originally posted on one of my several now defunct blogs, called On Engineering, on 3rd February 2013
Apart from the opportunity to see some films that I don’t normally get the chance to see, long-distance travel lost its allure a long time ago for me. I appreciate different cultures and their food, it has to be said, but getting to experience them on business trips is generally not worth the price of jet lag, lack of sleep and missing the family. I’d rather travel to Kassel than Korea.
Sometimes, though, a trip can be rewarding in other ways. My recent jaunt to Shanghai was as special as it was exhausting; after many years of learning engineering and the specifics of my job, I finally became teacher.
To say “finally” isn’t strictly true: helping out colleagues with technical questions is a large part of what we as engineers do. We’re always explaining things to sales people or buyers (usually in full knowledge that it’ll be out the other ear within milliseconds) as well as other engineers. But this was different - I was formally given the task of training our colleagues in the Asia Pacific region how our products work. It was like our own, private, in-company TED talk.
The background to the training was inauspicious: our colleagues in China had a few eminently avoidable issues (incidences or complaints, whichever word-avoidance euphemism is currently in vogue) that required a lot of effort throughout the company globally to resolve, even though for me the analysis and resolution were fairly trivial.
Even before the dust settled, the key action that emerged from all of that excitement was that we needed to increase the general skills level in technology, quality and manufacturing - we needed to spend the effort to train ‘em up in order to save ourselves and the company a whole load of pain and cost.
From a business perspective, it was an investment that would result in a positive pay back (or at least a less negative one).
Getting the admin right is part of getting the product right
Just getting to Shanghai turned out to be a bigger hurdle than I had expected: cutting a long story short, I couldn’t board my flight on the Saturday because what I had thought was a six-month, two-entry visa was in fact a three-month single-entry: I hadn’t checked in advance. Whilst I’m proud to call myself an engineer rather than a bureaucrat, it was still pretty embarrassing, as it meant that I would miss the final organisational meetings with the team on Monday.
For various reasons, I ended up making use of a new rule in China - that you can stop over in Shanghai or Beijing for 72 hours without a visa, as long as your stay is just that: a stop-over. This meant that I couldn’t simply fly back to Frankfurt after the training; no, I had to have an interim airport on my itinerary. In this case I was recommended to stop over in Bangkok.
Fortunately, bureaucrats being bureaucrats, they could only go by the letter of their rules, rather than the spirit of them: I was admitted into Shanghai for those 72 hours, even though my return flight from Bangkok to Frankfurt was only two hours after my arrival in Bangkok.
Sometimes it’s great that the law and its ilk are asses.
What matters is, I got there.
Presenting in pyjamas
Because of all the delays in my arrival, instead of having a few days to acclimatise, to organise and to finalise, I rolled up to the conference hotel just in time for my own presentation. And so, without the chance to change into my suit, I wandered up to the front of the auditorium still wearing what I had been travelling and failing to sleep in - whilst not really my pyjamas, they may as well have been.
Fortunately, that didn’t matter one jot.
Not fortunately, I had practiced my presentation out loud to myself in an empty meeting room back in the offices in Heidelberg. I had given myself the rare chance to test the logic and flow of my presentation before flying, so I knew that I wouldn’t be standing there, staring at my own slides, wondering what it was I wanted to say: I heartily recommend the practice of practicing to anyone.
So, finally I was there, adrenaline flowing as I stood in front of 70 colleagues who were all eyes and ears, ready to listen to what I had to say. Presenting the basics behind what we do and what our customers do with our parts once they assemble them was an enlightening experience. The things I was showing them were what I have lived and breathed at work for the past five years and more. Conversely, my audience really didn’t have much of a clue - and they were agog. Those eyes followed me as I talked, as I tried to avoid walking around the stage too much (I do tend to use up the stage) and even as I noticeably faded towards the end: it went well.
The best of indicator of my success were the questions that people threw at me during coffee and lunch breaks over the next day and a half. For sure, there came many compliments but they weren’t empty: they nearly always came with a question. It was this that really told me that they had been listening and were making the first steps towards understanding, namely confusion.
And the rest is a blur
That evening, we went out for drinks. The next evening, we went out for dinner and drinks. Early the next morning I had a meeting with Shanghai Volkswagen. That afternoon I flew to Bangkok. That night, I flew feet-first in a business class bed in an A380, to get home in time for breakfast.
Was that it?
I’m back in what counts as normality at work again, my temporary rockstardom popped back in the folder where my presentations lie like an unwanted old rag-doll. But, if all goes to plan, it will be taken out, dusted off, given the odd bit of nip and tuck and we’ll be back on the road. The idea is that we take this “show” throughout the company; and that’s going to be interesting, to say the least. We could say that Asia Pacific was low-hanging fruit. My colleagues there were (and still are) keen to learn, excited in the possibilities that this knowledge will give them when dealing with their customers.
In North America and Europe, on the other hand, I’m expecting a kind of tacit resistance. They “know it all”, have “seen it all before” - even though in my experience they don’t talk the right language of our products: I hope it doesn’t go as far as apathy - but could well go that far.
But that’s all to come. First of all, I have to get ready for that exciting trip to Kassel, where at least you can see through the air around you.
It’s true, though - it doesn’t quite have the same ring as Shanghai, does it?
