Courtesy of Connexion by Boeing, I’m literally posting this 36,000ft in the air on my flight from Copenhagen back to Seattle. Let me take a moment to notate this as The Coolest Thing EVER. Talk about redefining the whole concept of flying…and I thought in-seat screens were cool.
The last week has been an amazing whirlwind of activity that passed way too quickly. I started out last weekend in Austin, hanging out with Clare, Bo, Bill, and John. A fantastic visit–between the BBQ, jet skis, and good company, it was a weekend to be remembered and hopefully one of many to come.
I had to ditch out a little early though to catch my flight to Madrid. As per our corporate policy, flights over seven hours in length get to be flown Business Class, so all my flights on my international trips qualify. I’d always wondered what happened on the other side of the majestic curtain and the answer is luxury. Start with white table cloths with three course meals served on actual plates and your choice of wine. Enhance with a power seat that adjusts in six different directions. Finish off with so much leg room you can’t even phantom touching the seat in front of you unless you were Shaq. It’s not a bad way to fly! As advertised, I arrived in Madrid on Monday well-rested and ready to go. 
Monday was actually my free day, which I spent wandering around the city, ending up in local neighborhoods, places of business, and tourist areas alike. I ran into a couple of girls from Chicago (the first of many) which reminded me how much I missed meeting travelers and hearing about their stories. Although I was staying in a nice hotel, I spent my evening hanging out at a fantastic place called Cat’s Hostel, with a brick walled underground cavern filled with travelers from all over world, including a Latin crowd that had somehow had a couple of guitars, a sounding board for some rhythm, and a really long wooden tube (akin to a yoodle) that put out these really deep resonating tones. With a scene like this, why would anyone want to stay in a hotel?
Tuesday was my first presentation. Yolanda, our CRM rep for Madrid picked me up from my hotel early in the morning and took me to the beautiful offices in La Finca, an area just outside Madrid. Their offices there put ours to shame, with beautiful glass walled conference rooms and an extremely well done interior design. Little did I know at the time that this is the trend for our sales and marketing offices abroad and that Stockholm would wow me even more than Madrid (Scandanavian design is tough to beat!).
The first audience I presented to was a group of local partners that had come in to hear about Microsoft CRM 3.o. I was really excited to give my first presentation, but I immediately got the vibe when I walked in the door that having a few extra years of age on my face would have helped. It wasn’t the first thing to shake my confidence. Back in the office, I’ve heard that it takes about two live runs with the demos and presentations to really get the material down. But I’ve also been told I’m pretty good at presentations and thought this would be easy fun work. Well, the first day, while not disasterous, was certainly not my best. I was running through the material wayy faster than my allotted time and I felt I was really lacking some real depth. My feedback scores for the afternoon were mediocore–it wasn’t bad but it wasn’t very good either. I was pretty disappointed. I locked myself in my hotel room after I got back to revise my presentation and reorient some slides to my presentation style.
Staying up until 3a, I had revamped most of the slides, redesigned some of the demo scripts, and felt that I was ready to come through with a stronger presentation. It was half and half. Day 2 in Madrid was a much smaller and accepting internal audience. Two of my presentations were vastly improved, but my slides on Reporting and Analytics were still running super short and feeling empty. After a Spanish lunch with Yolanda and Kai, my marketing counterpart, we took off to the airport and I spent the entire flight from Madrid to Stockholm further improving my content. When we arrived in Stockholm, it was already dark, so I locked myself in the hotel room once again. This time I logged into our corporate network and watched painfully laggy streams of recorded presentations from my team members who had actually put the original slides together.
I already knew this, but I never realized how much stronger these presentations are if you can show some progression. What I mean by this–the people giving the original presentations were old hats on the team. They had come out of CRM 1.2 and knew our shortcomings well. CRM 3.0 righted and improved on a lot of the problems we had in that release and my team members were quick to highlight where we were in 1.2 and where we are now in 3.0. Being a junior member of the team, I didn’t have the benefit of this experience to pull from, but I was able to absorb it in a hurry. I learned a ton and got tons of ammo to augment my presentation and demos.
It showed the next day. I got a bit of a late start in Stockholm, but in front of a room full of 60 partners and customers, I made our product and marketing message sing. It was the first time the technical audience was bigger than the marketing audience. The presentation was strong, the audience Got It, they laughed at my jokes, and asked a bunch of questions. Of course, this was helped by the fact that I was in Sweden and everyone knows English to an amazingly high degree, including all the American quibs and idioms. I was incredibly excited–my feedback scores were tops. But admist my joy, the only thing I could really think about was finally being able to relax in the hotel tonight–I had been working from the time I woke up until the time I crashed for the last several nights.
Not immediately. Our local CRM people took us out to a restaurant called East, an Asian Fusion place in downtown. Very much like the US, the Swedes really go for the whole international cuisine bit…there’s not much in the way of traditional restaurants. After a long dinner and fun + fantastic conversation with our Swedish friends (the people there ROCK), I finally headed into the hotel.
Only to be hit with a bout of insonia. Oh of all the nights…
I netted about 1.5 hours of sleep and compounded by a sleep drought the previous few days I wasn’t exactly firing on all points. Thankfully, the Swedish consume a ton of cofee and the office hallways had fantastic push-button espresso machines which churned out a foamy latte in about twenty seconds flat. Fantastic. I was taken out to lunch by Pontas, where we cruised over to the local mall his awesome red SLK 230. We had lunch at the Swedish place in the food court and I sprung for the Swedish Meatballs. Can’t miss the classic right? Mmm. That was good.
After a second consecutive day of good presentations, I wandered around town for a few hours before settling at the Absolut Ice Bar Stockholm. This is a bar that’s literally made out of ice–walls, bar, tables, and even the glasses. (Pictures on the Gallery, linked below) I crashed hard that night, sleeping all the way until 2:30p the next day. Oops!! Stuff closes early in Stockholm, so I had only 2.5 hours to go before places would close.
Stockholm is a BEAUTIFUL city. With the people, the layout and content of the city, plus the wonderful sense of Scandanavian design, it sits right after Budapest on my list of favorite cities in Europe. I will definitely be going back. I didn’t see any of the tourist sites, but I spent a lot of time admiring the various nooks and crannies of the city, looking at interior design work that was simply jaw dropping. Inspiring to someone who’s thinking about that condo some day.
Finished off the evening by going to a delicious vegetarian buffet restaurant with some people at the local hostel, overlooking most of Stockholm and tucked away deep into a cranny of the city. Finished off what turned out to be a great trip by hanging out at a local hostel and swapping travel stories.
And now, back to daily life….just for 5 days. A week from now I’ll be in Brazil!!
Pictures!
