Run away, run away (7-13)

By Wednesday, I was really starting to get into the groove of things here in Qingdao. I still haven’t been sleeping the best, but it’s getting better. I’ve been up most mornings around 6 or 6:30, have been running next to the harbor, and today was no exception. I saw Kempton as I was just starting, but he was heading back to the hotel. Then as I was getting close to finish, I ran into Melisa so she and I ran about another mile together, so I ended up getting in close to 5 miles. Ivonne apparently was out there too and saw me go by – I must just have been in the zone.

At Han Te, I really started focusing on customizing the Design Thinking content as it is going to be a core part of the material that we deliver for them. Matthias also set up a Kanban Board for us to track all our tasks and to also serve as an example for Han Te. The Pyxera folks dropped by as well to see how things were going, so we gave a quick review of our plan and then headed out to lunch as they had to get to the airport and Carosa had made a reservation at a special seafood restaurant for the team.

Lunch was at another typical Chinese restaurant with what Dan Carr liked to call “roundy round” – which has stuck with me ever since. Carosa ordered a huge assortment of a big fish, clams, pork, lotus root, chicken feet, mushrooms, and who knows what else.

However, the funniest thing that happened was when one of the waitresses came to pour me a beer. I looked up to say “Xie xie”, and she immediately got extremely embarrassed and ran out of the room. Then another waitress came back to serve the rest of us beer. I’ve had my fair share of interesting (and challenging at times) interactions with girls over the years, but I’ve never literally had them run away from me! Needless to say, we all had a very good laugh over it for the rest of the lunch.

When we got back to the office we started interviewing the technical staff and it was intense. Zoey was helping Matthias and I out, and we had some really informative and candid conversations with several folks. By this point, we were really starting to get a good feel for what their major pain points were, and were starting to develop some ideas on how we could help them.

By the end of the day, we were exhausted, but still continued the conversation on the way back to the hotel since we were now in a car without any of the Han Te folks. It was at this point, that Maria and I may have broken Matthias’s heart just a bit.

We started talking about what we really thought we were going to be able to include in the scope and eventually he joined us in the conclusion that we won’t be able to cover everything in detail. There just isn’t enough time, especially with the limited time each day we’ll have with the team – after all they do have their day jobs – and there will be quite a bit of time lost to translation. The three of us continued the conversation when we got back to the hotel on what we later dubbed the “counseling rock.”

Talking through everything helped a bit, and we ended up with a good plan to make sure that we were focusing on the items with the biggest impact, that we could deliver in the time that we had, and that we thought would stick.

After that, the three of us took a little walk around the harbor to get a bit of exercise and check out the nighttime scenery. Unlike in the mornings when people are just fishing and all the shops are closed, at night, everything is alive. We checked out a few of the shops, but eventually made our way back to a restaurant near the hotel where we were able to enjoy a few 500ml Tsingtaos (only 10 RMB or just over a dollar each).

But as the title implies there was just a bit more running to do. It wasn’t quite as bad as lunch time, but again tonight, we had an embarrassment issue with one of the waitresses. That of course embarrasses me, which both Maria and Matthias love adding fuel to the fire about. In the end, it’s quite flattering, so I’m not complaining, but it is pretty funny since it doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world — at least not to me. 🙂