Three Week Reflection on My Time in Qingdao (Part 1)

At this very minute, it’s been almost exactly three weeks that I left Qingdao. Coincidentally, as I’m writing this, I’m actually on another airplane to Asia and will nearly pass over Qingdao on my flight from Dallas to Hong Kong (on the way to Malaysia and Singapore). As another interesting side note, we flew nearly over the North Pole to get to where we are now.

I thought I would take a few minutes out of the 15+ hour flight to sit back and think a bit about my time in China. The first thing that stands out is that I’m really thankful for having been able to go in the first place. If you’ve read my various blogs, you certainly could see that it was an all around amazing experience. I’m also lucky to have the support of my family (especially Korey — Love you!) to put up with me being gone so long, and for my management to not only support, but to encourage me to leave my real job for a month. I couldn’t have gone if either of those had not fallen into place.

Leading up to my CSC assignment, we were told about the triple benefit of the program. IBM CSC assignments give leadership experience to the individuals that go, they help the clients we worked with, and exposes IBM to new markets. Reflecting back, all three of those were certainly fulfilled.

I’ll go through them in reverse order… IBM definitely got a lot of attention and good press over the course of the month. For the pieces we know about, there were over 70 press releases and news articles written about the program / our team while we there. I know all of us certainly learned quite a bit about Qingdao and working in an emerging market along the way as well.

There is also no doubt in my mind that our client, Hante, received a lot of benefits from our engagement. Between the design thinking workshop to allow them to focus more on their users needs and requirements, the agile development workshop to improve their delivery quality and efficiently, learning enhancements, management training, and other various problem solving and training sessions, we delivered a lot of value over the course of the three weeks. But don’t believe me. Here is some of the feedback with got from our primary client stakeholder, Carosa:

“They left us 1000+ post-it notes, over 40+ training videos and countless valuable memories. One simple way they taught us how to hold a meeting has saved us over 40 hours a week on meeting. They stay positive and happy while working and solved many problem we had been suffering long, which is the very important thing we would like to learn!”

The publicity and helping Hante were obviously very important, both to me and to IBM, but the biggest change or impact has to be with me directly. There are so many things that I learned and experienced that I need to split this post into three pieces. I’ll write the professional reflections as a second post and the personal ones as a third post.