Some observations....

1. Getting out of work at 7pm is considered leaving early

2. You comment on the waiting time at McDonalds as "lead time."

3. The same McDonalds burger is referred to as a deliverable.

4. You use the word paradigm in every day life.

5. The act of loading the dishwasher is now referred to as "Kitchen Process re-engineering"

6. Every trip on metro requires complex analysis beforehand involving business frameworks.

7. You know every single powerpoint shortcut.

8. You understand the complex workings of the office printer better than IT support

9. Excel is still a mystery to you.

10. Your only deliverable for the weekend is clean laundry.

Just some odd observations regarding my life so far at Bayer Business Consulting! I simply cannot believe 3 weeks have already zipped on by!

I'll finally detail a little bit more about my project. I'm supporting a consulting team on what's called Bayer's Working Capital Initiative. Currently there are three consultants, a project manager and a partner on my project. Effectively the project is about improving the financial position of Bayer. The press release link at the bottom of the page explains it better but here is a quote from it:

In an ordinary household, people wouldn't stockpile hundreds of reams of printer paper for the next ten years. Rather than hoarding such unnecessary quantities, they might either invest the money for make other important purchases.

Simply put firms need money to work and this is called cashflow. Sometimes though they have money locked up in various things. Take a newsagent, he has the money in his till, but he has also ordered a whole stockpile of chocolate. He would rather have money in his till then an extra box of chocolate in his store. It is this cashflow that companies need to compete. Bayer has kept quite a strong position despite the recession so by adding funds it could use it for acquisitions for instance. The aim is to release 1 billion extra euros into cashflow in the Bayer group which for any company is quite a serious amount! The project its fairly wide ranging affecting all of Bayer's sub groups (Bayer Healthcare, Bayer CropScience and Bayer Material Sciences) and affects every single Bayer entity across the world. So naturally there is a lot of pressure on the team to keep this moving.

In terms of day to day work a consulting intern is primarily slide making. These might be for instance working with a client to design slides to present to another client. Again i'm not sure whether I can detail what these slides are about but needless to say i'm an expert at powerpoint by now! The hours once again are long by UK standards, with most consultants leaving after 7 in the evening. This is not forced upon you though, it's just merely the work ethic of the Bayer consultants who really will do everything in their power to get the job done, and get it done well!

On a last note, i've also learnt once again the power of networking this week. I spoke to one of the partners at the start about a future career interest of mine which is somewhat in the CSR/Social Consultancy field and I also asked i'd love to see if there was anything there. Whilst he said my project was important and he didn't want to divert me from that I have been given additional analysis to do regarding CSR trends and its relation to Bayer. I'll detail more about this in the next post though....

For now Aufwiedersien!

Link to more details about the Working Capital Initiative: http://www.bnc.bayer.com/bayer/bnci.nsf/id/0102E18F5A3207F1C12575C9003D698E?open&l=EN&ccm=900010020