Internship: Week 5

That was a busy week again. This was the last week of my friend from HBS, and so we were slogging throughout the week to put together a presentation which is to be presented to the board at the end of Week 6. The initial deadline to finish the presentation was Wednesday. We had a board member visiting the office on Friday, so we decided to do a test run when all of us were around. This meant that we cut our deadlines by technically three days and effectively five days (taking the weekend into account).

We finally did manage to get the presentation ready by Thursday morning, and even had time to get it reviewed by our General Manager of Strategy as well as the BCG consultant who works with us. We decided that most of the feedback will be incorporated during week 6, since we did not wanna majorly tinker with the slides. On Friday, we had a 3 hour session with the board member, the CEO and the entire Strategy Development team. We were pushed for information and reasoning behind each of our suggestions and many hypothetical situations, but overall the analysis and the recommendations were very well received and the board member and CEO were very satisfied and highly impressed with our work.

Now we have to implement the other comments into the presentation, add some more slides on global strategies and make it ready for this Thursday. Also, most of the presentation is in Spanish (I'm in Chile remember) with my part in English. The HBS guy is a Spaniard, so it all went smoothly. Apparently, one of the board member does not speak English and with my friend gone, I am gonna handle the entire presentation. So someone is translating my slides into Spanish, to give printouts to this particular board member, while I'm taking notes for all the slides into English so that i have reference points during the presentation. Oh the travails of working in Chile :)

I also meet with my General Manager tomorrow, to discuss future steps after the presentation. We know what to do, but we're short of time and I am hoping to allot responsibilities accordingly. Also, we need to work on a transition schedule, because the team will shrink down from five members to just two by the time i leave. I might also have lunch with my CEO sometime during the week - something I'm really looking forward to. Here's to another week of crazy and exciting fun at my work place!!!