in music, comedy and writing is of the essence, so it is ironic that I should appear to be posting this in such a timely fashion after the announcement that a team has managed to reconstruct the sound from the wax disc that recorded Alexander Graham Bell's voice from 1885. All of a sudden, I have a relevant segué to present my old news in a new, refreshed light.


    Over the Easter holidays, oh so long ago now, but at least this year still, we managed to park the children with the Großeltern for a happy few hours and to drive to the wholly unremarkable Black Forest town of St. Georgen near Villingen.

    The town is, sorry to say, not much to look at. But it was the centre of two key industries as they rose and fell in waves; clock making, and record players. I'm not that much of a watch connoisseur, but I have always enjoyed audio and hifi, so when I saw the signs for the Deutsches Phonographisches Museum in St. Georgen, it was always going to be a place to visit.

    The famous Dual logo (from Wikipedia)
    Perhaps the most famous brand to come out of the St. Georgen is Dual, with their wonderfully stark logo and great record players. The name stems from their technique of combining a clock-maker's spring (from which the company sprang) with an electric motor, creating their signature dual motor system (I suppose we would call it a hybrid these days). Dual and its related competitor, Perpetuum Ebner, were the hight of hifi for several decades, but neither survived the switch to CDs. Dual tried a spot of badge-engineering via Rotel - but that's rarely a forward thinking strategy and, after a rather demeaning round of sales to ever less relevant groups, they folded.

    A couple of ex-employees got together and put together a German phonographic museum in the St. Georgen town hall. It's a pleasant, light space on two floors, full of a record players from the very beginnings in the USA and France (Edison and Pathé), via the dominance of the German and Dutch manufacturers and through to the demise of Dual. Whilst the collection is ordered chronologically, we still felt that there was a lack of a "story" behind the industry. What helped its massive expansion, how it withered on the branch here in Germany and - for me, notably - how it continues to this day. There was no mention of current high-end record player production from the likes of Linn or Pro-Ject, and there was only a passing mention of new music formats (with no sign of an iPod at all).

    The strangest thing for me from the collection was the sound. The main hall, with reception, is also the location of a small stage where a video of how records and music developed. This then booms across the whole collection, which I found rather distracting. Secondly, there was also a random selection of old LPs and singles with some rickety looking turntables - but no instructions as to whether playing them was permitted or not. We had the possibility of paying 1 Euro to watch a 1980s high-end turntable play and to spin around in its gyroscopic gimbal, but by that stage I didn't feel like I really wanted to.

    What I wanted was something like an audio room, where we could hear how the old horn record players sounded, how a 1970's Dual turntable with the amplifiers of the day sounded, and how a modern system might sound. After all, that's what they were built for.

    I fully understand the difficulties surrounding that - how to organise and to protect such systems from the grasping public - but perhaps the old chestnut of a bank of good quality headphones would be a start. (Update: I see from their website that they're holding a record playing evening on 11th May 2013. I'm not sure I can go, but it's exactly what I'd love to see - and to hear!)

    I'd love to go back again in a few years, to see how and if they develop the collection. In the meantime, here are a few more smartphone photos for you to peruse whilst I try not to buy myself a Pro-Ject Debut Carbon...



    → 3:35 PM, Apr 28
  • Excuses manifold

    This blog looks to be in grave danger of becoming an orphan; no writer to care for it, only the occasional glance in from human readers and data mining bots as they continue moving swiftly on to other digital destinations, only Google’s server farm keeping it from sinking into the digital abyss. A blogging pause has happened here before, of course, as noted in my Blogging State Of the Union post from October 2012.  I’ve again not posted here for several months, obviously because nothing of interest has happened to me in that time.

    Perhaps that’s right. The day-to-day has been pretty overwhelming and I’ve found that whilst trying to keep my engineering blog a little more lively, there’s simply not been the headroom, or quiet time, or energy to work on this here blog. But what about the content? Has that been lacking, too? Thankfully, I think not.

    What have I been up to since Shanghai? Well, I played in another symphony orchestra concert (Gershwin, Shostakovitch and Rachmaninov’s 3rd Symphony). I remixed a Jamiroquai track for their 20th anniversary remix competition, we were served notice and had to find a new house to live in, I started jogging again… and again…, I worked, and took part in general family life.

    Over the Easter holidays, I enjoyed visits to the Steim Automuseum and to the Deutsche Phonographisches Museum - which I will describe in another post - and I worked.

    So, lots of excuses not to keep this blog ticking over: many of those excuses could easily have been made into entries in this online diary of mine, building up my insignificant history, for as long as the Blogger servers and HTML continue…

    …anyway, enough mulling and pondering, enough slumping into sofas, and onwards with the writing!

    → 10:01 PM, Apr 25
  • Engineering Things Done

    Phew, what a day! What a lot of days! Things are pretty mad at the moment and have me racing from one fire to the next whilst juggling the other less serious blazes. Things are probably more or less the same for you (unless you work in aerospace ;-)). We need to get things done all the time and seemingly all at once. Priorities rest on ever-shifting sands, cups of coffee are gulped without enjoyment, nerves are frayed.

    Having lots to do at work is both a blessing and a curse: of course we want to be gainfully employed, but there is a point beyond which the sheer number of tasks that we are responsible for becomes overwhelming. As a result, efficiency sinks to its knees, even if we physically manage to stay on our feet.

    This fact has been recognised by many and has become the basis of whole careers on advising people how to do manage tasks. I’ve been on Time Management courses, as I described over at Engineer Blogs last year, I’ve tried hiding myself in empty cupboard-sized meeting rooms without my phones and I’ve tried all sorts of tools like the Tasks list in Outlook to try and find a way out of the mess, mostly to no avail.

    Help is at so many hands that it’s no help at all: there’s such an uncontrollable thicket of to-do apps, self-timer apps, of notation apps and (e-) books to be bought that these have become an industry in themselves. All in the name of getting things done.

    Late last year I caved and bought the book with those words capitalised by Dave Allen: Getting Things Done. I read it, too - and came away rather impressed. It’s certainly a book of two halves (it feels a little like a ‘buy one, get one free’ deal, where you don’t necessarily want or need the free item), but the first half, where the concepts and mechanisms of Getting Things Done are explained is well worth the entry price. Mr. Allen has an incredible font of quotes that are splashed liberally throughout the book, too.

    This isn’t a book review, though. It’s a process review, about Getting Things Done, or, as it’s now known in the trade, GTD.

    In essence, the GTD methodology is about freeing up your mind, removing all the vague projects and to-do’s lodged quaking anxiously in your brain and onto physical or digital lists. The discipline of creating lists, of categorising, of sifting and sorting into whatever systems best suit you is geared towards relieving the mental pressures of non-started or incomplete tasks and towards focussing your attention on the next thing to do.

    Next steps are a key element of Getting Things Done and recognising this goes a long way towards success. When I have to update a drawing, that is not a task itself, it’s a project. The next steps for me go along the lines of: Creating a new part number or release level in the system. Printing out the current drawing. Sketching up all the changes required: whilst I’m doing that I’ll realise that I need to pull a Change Request number, so I’ll need to go onto that system and generate a form and a number. That number goes onto the new print, which, once sketched up, goes to our CAD designer for modification. I wait. I get the print back for review. I make corrections, or I don’t - I send the drawing back if I do need updates, wait again (doing something else in the meantime), then switch focus back to the print once it’s finalised. Then I need to upload it and “publish” it… And so on.

    Each one of those steps are all “small” things, but there are so many of them that constitute this mini-project called “update drawing xyz” that they easily clog up my mental passages (for want of a better turn of phrase). Listing the tasks out on paper or in some kind of digital software means that I don’t have to hold them in my mental buffer. Equally, I won’t have to worry about remembering where I am whenever a distraction occurs - a colleague walks in whilst I’m sketching and requires assistance (often setting off the next mini project of Things To Do), or quite simply when I’m waiting for that drawing to come back from CAD: I can quickly find the next open task and use that,

    I’ve worked according to this methodology, applying the same logic to pretty much everything I do: ideas for new developments, testing that I need to do and subsequent reporting that I need to complete.

    The general methodology works very well. It took some time to sift through my projects and my emails, but surprisingly quickly, I found a decent system of project taxonomy and began to see more and more white space in my inbox.

    Tool-wise, I ended up using the browser-based software Asana, mainly because I wouldn’t need to install anything on my locked and stitched-up work laptop. Outlook is too stuffed to work for me. It has all the functionality - emails, notes, to-do’s, ability to drag and drop emails into Calendar and into Tasks - but somehow I need to escape the Outlook environment and keep things as focussed as possible - Asana provides this “cleaner” environment for me.

    Up until mid January, I had a good set of lists and tasks, as well as an email in-box hovering around the zero level (each email is either archived or generates a set of tasks in my list setup). It was only when I embarked on a series of business trips - to Shanghai, to Kassel - and became sucked into a series of “urgents” that things started to subside back to the old ways of inbox infinity and anxieties everywhere I looked inside my head.

    The focus of GTD is very much on mastering the low-level tasks. Dave Allen addresses this regularly in the book - he acknowledges that life-goal-setting (his “50,000 ft+ view”) is a way of finding orientation and goals in life; but if you’re mentally overloaded with pending things to do, you don’t have the headspace to creatively think about the bigger picture.

    Get your everyday tasks under control, unload your mind of that burden, and the bigger picture has more room to grow of its own.

    Honestly speaking, I’m a bit like a dieter here: bouncing from inbox-zero and being on top of things to feeling overwhelmed. I’m back at the overwhelmed phase, which is why I feel that now is an interesting time to write about all of this: not from the perspective of a smug succeeder, but from that of the struggling disciple, trying to turn things around again.

    I am starting to get back on top of my tasks and lists again. I know how it feels to be overwhelmed, to have a brain buzzing with alerts and anxieties; and I know how it feels, however briefly, to be in control.

    So - here’s to engineering more efficiently, fluently and… more cannily

    → 9:56 PM, Feb 21
  • On Staying Engineer

    originally posted on one of my several now defunct blogs, called On Engineering, on the 12th February 2013

    Blogging about considering new jobs (and doing something about it) seems like a risky idea. Posts are by their nature open to the world, so conceivably my boss could read this.

    (Well, it’s inconceivable, really, but let’s go with it for now)

    What will he think?

    In my case, there’s nothing that he can’t have been inferred from previous discussions, so there’s nothing that could surprise my boss unduly were he to read this. For you, dear reader, there are hopefully some worthwhile thoughts in here - so read on, whilst I write on.

    It’s safe to say that I had a frustrating time at work in 2012, mostly for non-engineering reasons (resources, too many inputs and outputs, etc). I decided that a change of scenery would be a good way of clearing the decks and starting afresh, so I applied for a couple of new jobs.

    A seemingly attractive way of making the switch to a new company or even to a new industry was, I thought, to glide along the plane of least resistance, taking a training- and background-agnostic route. In my thinking, this route would take me towards Project Management.

    It’s not perhaps strictly true to say background-agnostic. Project Managers are often handed the role from within another, and that’s what happened to me at various stages in my career - so I can show a Project Management history: nominally, I am in any case a project manager right now. It forms part of my job title (the other words being “Development Engineer and-"). Whilst I officially combine the roles I also tend to fulfil both roles simultaneously (Project Manager, manage thyself!), which has added to the frustrations I have felt of late.

    We were also given project management training a while back. It was in itself quite inspirational and I came top of the class in the tests at the end of it. So, in essence, Project Management is something I can do, more or less without really thinking about it - in fact, what else do I do other than manage projects? Every single task I have, be it “engineering” or “not”, is part of a project, big or small. I do have to force myself to do things like pick up the phone (I’m much more of an emailer or short messenger than a caller), but overall I can work with others and others seem to be able to accept working with (sometimes for) me.

    I got invited to some interviews.

    Both were within the automotive sector, so I wasn’t going to be changing industry, but I would be changing technologies - glass and engine products were the general themes.

    And therein lay the rub with me wanting to switch via the PM route: I thought the technologies would be cool, not the job. You see, what happened in both interviews was something like this:

    Interviewer, after some preamble: “Imagine the scenario that a task within one of your projects is delayed. What do you do?”

    Me (brain whirring, thinking…): Um, what can I say to this that could possibly be interesting? I’d have to talk to the guy whose task it is, see if I can chivvy him up a bit. Talk to his manager, talk to the customer, see if we can delay - oh, this is all so dull!

    Me (aloud): Well, we could, umm, talk to the person responsible for the task (etc)

    Me (body language): help! I’m floundering here and both I and my interviewer have lost interest in what I’m saying. He’s staring out of the window, I’m staring at him for some kind of positive reaction…

    And so on. Yet within the same interview I had to field some engineering-type questions:

    Interviewer: What do you think could be the potential technical difficulties involved in developing this kind of product?

    Me (internally): Yes! Easy score here

    Me (aloud): Well, there’s the material selection, the coatings, how to apply them within undoubtedly very tight tolerances, how to withstand heat without distortion that would…

    Me (body language): Hands waving, leaning forward, engaging the interviewer - more, please!

    In the end, I have to realise that I am by nature an engineer, with everything that that entails: all the coolest development work, all the dullest admin stuff and everything in between. Anything else (commercial, purchasing, quality) would mean going against my own grain.

    The only question remaining, then, is: can I become an engineering manager? From the aspect of organisation and team working, data access and transfer, deciding on what’s right for the product and for the company - yes. From the aspect of dealing with stroppy employees, an ever-increasing email and travel load, and becoming ever more involved in company politics (whichever company that may be) - who knows. But that discovery is for another day.

    Have you transitioned away from pure engineering? Have you made the step up to management - either successfully or stressfully? Let us know in your comments!

    → 6:25 PM, Feb 12
  • Shanghai and indirectly back again...



    I’m writing this on the plane from Shanghai to Bangkok (fortunately for you, I'm editing it several days later from home). It’s going to be a long post, as it's been a long several days: now, tapping this into my work laptop whilst sat in seat 8D in this Airbus A330, I’m as exhausted as I can remember being in a long time. I’m forcing myself to think and to write so that I can stay awake until we land in Bangkok: I arrive there at around 9 pm local time, which is something like 2 pm home time. I want to make the transition back to European time as quickly as possible, so I’ll wait until the homeward flight from Bangkok to Frankfurt, departing around two hours after I land, before I finally allow myself to sleep.

    Nearly home
    So – why Shanghai, why Bangkok and what Business Class delights did I have to eat on this Thai Airways flight TG665 to Bangkok? Well, as the swordfish was unrecognisable as a specific foodstuff, I’ll skip that question and proceed to try and answer the first two questions instead.

    I was in Shanghai to teach. It's amazing how refreshing it is to write that phrase there: any emergencies were pushed to the background, drawing updates and supplier discussions; I did have to tack on a visit to Shanghai Volkswagen before these flights, but essentially, I was in Shanghai as a trainer, as someone who, in the company context, has much to offer from my experience with living the basics (and the many details hidden therein) behind what we do.

    Our training team was made up from Quality and Manufacturing as well as Technology: sales and purchasing were not directly represented, except on the receiving end. The focus was very much on bringing people up to speed on how to get the product right and out the door in the best possible way (in the various ways that "best" can be interpreted).

    The training was called into being following some clear examples recently of things not being "best" at all; senior management agreed that it was worth the investment in starting this training initiative, and in making it global.

    We started with what initially appears to be the hardest possible region, Asia Pacific (AP). There were colleagues from throughout China, Japan, Korea, India, Thailand and Australia, so there was a significant cost associated with flying people in and housing them in hotels, and there were cultural and language hurdles to overcome.

    But it made sense to start with the AP region as it could be considered to be low-hanging fruit in terms of the general skill-set. But I really think AP was the easiest of the regions to start with. When presenting I noticed how focussed people were on what I was saying; I saw the eyes looking back at me – they were hungry for knowledge in a way that none of us can expect of the more “developed” regions of Europe and North America, who “know everything anyway.”

    My presentations went well, despite some additional hurdles that you'll read about next - for me, the best feedback were the questions. People were asking me about really specific things, they were a little bit confused and wanted to clear things up… I was impressed at how many colleagues came to talk to me during coffee breaks and over lunch.

    So, we made a successful start with Shanghai. Alas, I didn’t get to see much of the city other than the Hilton hotel, the Shaanxi Hotel where our seminars were held, and Malone’s American bar, where westerners would gather for beer and a superb pub band.

    The key reason for not seeing more is that I didn’t check my Chinese visa before checking in for my flight on the Saturday. The original plan was to go in October. For that I ordered a six-month two-entry visa and received it in September. So when I turned up for my flight to Shanghai on the Saturday, I was looking forward to a Sunday of acclimatising, seeing the financial district and old Shanghai followed by a Monday of preparation with the team.

    Naturally, when I was turned away from check-in, it was disappointing and extremely frustrating. My visa had expired in December. What I had been sure was a six-month one, valid from September to March was in fact a three-month, single visit one. I simply hadn’t checked that I had received what I had ordered. Buyer beware, I suppose.

    So, I drove back home - and more or less didn’t have the weekend with the family that I shouldn’t have had anyway. I was so disappointed with myself for not having been permitted to fly, and so filled with the anxieties of everything that could go wrong on the Monday morning when I would head to the Chinese consulate in Frankfurt to obtain an express visa, that I couldn’t really be with the family mentally.

    I popped into work on Saturday afternoon to fill out application forms and hunted around for various bits of supporting documentation – I was reasonably confident that I had everything that I would need (apart from a fresh invitation letter that I hoped would arrive from China by email on the Monday morning – which it did), but still my fears of bureaucracy and the whims of its executors remained. I slept terribly all weekend.

    Finally, Monday arrived and my family could gladly see the back of the caged bear that I had become and I could take my cares with me up along the Autobahn to Frankfurt Kennedystraße, home of our local friendly Chinese consulate.

    I arrived just after opening hours, and was initially glad to see nobody there; I would be through in a trice, in good time for my rescheduled early afternoon flight to Shanghai with China Eastern. I was done and dusted very quickly, but in a very negative sense. They no longer process visas there any more, I was told, and I would have to go to an outsourced company called “Visas for China”, where I could apply for a passage to China that would arrive within 6-7 working days of the application. They stopped issuing express visas at the beginning of January (none of which was up on the Consulate’s web page, naturally).

    So, I called the team who were preparing in Shanghai to tell them that I was dead in the water. We started to discuss contingency plans, especially video conferencing, which we all agreed would be simply awful, like pulling teeth from 6000 miles away. Then, an English colleague now based in Adelaide thought of a new scenario – that it was now possible to fly to Shanghai and to “transit” there for 72 hours. The condition was that my next destination after Shanghai on the itinerary was not my home airport.

    I was terrified – now would I not just be driving to Frankfurt to find that things could go bureaucratically pear-shaped, but I would be flying to the heartland of whimsical bureaucracy (no, I don’t mean the USA...), China, without any supporting documents other than my itinerary, which I would have to print out somehow.

    So, it became an all or nothing flight. Our assistant rescheduled my flights to Shanghai and then to Bangkok as the next stop. The administrative risk for me was the obvious fact that my final flight home, the one that I am flying to catch now, was a mere two hours after I landed – a clear signal that my “transit” through Shanghai was anything but. If they were to reject me on that technicality – well, I was going to try to say that the flight back was flexible business class that would be rebooked as soon as I knew the full scope of my tasks in Bangkok (we do have a plant near there, so it would not have been a total fabrication).

    I finally flew with Lufthansa, squirming for over nine hours in my grey economy seat and landed before midday on Tuesday morning, ready to face my fears - and the immigration officer. She investigated my passport, found the expired visa and started to look officially quizzical. I said "72 hours" and showed her my itinerary. She asked me to step aside for a few minutes and phoned a supervisor.

    I was fatigued from not being able to sleep on the flight over and jet lagged, but I doubt that it would have been any different had I been in the best of conditions: my mind started spinning through worst-case scenarios – being asked into an office for further questioning, being told to get straight back on the plane back to Frankfurt, getting some kind of black mark that would prevent me from ever entering China again… All the while, the welcoming video of smiling Chinese immigration officers, smiling children, kung-fu fighting soldiers, and tanks rolled its loop.

    Finally the awful moment arrived with the supervisor. He took my itinerary and visibly started counting the days and hours between my arrival and the departure to Bangkok. Finally, the maths seemed to add up, (my two-hour sojourn in Bangkok seemingly insignificant) – and I was in.

    A driver picked me up and drove me to the conference hotel. I arrived just as one presentation was ending and mine was about to begin; with me in my flight clothes (in-flight-dinner-stained hoodie, jeans and flat-footed trainers) and the memories of a Lufthansa breakfast in my stomach, I made my presentation.

    It went, by and large, very well. There were technical difficulties with connecting to our VPN (my anti-virus software went nuts as we connected to the hotel wifi) so I couldn’t demonstrate our SharePoint system, and I think I faded during the last few points, but the feedback over the next day was overwhelmingly positive. There were so many compliments, good questions and comments to the effect that this would help them with all sorts of discussions and issues with their customers that I came away with the impression that we had made a good start.

    The view from my hotel room
    The first evening was a “quiet” one just for us presenters (plus a couple of Aussies who needed a night out, too). One of the Australians had lived in Shanghai for seven years, has a Chinese wife and speaks (to my ears) fluent Mandarin, so we let him take us out. His initial plan was thwarted by an overbooked restaurant – and when we neared plan B, my heart sank. We weren’t all flying thousands of miles to this country only to go to an American bar, were we?

    We were.

    Of course, it was a brilliant night out. Much more relaxed than had we gone to that restaurant, we ate burgers, drank our beers and were rocked by Art6, the house band of Philippinos who rolled out classic after classic (AC/DC, Police, Blink 182 - a modern classic by any pub-band definition).

    {hooray, we’re beginning our descent – soon time for bed!}

    Cucumber juice!
    I got to bed at around 1am local time, ready for my breakfast (with cucumber juice, naturally) and leaving the hotel at 8am.

    The second day was certainly more relaxing for me: I could switch off for the morning whilst our Spanish colleague presented standardised Quality controls. I didn't fall asleep, but I certainly consumed more coffee than normal.

    He was coming to the end of his presentation when a director from North America sidled up to me and asked if I wanted to come to lunch with him and our Australian guide, instead of staying in the hotel. I of course said yes, and off we went, for the most amazing lunch in a new-but-traditional dumpling restaurant.

    Lunch took a little longer than anticipated, and I got back… Just in time for my next presentation!
    The dumpling-makers
    We finally got through the day and had our end-of-course dinner with all participants. It was good to meet many of the faces behind the names I'd come across in my multitude of emails received over the last several years. Eventually, dinner drew to a close and we headed back to our hotel (the Shanghai Hilton, if you must know) to mull over a few things over some beers in the lobby and then to go to bed.
    Except - some colleagues from Australia whom I'd met years before were in Malone's bar and wanted to meet up with me. I told them no; but knew that I'd regret not heading out to see them when I had the chance. So my Spanish colleague and I walked back out to Malone's for another few beers and rock music.

    Little did we know that, stood where we were, I would be called out to join the band on stage to dance - first, freestyle, and then, with two other volunteers (the Spaniard and some other guy from the bar), to hop around Gangnam Style!

    All good fun (and I have locked away the video evidence of that…) and all very late and all very exhausting. Perfect preparation, in other words, for being checked out and picked up at 7am to travel to a meeting with Shanghai Volkswagen.

    Fortunately, that meeting felt like an extension of my training presentations. I showed them what we know about our products, what they have to gain with moving to our latest offerings - and then rode off through the hazy sunset to the airport.

    And so we have it. I slept through most of the flight back to Frankfurt on the Thai Airways A380, landed before 6am on Friday, drove home for breakfast with my family and then went into work for the rest of the day, principally to prevent myself from falling asleep rather than for anything particularly productive.

    Now I'm back in the mill, back off the stage and into the crush of the day-to-day. I'd like to think that the training we did will have a lasting benefit - but that's utopian. It'll all fade away with the audience, too, as they step back into their real worlds: which is why we'll need to maintain momentum. We'll do this live again in Europe and America this year, but we'll have to tune things for webinars, too. Only that way, with lots of repetition, will we have a chance of making things stick.


    → 10:37 PM, Jan 30
  • RSS
  • JSON Feed
  • Micro.blog