Your Assistance Requested

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If you have a moment, I would love to get your help in a competition I have entered; the result of winning will enable me to enlist help for a school in rural Yunnan province that I visited when I was in China.  Here’s the story…

Runan Wan Primary School is home to about one hundred students, attending what in the UK would be years 0ne to six. There is one principal and about six or seven teachers. The students there are hungry for education; some walk as much as three hours, over a 2,000 foot mountain ridge, just to be able to attend. And yet for most of them, this will be all the education they ever receive. Every few years, one of them is lucky enough to secure some kind of sponsorship that allows them to leave their family at age 10 or 11 and go to Lijiang to attend intermediate school. The rest, no matter how bright or academically inclined, go to work the fields.

In one brief visit this place burned a spot in my heart; I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.  And I’ve been wondering what, if anything, I could do to give the kids there more opportunity.  Well something came up that may give me that chance.

IBM entered one of the photographs I took at this school into a photo contest for international corporate volunteerism, and it was selected as a finalist.  And here’s the thing: the winner of this contest gets to speak at their annual conference in Washington DC.  I wouldn’t get a cent for doing it, in fact it will be really expensive for me to go and speak there if I win.  But in that audience will be people who can help me make a difference. Ultimately, I would like to find sponsors for scholarships so that the top kids of this school don’t have to end their education at age 11.  And I can’t think of a better forum for getting the word out than this conference.  So in short, I really want to win this thing.

IBM Corporate Service Corps - Team China 18The winner is decided by public vote on their Facebook page, and I am currently tied for second place, about 30 votes behind the leader.  Obviously I have been leaning heavily on my friends and family, but to win this I will need to get beyond my own personal network.  So my favor is this: would it be possible for you to round up some of your Facebook friends and talk them into voting?

If you like, I can also send a PDF book of the photos from the school, to you or anyone else who votes. This means a whole lot to me; I have what may be a real chance to make a difference to these kids, and I’d like to make the most of it.

Thank you so much.

The link is: http://woobox.com/ve2sng and the photo is labelled IBM Corporate Service Corps – Team China 18

Deployment minus 4 days…

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This past Thursday, we had our last weekly team call prior to deployment.  It was calm, almost anticlimactic.  Some had already departed for China, spending a week to see Beijing, Shanghai, or Hong Kong.  Others, like myself, were buried in work. Despite the fact that our home teams and colleagues have known about our deployment since June, it feels like our impending absence has just assumed the mantle of reality, and we are now overwhelmed with the sheer volume of what needs doing before our departure.
Still, we got some useful things done on the call. In addition to our main clients, we will also be hosting a couple of workshops, spending time with local community leaders share our experience and perspective with them.

My colleague Brett will be leading a presentation at Kunming’s medical school.  He will be discussing a couple of topics with them: a survey of how supercomputers are changing the way cancer diagnosis is conducted, and a walkthrough of the communication protocols that health care providers in the US and UK use to share patient data.
Ronnie will be leading a set of learning activities at a local middle school, similar to the ones IBM performs for schools in the UK.

And I will be facilitating a session on cross-cultural business operations for a group of local small and medium business owners, hosted by what in the US would be called the Kunming Chamber of Commerce.

I am really looking forward to these sessions. To me, the greatest opportunity we are given as part of this program is the chance to meet with, teach,  and learn from business and community leaders, and these workshops dramatically increase our exposure; far more so than supporting any one client would.

I am back to The Hague early this week to continue the work I’ve been doing with a troubled project for this past month, so most of my packing and such has to be done this weekend.

So much to do. So little time. I wouldn’t have it any other way :-)

Mi colega Pilar se une a la blogosfera

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Hola a todos. Por favor, dar una cálida bienvenida a mi amigo y compañero de equipo de Pilar de IBM México, que ha comenzado un blog propio. Usted puede encontrar su historia aquí. Me divertí mucho sus recomendaciones para nuestra próxima aventura.

Hello everyone. Please give a warm welcome to my friend and teammate Pilar from IBM Mexico, who has started a blog of her own.  You can find her story here.  I quite enjoyed her recommendations for our upcoming adventure.

Pilar’s blog is in Spanish, so English speakers will have to use Google Translate to read her posts.  Go ahead; it’s definitely worth the effort.

Quartz – a new online news publication

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I have for the past week or two been following the rollout of a brand new news publication called Quartz.  It is backed by the same company that publishes The Atlantic, and the small staff has an impressive journalistic pedigree.

The publication is targeted at and optimized for mobile phones, tablets, and readers first and foremost, rather than as an afterthought. The business model is radical, and by no means secure, as Jean-Louis Gassee points out in his delightful Monday Note blog. All of this is interesting to me intellectually as an observer of evolving media delivery models, but what has me excited is not the delivery method but the quality of the content.

This is some of the most consistently excellent writing I’ve seen in a long time.  The quality of analysis is on par with that of The Economist, but Quartz is not an attempt to imitate The Economist (if it were, I’d probably agree with their editorial position a bit more :-).  Their editorial positions are decidedly less guarded, but written from a position of confidence that feels like it emanates more from experience than ideological certitude.

Given the upcoming deployment, I have particularly been enjoying their series of articles on the impact of the world economic slowdown on China, as well as a recent piece on Bo Xilai, which I did not agree with but thoroughly enjoyed reading.

Have a look for yourselves, and let me know what you think

Welcome Michael Siems and his blog

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Hello everyone, I’d like to introduce you all to a colleague of mine, Michael Siems from IBM Germany.  Michael will be joining me in Kunming as part of Team China 18.  In fact, he and I share the same final leg of our outbound flight, from Beijing to Kunming, so Michael will be the first of my teammates I get to meet in person.

Michael has recently started his own blog to tell his story of our our coming adventure.  You can find it here, as well as in my links section.  Pop on over, say hello to him, and give him my best regards.

About our clients…

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With our deployment only two weeks away, our team is starting to kick into high gear on research and preparation.  I thought this would be an opportune time to tell you a bit about our clients and the work we will be doing.

As I have written, there are a total of twelve of us on Team China 18, coming from nine different countries.  We will be working with a total of six clients during our four-week engagement.  The twelve of us have been divided into three sub-teams of four people each, each of which will be looking after two clients.

I am on Subteam 3, along with my colleagues Brett, Martin, and Renata.  Brett is a technical architect from the US; he works in IBM’s consulting business like I do.  Martin is a security specialist from Slovakia, and Renata is an attorney from Brazil.

The first of our two clients will be the Fanya Metals Exchange.  They are a brand new, started only a year ago with the intent of becoming a commodities exchange like those in Chicago or London.  As some of you know, most commodities futures and option contracts traded on an exchange are purely financial instruments.  But many of the buyers and sellers trading metals on Fanya’s exchange are miners or manufacturers, so a much higher percentage of their contracts are settled in specie — in other words, they are paid in the actual, physical metals that the contracts represent.

Fanya has done very well in its first year, and would like to continue expanding and become a regional player, trading not only across China but throughout southeast Asia, and they have asked for our advice on how best to go about that.  To provide this kind of insight, we will be putting together a case study on the business and marketing models of some of the world’s major commodities exchanges, and advising them on how best to emulate the success and growth patterns that some of these have enjoyed.

The other client is a financial clearing house for small and medium business called KMfex.  China does not have a well-established market for commercial credit, so most small businesses looking for a loan need to look for individual investors.  The goal of KMfex is to create a clearing house where businesses and investors can find one another.  Like Fanya, KMfex wants us to put together a case study of companies in other regions who have enjoyed success with a similar business model.

In a lot of ways KMfex reminds me of Lloyds of London in the 1600’s and 1700’s.  At that time, the only “corporations” in existence were shipping companies, and if you wanted to invest in their voyages, you had to make contact directly.  There was a coffee shop not far from the docks called Lloyds where a lot of the ship owners and captains would hang out, and wealthy individuals looking for ships to invest in would often go to Lloyd’s in order to find a suitable ship and voyage.  Over a period of several decades, what began as a coffee shop transformed into something entirely new: the world’s first true financial market.  KMfex is in a different country and services general businesses instead of shipping companies, and its distribution channels are online rather than at a coffee shop.  But in most of the important ways, they are very much like Lloyd’s was when it started: a clearing house that made it easier for companies and investors to find one another.  I expect that many of the successes and failures Lloyds has experienced over time, including the massive “Names” scandal of the 1980’s could end up being quite relevant in terms of advising them.

So there you have it: a brief synopsis of what I will be up to very soon.  In addition to working with these two clients, I expect to also be helping to advise and support the other subteams, just as I am sure we will be able to rely upon their expertise and support for our two clients.  There are also a couple of one-day events that the entire team will be participating in; I’ll tell you more about these as the time gets nearer.

It’s less than two weeks now until we take to the skies…