Jieqi Zhou: Returned from a family leave and preparing for new projects

I just returned from my 6 week leave that I spent in New York, as my second baby was born there. Now she is about two months old and I really enjoyed being so close to her in her first weeks on earth. Five years ago, when I had my first daughter I was still quite young. And now, with the arrival of our second daughter and me spending the whole six weeks with both my daughters, having the chance to play and talk with my elder daughter, I do have a real family feeling! It is just amazing and I am more than happy that my family will return to China in about two months.

In terms of work, I am not yet involved in a new project, since I only returned three weeks ago. Before I left, I was on two projects and also involved in the preparation of the final presentations. I heard from my colleagues, that the presentation went well and that both projects have been successfully closed in the meantime. This makes me really happy, since all our efforts seem to have paid off.

Normally as a project manager, your are responsible to deliver projects, not to acquire them in the first place. But being with Roland Berger means having the opportunity to live your entrepreneurial spirit, if only you like to. So since I was not assigned to a project, I decided to focus more on proposals and acquisitions myself. I assume that I made good progress in turning some of these proposals into real projects. Keep your fingers crossed!

Last week, I took a business trip to Chángchūn for initial talks with a potential client. In mid-April we will then have a follow-up workshop with them that I will be preparing. For this task as well as for most of the proposals, I do have some junior consultants to support me. They really do a great job! As usual, time is limited but the cooperation within the team is awesome. Jointly we manage to provide all our documents well crafted and within the provided deadline. And this is for a large part owed to the excellent work of our junior people!

I was also really happy to learn, that some of the younger colleagues are planning to get married next year. It is good news, and I also appreciate that they share these kind of personal information with us! This is a good indicator for the kind of relationship we are having within our office.

One of the big news at a national level is that China is now gradually opening its pensions funds to the capital market. People here think that the pensions funds need some value added initiative to increase their value, but they are insecure whether the Chinese stock market can do the trick. But since we lack experience in that area, we do have to find the right path by tying out things. We feel that our country is opening up in many ways and that makes people here in general very confident about the future. 

Jieqi Zhou, Shanghai

Well, we just finished an interim report for one of our biggest projects (the new media marketing project, I mentioned last time). The client is very satisfied on many levels. Now we are entering the final phase for the final report and I think we will complete it this week. Furthermore, I had an adventurous trip to a presentation that was supposed to take place in Beijing: There was a very thick fog and none of the flights could land so we were redirected to land at an alternative airport. We ended up landing at a small one – and, of course, my meeting was cancelled. I consequently had some time to relax a bit and read my book – an unexpected blessing in disguise… The other project I’m working on is now coming to a critical point and pretty exciting.

At present, I’m doing 2 or 3 interviews a week for professional recruiting. I really enjoy this. The professional level of the people is really high and it’s fun imagining the kind of people who will help shape the company in the future. As you can imagine, Christmas is not a really big deal here in China. But Shanghai is quite open-minded and we even have some decoration in windows and so on. At the Roland Berger office, we have a little Christmas tree, since we’re a German company.

The book I’m reading is the new Steve Jobs biography. I try to read it about 30 minutes a day. My view on it is, well – in a negative light, Jobs was very stubborn. But in a positive light (which also applies to people at RB), he stuck to his ideals at all times. He could always motivate his team to a much higher level than they had ever imagined reaching.

Jieqi Zhou, Shanghai

Hello. Back again. I’ve taken a few short jaunts to Beijing and Changchun – where the number 1 Chinese automotive group is located. I did a project with this client several months ago, had some good talks with them and also had some official meetings with a new client there. Several weeks ago we went to the China Europe Business School in Shanghai, the most prominent business school in China, and were highly welcomed by the students there. Talking about students, last week we held some recruiting interviews in our office. I enjoy my involvement in our recruiting activities a lot. Seeing all these new people interested in the company is always very satisfying and exciting. And maybe we will soon have at least enough workspace to hire them all: At our office located in the tower on the 23rd floor of the Shanghai Kerry Center, they are now planning to erect 2 more towers! They are planning to construct underground tunnels to link all the towers, so there will be a lot of construction going on in the near future. Maybe we’ll be expanding our office to the other towers. At present, we are doing a lot of improvement tasks to make things better for our employees. There have been some really interesting suggestions. Oh yeah, just the other day, we had a karaoke/dinner party, which was really fun. Last but not least, I just finished a book called 'Barbarian at the Gate'; about Wall Street. Fascinating. That’s all for now!

Jieqi Zhou, Shanghai

I have just returned from a team event in Okinawa, Japan. It was fantastic! First, we visited historical sites, and then we spent a lot of time on the beach playing team games like tug-of-war. We also watched traditional singing and dancing of the people of the area. It was an amazing experience – especially after the busy weeks I had. I've been leading two different projects. One project had to do with branding and the other one with new media marketing. This is a fascinating area to be involved in, since there are so many new possibilities opening up every day. The results are great and I took advantage of a steep learning curve. Anyway, I'll soon be having a couple of weeks off to be with my wife, since baby number 2 is on the way!