Hi

In my blog last week I talked about finslising the preperation part of my Porject and getting ready to approve it for funding the following morning.  Well I am pleased to say that my Project was approved, I have made some final changes to it and will constantly review the market test as it goes live.  Much has happened in the past week following the project approval.  I have worked with the key stakeholders to make sure that they are happy.  I created a training schedule, plan and presentation deck for delivery and I went to New York City.

I am going to verge away from the LM Project for a minute and talk a little about my trip to NYC.  I was there to attend the 63rd Tony Awards on Sunday night.  The Tony's are the main awards in recognistion of greatness in theatre and musical theatre on Broadway and across the USA.  The 4 1/2 hours I invested in sitting through the televised awards was well worth it.  What was great to see was the amount of British people up receiving awards in recognition for various catergories.  I had a lady from Texas sitting on my side and her exact words were 'I thought Broadway was all about America......clearly not!'  She did mean this as a compliment.

Back onto Liberty Mutual and my project.  So I returned to the office on Tuesday morning having spent Monday in NYC with the Field Sales Team.  We had our first group meeting with the Saltire Fellows and the MBA Interns.  We were lucky enough to have  the President of one of the divisions that turns over $6billion and employs in excess of 11,000 people.  The key message he gave us is that it is all about developing the people and the team around you.  Know the ground work and this will build the foundation for a great business leader.  He had worked his way up through the ranks over the past 20 years after leaving KPMG where he was a partner.  He clearly has moved through many job functions and the ability to transfer your skills is very important.  His name is Gary Gregg and he has a great energy and passion for the Insurance industry.  I suppose that part of the process is trying to convince some of the MBA Interns that they should come and work for LM at the end of their course.

So I am sitting planning flights and hotels and training schedules for Virginia in order that I can deliver my training to 81 sales reps next week.  I am quite proud of this achievement, getting a conceptul idea through analysis, approval and initial execution in 6 weeks.  This sort of goes against the way the insurance world works, but I have got to say that Liberty Mutual is bucking the trend.  I have also been given the brief outline of a second project today and will split my time between the two of them.  I will be travelling throughout the USA visiting sales offices and conducting focus groups in order that we understand the way sales engage and talk about their customers in greater detail.  So my trusted Fellows across the USA may have a sofa buddy for a night or two!

All in all it has been a good week for work and I am really enjoying the focus.  I need to now make the time to read through the projects for our next externship as well.  I will keep you up to date with my project when I am in Virginia next week.

Paul