China Trip, Day Six—April 11: This was yet another packed day, but it proved to be very interesting. As the previous day, we headed up to Tianjin outside Beijing to visit Danish industrial giant Danfoss’s main China facilities. Frequent readers of my blog will remember that Danfoss was the case company of the CBS Case Competition 2006, which gives it a special place in my heart. And it was amazing to travel thousands of kilometres across the globe to see that the buildings Danfoss has in Beijing, look just like the ones in Denmark. On the other hand, and equally inspiring, was how the structure of the organisation had been adapted to Chinese norms. It is big as well as little things, such as how the canteen is and how employees are appreciated, that meet the eye.

The visit at Danfoss was only for the morning—we drove back to Beijing for the afternoon to visit PricewaterhouseCoopers and learn about the insides and outsides of the legal environment for doing business in China as well as the comprehensive tax system. In addition to all that wisdom :-), one major takeaway from that visit was the view of the city from their offices (below).

I tried to keep up with daily posting during my trip to China a week ago, but I only managed to do so the first four days. Now, I continue—we are at day five. The title to this post comes from the hilariously funny speech that Will Ferrell held at the graduation ceremony for the Harvard Class of 2003. Let’s hit it:

Day Five—April 10: The programme for today was a daylong visit to Novozymes’s production facilities in the Tianjin Economic Development Area (TEDA) 2-3 hours drive outside of Beijing. Actually, the length of the drive varies greatly with traffic—and traffic grows at enormous speeds. In fact, some Danish expatriates we spoke to said that they could feel traffic volume increase week by week.

As usual, our chartered bus for the week was waiting for us outside the hotel to take us to the Novozymes facility. After a one hour drive, we entered a remote parking lot (a huge one) with hundreds of taxis and buses. Clearly, this was a maintenance centre of some sort and not Novozymes’s facilities. What had actually happened was that the driver was dissatisfied with his boss about some kind of pay issue, and he had decided to take us “hostage” until he had it his way. We did not know whether we had actually driven one hour in the wrong direction or how long we were going to stay here at this taxi/bus place. In Will Ferrell slang—We are now in Russia! But this happens in Communist China as well. After three quarters of an hour, we were on our way again, and I fell asleep for the rest of the ride.

After a long drive we arrived in TEDA, which is a huge development area. Many multi-nationals are placed here, and you can see countless production facilities. The area is designed as a grid like an American city, and it is expanding all the time. You sense pollution the minute you get there, which is actually not that different from the feeling you have in Beijing. Novozymes is one of the cleanest production sites there, and they receive constant awards for the sustainable production.
At Novozymes we met their finance manager and one of their production managers, who also gave us a tour of the plant. Most of all, it resembles a brewery, and it also smells like it—at least in the fermentation section of the plant. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to photograph inside the facility, so you’ll have to do with one from the outside.

The day ended in an ever-so-infinite car line on our way into Beijing—we had started getting used to it.

A keen jazz fan (and amateur musician), I like the title of Garr Reynolds’s latest blog post: Jazz and the art of connecting. Auch! Garr has collected some good quotes from jazz magicians (and musicians) and drawn parallels to the art of presenting. Here’s one of my favourites:

“Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.” (Charles Mingus)
This is my favorite quote of all. Many presenters — very smart people — either take something essentially simple and confuse an audience or simply fail to make their more complicated material meaningful to their audience. Simplicity ain’t easy. In fact it’s hard.

The audience doesn’t need to know if we are using 35mm slides, a Mac, a PC, an iPod or displaying slides from Keynote, PowerPoint, or something else. The content of the message and our connection with the audience are all that matter.

From Carlos Ghosn: The little things matter over at Garr’s blog.

Day Four—April 9: Today was Sunday and Grand Sightseeing Day for us, inasmuch as our programme is packed on weekdays. We started early in the morning with our guide, who introduced himself with some cool, crazy Chinese name “…but just call me Phil or Phillip.” We called him Phil (photograph below).

The programme for the day was packed. We started at Tiananmen Square—Google it if you want to, I’m not too keen on writing too much about it behind heavily monitored Chinese internet firewalls. After Tiananmen Square we walked through the Gate of Heavenly Peace (they know how to name things here) into the Forbidden City, which is a huge complex of buildings, and where the emperor used to live hundreds of years ago. On the back of the envelope, the Forbidden City covers just below one square kilometre—it’s huge! Below is a photograph of the Gate of Heavenly Peace with a painting of Mao hanging over it.

Besides the striking architecture, the size of the palace, the breeze of history—what I really find fascinating is the fact that there is a Starbucks store inside the Forbidden City. Of course I had to take a picture, which is below. My friend Ditlev is posing next to our hidden (forbidden) treasure.

(…we did so much more on this day… we saw more of the gigantic Forbidden City, we saw the enormous Summer Palace, and we went to one of the hustler markets to see how those work. I don’t have time to write about all that now, so: …to be continued :-).)

Day Three—April 8: Eating breakfast on this—another grey (grey because of smog, not because the sun isn’t shining)—day, I was amazed by the fact that the Chinese seem to eat the same kind of food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner: Rice with eggs, chicken, dumplings with mixed meat, water melons, etc. Then, so am I on this trip :-).
This was the day where we were going to visit the Chinese headquarters of Novozymes, the company around which the cases evolves. Below, a photograph of their building.

Novozymes’s Finance Director for Asia gave us a more detailed presentation on their activities in Asia, as well as surprising and knowledgeable insights during Q&A. Novozymes produces enzymes and micro-organisms (if I get the time, I’ll write more on the company later) and relies heavily on patent protection of these products in order to stay profitable. To my surprise, in China, intellectual property rights issues are of no concern to Novozymes—their products and the processes to make these are simply too complicated to become victim of the normal Chinese culture of copying things ruthlessly.

We were also introduced to NNE (my unofficial explanation to this abbreviation is Novo Nordisk Engineering), which—like Novozymes—also originates from the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. NNE is an engineering consultancy and has managed the construction projects of both Novozymes’s headquarters and their production site in TEDA (an economic development zone a couple of hours north of Beijing by car). In the case we’re solving, the issue is an expansion of Novozymes’s production capacity, which is why the viewpoint of NNE is extremely relevant. Below is a picture of Novozymes’s Asian Finance Director, Mads, and NNE’s General Manager for China, Christian.

After having spent the day at Novozymes, including an hour or two of case solving, we headed back to the hotel. I headed out to Beijing’s pedestrian street with a bunch of people to have a look—it is actually a pretty normal pedestrian street with McDonald’s, Nike, Häagen-Dazs, adidas, and what else you could imagine. Evidently, there are also stores carrying Chinese-made products, for instance, a store carrying all kinds of “cutlery”, i.e., chop sticks (photograph below).

This was also the day where I bought an incredibly expensive ice cream from Häagen-Dazs (RMB 60, just below EUR 10, which is about the same as three good evening meals would cost you here) and some of my friends ate beetles, so we covered a lot of ground.

Day Two—April 7: We landed this morning and drove to the hotel from the airport. What strike you right away is the amount of traffic, the lack of visibility through the air, and the extremely dirty streets and buildings. There’s simply dust all over the place—your lips and throat dries out pretty quickly upon arrival—and stays that way (thus far, at least). Below, a picture from our bus ride from the airport to the hotel.

After arriving at the hotel, we gathered to get an introduction to the trip by the organizers, tips and tricks by Miao (a Chinese national resident in Denmark, who follows us on our trip), and—finally—the case, which we are going to work on the next 10 days, was also handed out. Below, a picture from our introductory meeting.

At the end of the day, we had a welcome dinner of traditional Chinese cuisine. Among the more exotic things were sea cucumber and pig’s brain, but there were also chicken, noodles, beef and much more. Below, a close-up of one of the dishes from the evening.

Day One—April 6: Kick off for my China trip, a day I’d been looking forward to for a long time. Although it is a kind of a business trip, I also view it as a semi-vacation—the first in months. I met with the remainder of the team in Copenhagen Airport, where obligatory hot dogs and window shopping was on the programme. Below is a picture of (from left) Jakob (who is on my China team), Louise, Morten (whom I studied at New York University with), and Peter (whom I was in LA with).

We transferred flights in Frankfurt to a jumbo-jet looking forward to an eight-hour flight. We landed on April 7 (local time) in Beijing. Below is a picture of the group in Beijing Airport completely wasted by the flight.

I have finally found the time to gather some photos from the CBS Case Competition 2006. You can have a look at them here. I will upload more, when I get the time. For now, all the pictures that are up, are from our award banquet. Below, a picture from the award banquet of my good friend Christoffer and I.

I have not read Timothy Koegel’s The Exceptional Presenter yet, but Tom Peters posted about it on his weblog (He Has a Point: A Damn Good One). Tom extracts one simple, very obvious, but—often—very forgettable piece of advice from this book:

Those who practice improve. Those who don’t, don’t

What people often complain, however, is the lack of time to practice, and maybe this should be linked to the fact that the pay-off from practicing is not immediate—it is somewhat distant in most cases. What Tom points out about this book in his post, is that one should simply seize more opportunities to practice, such as in everyday tasks:

One of Koegel’s greatest contributions is suggesting-revealing the fact, the great news, that we have many, many mundane opportunities to practice! He offers numerous ideas. Using people’s names in conversations is very powerful. So practice it at a party this weekend. Smiling is a matchless “weapon” for winning over audiences … so be aware, in family communications, the degree to which you smile, or don’t. In my case, and my wife laughs at me over this one, I spend as much time spell-checking and working on grammar-word choice on emails to old friends as I do when writing something formal to a prospective Client: Every time I communicate with anybody is an opportunity to improve my communications effectiveness.

What a wonderful point. Every time we communicate, we have the chance to improve our communication and presentation skills. Seize the opportunity and Go Own the Room.

I read a lot of blogs (100+) every day, and there is so much that I want to share—but I simply can’t find the time to make several blog posts a day on that account. Luckily, Google Reader has launched a new feature, where you can share certain posts that you read in their reader—example below.

Now, every post I read that I want to share is automatically linked to my Links site, where you can access it and go to the original post.