Hello again! I promised to write about my trip to Taiwan, which was really interesting, beginning with the travel.
I flew EVA Air, which is a Taiwan-based airline. They have Hello Kitty-branded planes, one of which does their Chicago to Taipei flight. Everything—and I mean everything!—on the airplane was Hello Kitty: the coasters, the table mat, the pillow, etc. Even the airport is branded with Hello Kitty. Upon landing, I took an Uber ride to the client in a Tesla, which was my first time in a Tesla!
I spent a week in Taipei helping two teams prepare for their upcoming negotiation sessions. We coached the sourcing teams through their storylines and practiced through role playing. The biggest challenge was that none of this was done in English! The teams had translators there, so I wore an earpiece to hear the English translations. It was a little more challenging this way but I eventually got used to it and we had some good sessions. The client learned a lot from our approach of using should cost models as a fact base for negotiation, and the practice sessions were good for them as well.
Following the trip to Taiwan, I have spent a lot of time with a large retail client doing a very large transformation. We have a lot of different workstreams and as the co-engagement director, I am thinking through the broader change management with a team of four colleagues. Our client is using the McKinsey Impact Accelerator, which is a cleaner, more holistic way of managing change transformations in which we think about the 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day plans, map out how to manage our communications and inspire the team, and much more. These colleagues couldn’t wait for their picture to be on my blog, so I’m giving them a big shout-out here!
It was an interesting summer!
Until next time,
Britta