Rowan's blog

Mexico, Milan, Madrid

At work, I'm part of a team driving the effort to increase, optimize and integrate the use of digital in marketing & communications plans across IBM globally. This is a pretty challenging transformation effort, requiring large scale changes to enable constituent-focussed integrated planning (moving from inside-out marketing and communications to an outside-in approach).

As part of this effort, we run Digital Strategy Workshops. My Manager @EthanMcc, Vice President @benedw, colleague from another part of the business @DMBeckmann plus our global agency partners from Euro RSCG 4D @gallate and Ogilvy @howardpyle, and I, are continuing to get out to more IBM markets this year.

Workshops in Mexico, Milan and Madrid

In the last two weeks we ran workshops in Mexico, Milan and Madrid.

It was wonderful to meet the local teams, including local Digital Leaders I've been working with for some time. It was good to better understand their business priorities, local gaps/opportunities and market landscapes. We worked with these local teams to improve IBM's capabilities in digital, drive deeper integration between internal functions around digital and, ultimately, to identify ways to meet their growth objectives by developing integrated marketing and communications plans with digital at the core - the next steps for their markets in this transformation effort.

Many thanks to Leobardo V Mendez in Mexico, Paolo Carnevale and Loredana Galante in Italy, plus Luis De SopeÑA Pastor and Particia Jimenez in Spain for all your hard work to make these workshops possible. It was wonderful to meet you finally!

I'm not sure what I would have done without the tremendous support of my colleague Denise Beckmann who looked after me when I got sick with laryngitis (when I arrived in Mexico City). I couldn't stand for more than 30 seconds and had lost my voice (not that I could speak Spanish anyway)! Also, big thanks to staff at Sheraton Suites Santa Fe, Mexico who, on request from Denise managed to get a friendly and professional Mexican doctor to my hotel room within 40 minutes and were very kind and helpful.

Photos from the workshops are up on Flickr. Some of my favorites are below.

Mexico:

 

Milan:

Madrid:

 

Japan

This time last week I was en route from Australia to Tokyo, where I joined IBM and agency colleagues from the USA, Singapore, HK and of course Japan, for the Japan Digital Strategy Lab. I thoroughly enjoyed the workshop and meeting our 70+ Japanese colleagues during Day 1. The photos are up here.

Some of the team at end of Day 2:

NB. If you're ever in Tokyo, I recommend the Green Tea flavour KitKats (but not the French Cheese flavour so much, eew). I was upset not to find the Wasabi flavoured ones. Pocky sticks were nice too.

Of course, the sushi was to die for (thank you, fish)

:s

 

Photos from 2010 Digital Labs

Photos from the 2010 IBM Digital Strategy Labs are up on Flickr. I can't seem to work out how to embed the collection into this post, so you'll have to click this link to view them.

One more Digital Lab to go this year; Japan. We will be there two weeks today. I'm looking forward to it (and the food in Tokyo)!

Going global

I'm at the end of my whirlwind tour. In the past two months I visited cities in six countries for work (Hong Kong, Taipei, Dubai, New York, Bangalore, Seoul) and two for holidays (UK and Thailand, en-route in between the work trips).

The work I mentioned in my earlier post on managing change in the digital environment now has much broader (and much more senior) ownership, which is necessary and very exciting. Why? The second of John Kotter's change management steps is to develop a cohesive guiding team:

• Assemble a group with enough power to lead the change effort
• Encourage the group to work as a team

It was great to spend time with the big brained senior IBMers and agency leaders who hang out in the concrete jungle that is New York - and exciting to see the guiding team develop. The digital workshop has evolved and improved - it was wonderful to deliver the Bangalore and Seoul workshops as a part of this large, talented team. Pics are up here: HK, Taiwan, Dubai, Bangalore (no group pic), Seoul. See photos from all the workshops.

More workshops in more countries to come. Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to humming along to the Qantas song "I still call Australia home" as I complete this trip today.

Exmoor

Exmoor is one of the last remaining 'wild' parts of England - and a remarkably civilized wild place it is too.

I spent many childhood holidays on a farm just down from the moor on the south side. Dad and I returned to visit the farm, farmers family, the rare Exmoor ponies on the moor (the oldest, purest breed and most primitive of the Brisish native ponies), Doone Valley (setting of Lorna Doone), Tarr Farm Inn, The Royal Oak at Withypool and other favorite haunts. 

The narrow, deep Devon lanes force you to slow down a bit. It was much needed.

Dubai to London

Well, we didn’t find the historic ‘eastern’ part of Dubai. My friend who now lives there reassured me it does not exist. In fact, approx 40 years ago nothing existed there except sand and hot sea!

The workshop went well and it was great to meet colleagues who had come over from the US as well as the local IBM team. On the final night we took some pics outside Burj Kharifa, the world’s tallest building.

Then I flew from the land with no history to England. The old roses smelt overwhelmingly sweet and juicy after the desert of Dubai. 

I headed into the South Bank office and finally met my colleague @DelphRB in person! Then started my two week holiday (with just the odd sneaky-work-email-peek).

One week of holiday has zoomed by:

• I finished Seth Godin’s ‘Tribes’. Bloomin marvellous. Deserves a separate post but, well, I’m in holiday mode.
• Had a great discussion on the many places that could do with improved 'change management' including small businesses, a monastery(!), not for profits and of course large enterprises.
• Sent my Gran off to heaven with much sadness, but a lovely funeral and a huge pink sunset.
• Breakfasted with some hilarious people who were re-enacting 'Allo 'Allo! and couldn’t stop laughing for long enough for us to understand the explanations of their crazy antics.
• Reunited with all ‘the gals’ from school for the first time in four and a half years! Checked out the New Forest; pubs, beach, pubs, moor, ponies, pubs, cycle routes, pubs…
• Caught up with an old friend from primary school in Cheltenham and a newer (only 12 yrs?!) friend from Oxfordshire. Wrote poetry in my head inspired by the landscape on the scenic drive from one to the other and Classic FM. Glorious.
• Finally got around to meeting up with very good friends from Sydney who Ben & I have been meaning to catch up with for months – they happen to be in London. I took them to the top of Richmond Hill (incl. the true top: King Henry the Eighth’s mound, from which you can see St Pauls 10 miles in the distance).
• Spent some lovely time with my various family members.

Only a week of hols to go – off to Exmoor today to get my ‘proper job’ (that must be said with a Devon accent) fix of the English countryside (i.e. the green coloured stuff. The parts of England I’ve been to so far have been uncharacteristically dry and yellow).

Hong Kong and Taiwan

I mentioned in an earlier post I've been working on rolling out a new approach to marketing planning, which involves placing digital at the centre of the marketing plan.

Last week I ran two-day workshops in Hong Kong and Taiwan with a colleague. It was great to meet the teams and see a little of two new cities. I've added the pics to Flickr here.

HK and Taiwan teams - thank you for your wonderful hospitality!

Next stop, Dubai.

Saving the Asian Elephants

The highlight of our Thailand trip was staying at the Elephant Nature Park, approx one hour north of Chiang Mai.

Asian Elephants are currently on the move towards extinction. There are only 3,000 Asian elephants in total left in Thailand. The wild Asian elephants are protected by law, but the life and treatment of domesticated (working elephants) in Asia is not protected in any way. These magnificent beings are often treated very poorly.

The Elephant Nature Park was founded by award winning conservationist Sangduen ‘Lek’ Chailert. She began rescuing injured and mistreated Asian elephants in 1992, and in 2003 (with the support of a Texan millionaire) was able to establish a permanent home for them in a beautiful lush valley.

There are now over 30 rescued elephants at the park. They are free to choose a family, form small herds and live amongst people who love and respect them. They are not expected to work or perform. Instead they are able to wander the park, feeding at their leisure, bathing in the river and playing together in the mud pit. Each elephant has a distinct character, which becomes more evident as they come to regard the park as their home and leave their past behind.

Visitors to the park help feed and bathe the elephants. If you stay overnight as we did, you may get to walk around the park in the morning, meet many of the elephants and hear about their working lives. Most of their stories are unfortunately heartbreaking.

I was in awe of all the elephants; their wise eyes, huge heavily grounded bodies, their gentle natures and their ability to forgive humans for the pain and suffering we, as a race, have put them through.

Personally, I fell in love with Mae Khum Kaew (also spelled Mae Kham Gaeo). She was radiant and gentle. Even her skin was soft!

You can read her story here. Read all the elephant’s stories via the links on this page. 

Creating the Elephant Nature Park was a huge achievement by Lek. Unfortunately there is much more work to be done to save and improve the lives of Asian Elephants. Lek Chailert is working on a variety of additional projects:

• Lek is in the process of setting up more properties for rescued elephants including 2,000 acres of land in Surin.
• She set up Jumbo Express, an outreach program that endeavors to improve the lives of domesticated elephants as well as offer free medical assistance and education to their mahouts and people they work for.
• Lek speaks out about the cruel practice of the 'Phajaan' or training crush, the horrific, violent traditional method of ‘breaking in’ an elephant to be ridden and worked. This practice is still used widely in Asia. Lek is campaigning against this, in favour of training methods that use positive reinforcement. For those of you reading this and thinking ‘Monty Roberts for elephants’, I agree there are strong similarities between Monty and Lek’s missions. With Lek's blessing, I emailed Monty’s office introducing Lek to him and inviting him to contribute his support to her excellent work.

What you can do to help:

1. Visit or volunteer at the Elephant Nature Park (you can go on a day or overnight trip from Chiang Mai or you can volunteer at the park for a week or two).
2. Volunteer as part of the Surin Project.
3. Foster an elephant (this makes an excellent gift). 
4. Make a donation to support the activities of the Elephant Nature Foundation.
5. Shop at the online Ele store (more great, socially responsible gifts).
6. Help raise awareness and funds (there are lots of ideas to get you started here)!
7. Join the Elephant Nature Foundation. 
8. If you’re in the USA, join the Serengeti Foundation which supports ENF. 
9. If you are in the UK and want to help, contact ENF UK.
10. Join the ENF Facebook Group.
11. I recommended the organisation set up Flickr Groups for: Elephant Nature Park, Surin Project, Elephants that need saving. Will update with links if/when available. ***UPDATE: ENP Flickr Group is now live.***
12. Read the recent media articles about Elephant Nature Park and please talk about the plight of the Asian Elephant. This National Geographic video featuring Lek is an excellent resource to share. The more awareness and people involved, the better!
13. Join 'Elephants in Crisis' (EIC), and ElephantVoices, two other organisations doing excellent work.
14. Discuss the plight of elephants, potential solutions, pilot projects etc in the 'Professionals Protecting Elephants LinkedIn Group'.

Note: If you are in Asia

• Please do not support elephant street begging, elephant painting or elephant shows.
• If you feel you must go trekking on the back of an elephant, please take a long hard look at the elephant’s health and enthusiasm for its work before you pay for the trek. If you really think about it, you may prefer the idea of walking beside a free elephant to riding on a working one!

Some of my photos from the Elephant Nature Park can be viewed in my 'Thailand' set on Flickr, starting here.

Thailand

Our time in Thailand was wonderful, varied and energising. I’ll share the highlights:

Chiang Mai

A really small, easy city to navigate, I loved it! We squeezed past telephone boxes and trees and food stalls on wheels positioned in the middle of narrow pavements. We saw monks in orange robes walking past Porsches. There were great smells and ancient temples, friendly helpful locals with big smiles and easy jokes. The East / West clash there is fabulous!

I dragged poor Ben around many temples:

Then the Saturday and Sunday walking markets:

I was impressed by the improvement in treatment of dogs since I was last in Thailand, almost 11 years ago. Almost all the temples had donation boxes and took care of the local dogs, including medical care, food and water.

The highlight of the whole holiday was an overnight visit to Sangduen "Lek" Chailert’s Elephant Nature Park. This warrants a separate blog post.

While staying at the Elephant Nature Park we walked up to a local village. Someone bought something from a local store and the store owner invited us to go up to her house to see her orange trees! We bounced around in the back of her vehicle up a pot-holed dirt track and, once there, were treated to delicious small sweet oranges, huge refreshing rambutans - and the most incredible view. This is the view from their house!

We had a marvellous (and cheap) massage at the Chiang Mai Women’s Prison (part of a rehabilitation program run by the prison). Whoever taught the women prisoners massage knew what they were doing.  It incorporated some yoga-like stretching and a little bit of chiro. If you’re ever in Chiang Mai I’d highly recommend it!

The best meal I had in Chiang Mai was chicken noodles in coconut curry from a local eatery on the corner of Jhaban & Inthaworot Streets. It cost 15 TBH (that’s about 50 cents in Australian dollars).

We took a morning tour to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep (the temple on the top of the hill overlooking Chiang Mai) which turned into a full day tour as what seemed like half the population of Thailand decided to visit that temple that day. This meant massive traffic jams up and down the mountain and a Rubik's Cube style puzzle of gridlocked vehicles at the Karen hilltribe village we visited on the way back!

Inside Wat Phra That Doi Suthep:

We later learned that 2nd January was a very auspicious day to go to that temple and receive a blessing from the head monks. Hopefully this will stand us in good stead for 2010 if not the whole tweens / teens decade!

While in Chiang Mai we stayed at 3Sis Vacation Lodge which I’d highly recommend for its friendly service, oasis-like feel, fantastic location and reliable good food.

Railay, Krabi

Railay is a rock-climbers paradise. It also felt a bit like a human-zoo after the friendly, polite, authentic Thai-ness of Chiang Mai! We arrived by longtail just before an enormous thunderstorm. Thankfully that cleared overnight and Ben had a good day’s climbing with friends who had already arrived in Railay.


I explored ‘Diamond Cave’ which was huge, full of bats and did actually have sparkly bits.


Koh Phi Phi

The following morning we caught the ferry to Phi Phi. We were welcomed at Ton Sai by our good friends Mish & Pete, who importantly briefed me on how to bagsie the best sun-loungers between the pool and the beach at Phi Phi Cabana Hotel (photos below).

We said goodbye to Mish & Pete and took a longtail round to the peaceful Toh Ko Beach Resort. The huts and place itself are very basic but the peace was wonderful; three days of eating, sleeping, reading, lying in the hammock, snorkeling, shade-baking, watching the numerous crabs burrow into the sand around us... we really relaxed.

Then, back to Ton Sai.

I'd recommend the tour of Phi Phi Lei with the Adventure Club. Our group of six was lucky enough to be taken out by Andrew (founder of Adventure Club), an English guy who has been there for many years and knows the islands and reefs like the back of his hand. In addition to visiting Maya Bay and snorkeling among all the usual beautiful reef plants and fish, we saw a huge eel, small and large black tip reef sharks (up to 6 foot) and small and large turtles. Ben dived under a gap in the cliff (I chickened out and swam around)!

We stayed at Phi Phi Cabana which is the hotel with the best view in Ton Sai.

The food at the hotel was very average, but we did find some good fare along the beach at Ciao Bella.

Spent a lovely relaxed day on the sun-loungers at Phi Phi Cabana between the sea and the pool. We had regular dips in the sea and the pool and Ben even stayed still long enough to read a book while I just gazed at the view!

Phuket

We spent 24 hours at a five star hotel at the end of our trip. This is pretty unusual for us! Apart from the obvious financial comparison, we usually prefer small boutique hotels and homely B&B’s to large five-star star hotels. However the Indigo-Pearl looked unique and very architecturally interesting. We’re glad we went!

The Beach Club is at a much nicer beach than we’d imagined.

 

We enjoyed the company of a (predictably) friendly golden retriever who seemed to spend it’s life wagging it’s tail up and down the beach between pats from guests and dips in the sea to watch – and every so often pounce on – the little fish in the shallows. 

Our upgraded suite was fabulous. The Indigo-Pearl was built on the site of a Thai tin mine. All the elements and materials from the mine have been kept and worked into the design of the place. The whole, huge place really was a feast for the eyes. Every detail in our suite was worth looking at, down to the bolt-toilet-roll-holder!

Spent the afternoon at two of the three pools; the Infinity pool and the pool with the bar. Noice!

Breakfast at the ‘Tin Mine’ restaurant was a standout - the variety of food served was astonishing. In addition to all the possible western & eastern foods you could imagine eating for breakfast – American style waffles to bircher muesli to noodles with yellow sauce, herbs and chilli, they had ‘areas’ of items. For example they had a pastries area with over 16 different types of mini pastries, a manned cheese bar and a manned cold meats counter.

A fantastic trip!

All the photos are up on Flickr now.

Hervey Bay, Coolum and B&C's wedding

Ben & I had a very relaxing time in Hervey Bay (thanks Owen for being a wonderful host) and in Coolum. Congratulations to Bianca and Carlos who got married in Coolum on Saturday!

Photos are here: Hervey Bay, Coolum & wedding.