Gerrit Schmidt: Completion of first project phase and a trip to Rome

I recently had a week of vacation which I spent in a small cottage about half an hour away from Rome. That was really relaxing! Although it was a little bit colder than I had expected, I really enjoyed it a lot. The last time I was in Rome was together with my parents a long time ago – at the time, I was still travelling with a plastic sword!
Last weekend I went to a stag night in Düsseldorf. For my international readers: It is a tradition over here that the groom is seen off from being a bachelor by his male friends. Stag nights mostly take place in bigger cities and the groom has to complete different, funny tasks in the course of the evening. I flew there directly from my project and we had a lot of fun….!

Project phase 1 has been completed in the meantime. Our working results are currently passing through various committees, such as the staff council, the extended leadership team, the shareholders, etc. This phase is very exciting, and as soon as the plans have been approved by all stakeholders, project phase 2, i.e. the implementation, can start. In that phase some new colleagues will join the team.

What really impressed me about my colleagues recently is how they coped with my absence – since my vacation unfortunately conflicted with the hot project phase. They took over all my work on top of their own and that definitely cannot be taken for granted. They did a great job!

Of the four production sites that our client maintains in Germany, I have in the meantime seen three – I mentioned that in an earlier blog post. The first site, however, was the most impressive one for me, because the really large mounted products are manufactured there. They are so big, they can neither be transported by truck nor by plane. That is why the production site is very close to the harbor. The products are stored in huge containers that are rolled from the production site to the ships that take them to their destination. Yesterday I visited a site where single components were produced – so I actually went back to the very first step of the production process of the mounted products I had seen before.

At the end of this week I will take part in a seminar that I am really thrilled about. It is on "Financial Business Planning" and, as fate would have it, the focus of the seminar is very helpful as a refresher for our current project activities, which also involve business case calculation. The seminar will take place in Berlin and since I have family there, I will take the opportunity to extend my stay over the long weekend – Tuesday is a public holiday in Germany. Oddly enough, a colleague I got to know in the initial kickoff will also be attending the seminar – I'm looking forward to seeing you again, Giovanni! Initially you do not believe how strongly connected you are to the colleagues that you meet in the 14-day kickoff at the beginning of your career at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants. But you never lose sight of them!

Gerrit Schmidt: An interesting factory tour and a scooter trip

The client I'm currently working for has several production sites throughout Germany. While so far I've almost always been at locations in Southern Germany, this week I will be at a site in the North. I'm really looking forward to this because I'll be at a really big production site with impressive logistics. Tomorrow I'll be there for the first time and will have a guided tour of the site. When you're advising a company, it's really important to understand the company and its processes, and being at the production site and having the chance to get a feeling for the products really helps. And with my engineering background, this is all the more exciting.

Following the more turbulent initial phase of the project, things are much calmer now. In the team, everybody knows each other much better now. The same is true for the work with our client: In the beginning, you have to find out how work at a particular company is organized, what is expected of you and how to best present your results. After a while, you find this out and realize that you are fully accepted and even appreciated as a valuable part of the project.

We could also sense this at a dinner we had with the management team following an important workshop. Discussions had been tough the whole day, but in the evening it became clear that we had forged a solid connection with the management.

We recently introduced the "team barometer" to our team which allows us to give anonymous feedback about the project. I think it's very helpful to talk about collaboration and the work atmosphere already at the beginning of the project. We discussed the results during a dinner and had the opportunity to address topics that we felt were important. This meant we were able to head off some tension right away. The whole team really appreciated this, so we've decided to hold this discussion regularly.

Last week, I had a somewhat tough time finding accommodation and it proved to be quite an adventure. There was a trade fair in the city and it was almost impossible to find a hotel room. I ended up changing hotels three times in one week. The last hotel was a small privately owned place in the middle of an industrial park. The room was the smallest and most colorful hotel room I had ever stayed in, and it reminded me of a summer camp. Even more so because the owner joined me for breakfast. This was a pleasant change to the business hotels where I normally stay.

On a personal note, there where some highlights over the past few weeks. Since I'm interested in photography I went to an exhibition at the "Deichtorhallen" in Hamburg featuring the work of photographer Saul Leiter. Leiter was once a leading figure in color print, at a time when it was still very much frowned upon. While with digital photography and image processing we take all the things we can do today for granted, it's fascinating to see what techniques were used 60 years ago to achieve certain effects.
The second, very personal highlight was that I was finally able to take my scooter (a Vespa) out of the shed and go for a ride. The scooter is from 1986 and I bought it a couple of years ago in really poor shape. Between two jobs, I took two months off to take the Vespa apart and rebuild it. Since then, we have a real bond! And every time I take it out of hibernation and it does me the favor by starting up without hesitating, I'm extremely happy. In order to remind myself of our rides, I've recorded the distinctive ring-ding-ding of her engine on my cell phone and use it as my ring tone.

Gerrit Schmidt: An exciting presentation and a walk on the water

As I told you last time, a new project started a couple of weeks ago. As always, the initial project phase is very intense. It is the phase in which you learn the most and collect the most information. This is very demanding, but it is also extraordinarily exciting. Personally, I enjoyed these first few weeks of our current project, especially since I am working with a bigger team for the first time in ages. It's a great atmosphere in the team room.

What really impresses me about our team is how helpful our junior team members are. We have a Consulting Analyst and a Junior Consultant on board and they are both great. They easily jump between topics and tasks and are a real help to the whole team

This week we will have an important presentation with the client and are planning on having a team dinner (and maybe a few beers) in the evening. I'm really looking forward to it.

The week before last, I had the opportunity to give a presentation to the Executive Committee of our current client. It is a large company, and I was very glad to have the chance to present some of our work results directly to the EC. This is an exceptional opportunity, especially in large corporations. So although I am used to giving presentations, in that particular case I was really excited
Next week I will spend a day in our Munich office in order to meet a group of students from ESSEC. We will give them some insight into the Roland Berger project world by introducing them to two sample projects from my Competence Center. One of the projects took me to the US for six months, and the other is the project I am currently working on. At the moment, I am busy preparing for the day with the students. I will be joined by a colleague who was also on the US project and now works on my current project. We have been working together for such a long time that we know each other really well.

Last weekend, I was at the "Alstereisvergnügen". The Alster lake in Hamburg has frozen solid, which only happens once every few years. This is a natural spectacle that you simply can't miss if you live in Hamburg or a nearby city. So I definitely had to go there myself – even if it was just for half an hour! "Walking over the water" and looking at the city from a completely different angle is simply amazing. However, since I was not the only one interested in this great experience – in fact, the river was packed – I got stuck in a huge traffic jam when leaving the area.

Gerrit Schmidt, Hamburg

Right now I’m at the airport in Munich on the way to Berlin to meet some friends for dinner and to have a nice weekend. Then it’s back to Hamburg. Anyway, the year has started off quite brilliantly. On the very first day back I did a market study on engineering service providers. This was a very nice opportunity for me because before I joined Roland Berger, I worked for an engineering service provider. So I could use a lot of my contacts from before to complete the study. This helped a lot and it was a nice start of the year because I was able to combine my business life with talking to old friends. This is one of those projects where you can provide your client with insight and refresh your own knowledge at the same time.

I’ve now started a new strategic project that could go from 2 to 3 months down in the south of Germany in my current main area of expertise (don’t want to give away too much). Anyway, it is a very large company and the first steps will be identifying what they are best at, how much work should be outsourced, how much should be done with partners, how to refocus on core competencies and so on. We have a ton of information to go through and will be quite busy with this. One of my favorite quotes of my client concerning this project was “I’m very used to defining the root cause of issues we have, but have never actually gone about identifying the root cause of the things we are good at.” In other words, don’t just limit yourself to fixing the symptoms, but look for the source of things. The client was very happy with this suggestion. It’s things like this that motivate me on a daily basis.

I had a very traditional Christmas with my family and friends. Small get-togethers. Very relaxing. Exactly my style of Christmas. For New Year’s, we went to the North Sea and watched and set off a few fireworks on the beach. I could really recharge my batteries because one big project was finished before Christmas so I could really take a nice break. It was one of the most relaxing holidays I’ve ever had. And I saw a very good movie ¬ “Carnage” with Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, and John C. Reilly. The name is a bit misleading, and I’m not going to reveal any details. Just go see it!

Gerrit Schmidt, Hamburg

So. Let’s see. What’s happening? Since I blogged last, I received a visit from my Principal in Wichita. He was there for 5 days to conduct some major talks with the client. We both drove to Oklahoma City for the weekend to do some Christmas shopping in the huge U.S. malls, among other things. We drove several miles on the original Route 66 (at least we thought it was) and had that particular song on our minds the whole time. As I blogged last time, the main project has to be completed by Christmas, so what we are doing right now is some sort of compilation of everything we have done so far. We are producing kind of a big handbook of all the results for our client, including really strategic recommendations for 2012 on top. A quite interesting challenge! It entails a lot of research through all of our documents we have produced to see what we have changed and what we have achieved – the outcome is gratifying.
Now I spend my last days in Toulouse, flying home for Christmas soon. Looking forward to meet all my family and celebrate together both Christmas and the start to 2012.
In our office we collect each year small presents for children who belong to a charity organization called "Schlaufox". They support children from deprived families in all kind of school activities and beyond. My colleagues just delivered the presents to them and it is lovely to see them smiling – both my colleagues and the kids.

Frohe Weihnachten! (Merry Christmas in German).

Gerrit Schmidt, Hamburg

Since the last blog, I’ve had quite a whirlwind tour. My itinerary of the last week has been Hamburg, Munich, Toulouse, Frankfurt, and Berlin, back to Hamburg by train, then via Frankfurt to Denver and now I’m back in Kansas. So I think I’ve racked up more hours lately than most flight crews. When I was in Berlin I attended a great Roland Berger seminar (the main reason for my trip). It was about restructuring. In short, we found out how to help companies when they are in a critical stage. The person who conducted the seminar had been working for many years as one of the first restructuring experts at RB. We heard a lot of war stories and it was extremely interesting. A lot of colleagues took part from offices all around Europe. When we were finished, we all went for a fantastic meal at a very nice restaurant. Among the group were 2 guys I knew from my kick-off (the two-week training for all new entries worldwide): one from Milan and another one from Prague. It was great to see them. So cheers via my blog to them! Anyway, I am back in the lovely U.S. I’m not alone this week, as my Project Manager and my Principal are here and we’re at the end-phase of our support which should be wound up by Christmas. There have been a lot of activities converging the last few days, so work has been quite intense. Oh, one last thing: A French colleague from Toulouse who noticed I now have a blog had to inform me of something quite important and wanted me to announce something to my German colleagues concerning French culture: If you’re in Toulouse and order a steak, never order it “bien cuit.” If you do, you are only showing them you don’t like the meat and it is kind of insulting to the cook. At least order your meat “medium”. A tip to keep in mind for your next trip to France…

Gerrit Schmidt, Hamburg

Hi. Over in Europe this week at my second home: Toulouse. My next project will be in a familiar environment, as our new assignment will be to prepare our current client to face the changes coming in the future. It is always very satisfying to realize that several months of work had been fruitful and that you have contributed to the success of a project – and, last but not least, the acquisition of a new one.

I have been travelling a lot, too. First of all, I had a whole week of vacation in Hamburg, my hometown. I haven't been there for so many days for a long time, it was very relaxing. This might be boring for some people, but for me it's the nicest thing I can do. Now I'm back in France. Probably the most interesting thing about being back down here was my trip down. I started out from Hamburg to Munich on Monday with only a 30-minute delay. I had a connecting flight from Munich to France. We cruised around the Munich sky trying to land for over an hour, and then the pilot said we were running out of fuel and that they had closed a complete runway at the Munich airport due to dense fog. So we had to fly to Nuremberg to refuel with a 3-hour delay. Then my connection flight to France had an additional 3-hour delay. In the end I arrived in France 9 hours late. On top of this, they lost my luggage. So I still don't have my stuff. A very tough day...Every day I'm buying a new shirt…

My mentor was in the same city by chance last night and we quickly organized a dinner with 4 colleagues. Of course it was fantastic (since we are in France), and so we stayed at the restaurant rather late… Oh, one more thing: The other day I saw Anna Ternheim, a Swedish singer-songwriter, in Hamburg. I have been a fan of hers for a long time, and trust me – she will be very famous one day, I'm sure…

Gerrit Schmidt, Hamburg

I am currently staffed on a project in Kansas. My life is quite hectic lately, but in a positive way. You could call me the "Jet-lag Guy". This is because I travel so much back and forth. Every two weeks I fly back to Germany for the weekend. The time zone difference has its advantages, though: when I go out at night with my Hamburg friends, I'm never tired. They all want to go home around two or three o'clock and I'm just waking up. Last weekend I finally made it to Tim Mälzer's "Bullerei" Restaurant in Hamburg. He is a famous cook in Germany. Great food. Great atmosphere. As far as work, things are going extremely well. In the last two weeks, a strategic project we have been working on for quite a while is really coming true. The physical delivery of aircraft parts is actually taking place: the result of which we can touch with our hands. My customers are in the middle of nowhere here in the cornfield of the U.S. But the people I work with are from all over the world. I like it here. The people are extremely friendly and appreciate what we are doing.