While we were at Babson College it was fairly easy to catalogue what we learned each day and each week - or at least some of it.  We could collect the papers, slides, case studies and notes and say "I learned this".  Being an organised kind of chap, I meticulously maintined my notes and took satsfaction as they grew at the end of each week.  In my heart of hearts though, I knew that the "stuff" I was accumulating was just that, and that the real learning was coming from immersing myself in the world of business on a daily basis, from the people we met, the stories we heard and from the rest of the group.

Now I find myself on my placement at Sun it isn't so easy for me to update my catalogue of learning each week, as nearly everything I am learning is from the environment.  Having been here 6 weeks however I thought it was about time I took stock and considered what I have learned in my time here...

The purpose of this placement is for us to learn about doing business on a global scale, so it seems only fitting that I start there.  I had a preconception that the difficulty of working with a team distributed around the world would be all about differences in culture, language, difficulty of scheduling meetings and problems of local legislation and convention.  These are all certainly important problems that we grapple with on a day to day basis, but the real challenge I see is the communication of a shared vision.  Where there is a common view of what we are trying to achieve, the other issues become merely obstacles to overcome as a team.  For me, many of the conversations we had at Babson about storytelling and developing vision suddenly make a lot of sense in a very practical way.

Even without the complications of working outside the four walls of an office building, I see the difficulties that arise from lack of shared vision - and this is as often at the project level as the corporate one.  We have a project which is being run by a tools-focussed group for delivery to a process-focussed group.  The process people expect the new tools to support their processes.  The tools people expect processes to be adapted to fit a (clearly superior) tool.  Until we can get these two world views reconciled so that the teams have a shared understanding of the desired end point, communications will continue to be challenging due to the lack of a common frame of reference.  Futhermore, delegation is an impossibility if those to whom you wish to delegate don't really understand where the project is supposed to be going...

This has really brought home to me the difference between leadership and management, and the way in which they are distinct even if one person both leads and manages a project.  I'm not sure I can really claim this as a "new" learning since it is already there in my pile of notes from Babson, but the lesson is much more potent when you experience it directly in the real world.  In the concrete rather than the abstract.

In a more general sense I am also learning to be comfortable with sales and marketing processes in a way I simply was not before.  We had some great classes on this, but working day to day with the language of campaigns, leads, opportunities, pipelines and channels really helps to make sense of the theory. 

It has left me with some unresolved thoughts though (and I welcome comments on this).  An organisation the size of Sun can treat it's sales operation as a statistical process.  If we have 100 opportunities in the pipeline in different sectors and with different values, we have historical and competitor data on how many of those we would expect to win.  We can also compare data on the pipeline we get from marketing spend across time and the rest of the industry.  For a startup company it is very difficult to find valid comparisons, and especially before your first sale any predictions really are little more than guesswork. I hope that perhaps the second placement with a smaller company in Scotland will give me an insight into how startups manage sales forecasting in practice!

Reflecting I feel that this fellowship has helped me to take first steps on many roads; finance, sales management, and even leadership.  These may be small steps at the start of a long journey, but at least I feel I am in a position to go out and learn from experience.  The one thing I really haven't cracked yet is Sales.  In my consultancy days I made a few small or follow on sales, and I helped out with some cold calling of prospects with specific propositions, but I don't really have the battle-hardened confidence I would like to have.  This is something I really need to push myself on (I guess I'm a little scared of this challenge!) and hopefully opportunities will arise in the second placement.

I have ended up writing yet another essay - I promise to wrie a short blog post one day!  

In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny: "That's all folks!"

Ian