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.

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 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!}

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!

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.