Mayor Bloomberg tells Mac that he is wrong (and that too more than once)!!!
The Bronx Team were invited on July 25th, Tuesday to the NYC Mayor's Official Residence - Gracie Mansion - to attend the annual Mayor’s Volunteer Center BBQ . The fact that the current Mayor - Michael Bloomberg - has not stayed a single night during his term in this grand house speaks no less of his being amongst the world's 100 richest, as he supposedly uses the New York subway (to ride to 
City Hall only!).
After we managed to slip in the fact that we had come all the way from Oxford and established that he liked the British (his ex-wife is British and daughters have Brit passports), we had our official group pic with him. However, as we were not allowed to use our personal camera plus the fact that the boys tell me that we won't receive our copies for a coupla months...we resorted to extreme measures...aka the pic with Bloomberg in the far distance (on the mic)!
We then had the honour of Mac being one of four contestants to be chosen, from amongst a crowd of (literally) hundreds of interns, for a game of multiple questions that was hosted by the Mayor himself!
Sadly, Mac heard the phrase "you are wrong" thrice upon honking his horn!!! An instance - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2908978666478748315&pr=goog-sl!!! However, please note that Mac did get a Gracie Mansion white mug for his efforts :-)
Till our next adventure...laters from the steps of the Gracie Mansion!
- The Bronx Team
Ps - Mac, we are proud of you for standing up to those undergrads!!!
Infosys / Bangalore / India - Rollin' and Ridin' and Slippin' and Slidin'
Hi all!
Our team is getting more and more accustomed to India.
We've learned how to balance our food (i.e. one Indian dish per day max!, one Western dish per day min!...otherwise, you'll simply explode...both directions at the same time, if you know what I mean).
Also, we've learned to value the mild climate in Bangalore - especially in comparison to Delhi and Chennai (Madras).
And we've come to understand how priviledged we are to have Infosys' Campus as our base-of-operation and safe haven...we can go outside for the India-experience and then retreat to our hostel to recover and gather new energy. Find pics of Infosys' campus (here: Mysore) attached.
We still have to learn how to stay within our budget when it comes to donations to children and beggars (since they're everywhere and you cannot ignore them).
Two weeks ago, Rachael and Leslie went to Delhi/Agra (see pic of them in the front and the Taj in the back). Apart from the fantastic sights, the temperatures of 40+ Celsius and an overnight-stay at an Indian 3-star hotel made this trip a memorable experience.
At the same time, Alex went to Mysore, a smaller city south-west of Bangalore. Find a picture of the Maharadscha's Palace, and Alex with fellow interns on the Krishna Raja Sagara dam attached.
Meanwhile, Shawn stayed back in Bangalore and explored our hometown.
Last weekend, the four of us went to Chennai (Madras). We flew over on Friday night, and went to Mahabalipuram on Saturday which is south of Chennai on the coast to the Gulf of Benghal. "Mahabali" is a huge and beautiful place with a beautiful beach (dirty sea water) and various sights: temples, "Krishna's Butter Ball" (or "Krishna's Butter Balls", which we found more appropriate), and large reliefs carved out of stone. Find various pics from that trip.
What else? We've checked out India's nitelife - - and are disappointed since all clubs seem to close at around 11.30pm. Moreover, beer and other alcohol is hard to obtain. Not all restaurants have beer or alcohol on the menu, and, even worse, alcohol is strictly forbidden on campus. :-(
Outlook:
This weekend, we will have the opportunity to attend an Indian wedding! And we plan to spend the following weekend in Goa!
Team Peru ambushes Machu Picchu at dawn
You have to admire a civilization that can build something so beautiful and sophisticated in the middle of the jungle at the top of a frickin mountain…. Then it was abandoned for 500 years, overgrown by jungle, subjected to earthquakes every two years, and even today the walls fit together so perfectly that one can barely slip a piece of paper between the walls’ stones – which incidentally, are granite and were built without the help of mortar, iron, or steel. Some of the stones are so large they took 15,000 people to move.
Here’s the team in Cusco’s main plaza (photo courtesy of Señor Robert Mittelman), L to R: Sean Fauth, Nina Kriklewicz, and Cameron Kluth.
Oxford representing:
And the marketplace in Chinchero, where all the theory and practice of negotiation are coming in useful.
Team Peru is keeping their heads down working this week, but we will have a few more stories for you before it’s all said and done. We're heading to Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Lake Titicaca, hiking the Chacon Glacier, and descending into the Peruvian cloudforest/tropical rainforest in the Manu Biosphere Reserve, dodging armies of golf ball-sized mosquitoes.
VIDEO: A Day in the Life in Lagos
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The Oxford team is spending 8 weeks in Lagos on a consulting project with Access Bank. In the next 3 minutes, mcfaddenplace productions will take you to where the team, Jayne Thorpe, Lijun Jiang, Timothy Ojo, and Michael McFadden, are working diligently on their task at hand. Be on the watch out for a special guest appearance by Kelly McFadden.
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Nokia - Dubai and Oxford bound
The Nokia team will reunite later this week in the jewel of the Emirates, Dubai to present its findings to Nokia MEA. We expect this week to be one of the most challenging yet as we synthesise our discoveries and develop key recommendations for Nokia. Judging by the photos it has not been all work and no play.
Tim has purchased himself a stress relieving Hookah in Casablanca. Bing and Ankur enjoyed an off road desert excursion from Dubai and Doug visited a Lion Park outside Joburg.
Plus there is even more 'play' on the cards. The whole team is looking forward to being treated by Nokia to an afternoon of indoor snow skiing in Dubai this Thursday. Then it is back to Oxford for the big write up. We are all a litte tired of living out of a hotel and look forward to resuming normal pub routines back in Oxford.
Cheers all,
Tim, Bing, Ankur and Doug
Thirsty Thursdays
Workin' hard or hardly workin?
After a long day at the office or maybe just in the seminar rooms of SBS, the Oxford and London based SCP's have been gathering Thursdays in London. Here are some pics from week 2 Happy Hour. Bad British joke of the week: in route to I asked a bobby at Victoria station if he new where "The King's Arms" was. He replied "under his shoulders, I reckon."
Rumble in the Bronx!
Yo Yo Yo from the Bronx Team….cold chillin’ in effect! Hope you guys are doing well!! We are “hard” at work trying to understand and deliver medical insurance models for the uninsured employees of SMEs in the Empowerment Zone aka EZ (
http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/html/nyez.html) of the South Bronx in NYC.
We are working right next to the Yankee Stadium in the Bronx Borough President’s Office and are conveniently placed at the top floor with a terrace that allows us to peak into the games (yet to take advantage of that!). Here is a view of our building from the home subway station courtesy Josh’s keen eye and photographic skills (way off in the distance... the one that looks like a mausoleum)
With accommodation in (NYC’s Jesuit) Fordham University Bronx Campus, we are living right next to the Little Italy of the Bronx (amazing restaurants!!!), the Bronx Zoo, the Bronx Botanical Gardens while getting a chance to experience the cultures of the Hispanic, African American and Italian American populations! Check out the pic of ‘Mac – an Italian singer’ at the three day centennial celebration of a church in Little Italy. The pic does no justice to his energy, enthusiasm and engaging skills!
Back to talking about the project – we had the opportunity of visiting, along with a Nicaraguan delegation during closing hours (thank god for that!), the world’s second largest fish market which is next only to Tsukiji in Tokyo. Fulton Fish Market is located in the EZ and is operated as a co-operative in an $85 million, 400,000-square-foot indoor facility with 37 wholesalers and approximately 600 employees. The new outlay is supposed to increase efficiency and cut unloading time by 50 percent. Smelly but impressive venture to attract investors to the EZ!!
We also had the honour of celebrating Josh’s bday!!! This meant amazing ice cream
concoctions at ‘Stone Cold Creamery’ followed by the movie – You, Me and Dupree and then getting caught in torrential rains!
Till next time! Look forward to reading the adventures of everyone!
- The Bronx Team
Radioactivity is not that bad!
York based Xceleron has rolled out a great new technology to the pharma world, but who the hell is going to talk about that. The first thing I learnt in our meeting at York was that a banana contains about 1 nano curie dose of radioactivity, and when we go out on a sunny day for about 10 minutes, we are exposed to more than 100 nano curies dose of radioactivity - after all it is not that bad!
So get ready to try the new technology being marketed by Xceleron (details on special request :)
Into the third week now, the project is going tougher, and the tough are definitely getting going! The beauty of York could not be captured much during our first visit there, so look out for this space as we go to York in the first week of August to pay a visit to the beautiful cathedral. cheers!
Xceleron team
Living La Vida Lagos
An update from the team in Lagos...
The team has been working really hard. We are out of the house at 8am and often not back until 8pm - which are normal Nigerian banking hours. The picture on the left is our team standing at our front door on the way to work. The one below is command central - our office.
We will be sure to get another update soon, but we cannot access this website from our office. So for now, the best thing to do to find out about life here is to go to
http://mcfaddencircle.blogspot.com/ This is updated weekly.
Cheers from Lagos,
Team Access Bank
SAS Marketing Analytics
A quick update from one of the SAS project teams! We were lucky enough to head to Germany a few days before our kick-off 
meeting with SAS and managed to be in Germany the day that they won the third place match for the World Cup. We also managed to plan our overnight trip to Strasbourg to conveniently also be in France the night that they played in the final! The mood there was not as jovial after the game… but it was neat to be there anyway!
We had a good few days touring around Heidelberg and Strasbourg, drinking lots of beer and eating good portions of hearty German food – YUM! We saw castles and cathedrals and mostly tried to avoid the heat… thankfully there were many bars where we could find a refreshing drink.
On Wednesday we had our kick-off meeting with SAS for our project. We are working on a marketing analytics review. Basically our task is to investigate what types of marketing analytics SAS’s customers use and how sophisticated their usage of the different tools is. Apparently SAS thinks we will get a straighter answer than they would if they asked the question. Probably true!
So now we are back in Oxford, enjoying the sun and warmth, and working to more clearly define the objectives and approaches for our project. Should prove to be an interesting few weeks!
We hope everyone else is doing well – and hope to see those of you who are in Oxford!
-Kristin
Nokia - Connecting people, disconnecting people, reconnecting people.
Connecting People: The Nokia team has been hard at it since Tuesday July 5th with Ankur Bahl and Bing Ji in Dubai (photos coming soon) and with Doug Waller and Tim Robinson in Casablanca (see photo of Tim to the left).
Disconnecting People: Doug aka "First World Waller" moved to Johannesburg on Friday July 14th in search of people who speak english and play rugby (photos coming soon), leaving Tim to transform into his alter ego "Mr Morocco". The Donkey is a common sight on the busy roads of Morocco. Tim picked this one up from a used donkey salesman for super price and 2 year service warranty. The cart was thrown into the deal at no extra cost.
Reconnecting People:
The team reunites in Dubai on Friday July 29th to present its findings to Nokia. We look forward to seeing all the Oxford based SCP people on or after August 1st.
All the best,
Tim, Ankur, Bing and Doug.
ProWorld - Peru
Hola amigos!
We are spending the summer in the sacred valley of the Inca, the Urubamba Valley, six miles from Machu Picchu, helping ProWorld Service Corps account for new competitors, manage cashflows, and devise a new marketing strategy. ProWorld is a service NGO in Peru, Belize, and Mexico that fosters education, healthcare, ecology, women’s rights, and development projects like building schools and more efficient wood stoves.In the mean time, we’re binging on guinea pig, alpaca risotto, and the national drink of Peru – pisko sours (to which we have callously stolen the grape brandy and egg white recipe and will be smuggling it back to Oxford).
Here in the ‘Bamba, we have been exceptionally lucky with accommodation.
Our house is centrally located, 3 bedrooms, all tile and dark wooden beams, house-wide sound system (replete with record player!), hot water, and large common room and kitchen. The backyard is a walled in courtyard with about 20 fruit trees/rose bushes, a place for bonfires, a grill we're still figuring out, and a hammock overlooking an Andean Mountain vista. The weather is so hot during the day, you can sunbathe in shorts, and so cold at night you need thermal layers and a down sleeping bag.
Here are a few pictures from our hike yesterday up “the Two Towers.” For a few more pictures, check out http://www.cameronkluth.com/peru.html.On the weekends, we have a few reconnaissance trips planned. Half the team is touring the Inca ruins of nearby cities this weekend, and the other half is living it up in Cusco, our “big city.”
Next week, we are tackling Machu Picchu, and the weekend following that is either Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca or Peru’s Nazca lines/mummies. The big trip later this summer will be an expedition into the cloud rainforest of Peru (where a competitor of ProWorld also lurks) in the Manu Biosphere Reserve, a park half the size of
Switzerland and supposedly the most biodiverse place on earth. Other team members are more swayed by the prospects of Buenos Aires, Argentina….Over and out,
Team Peru
Yahoo! there we go
After many hitches and false starts, half of team Y! have now gone to California to rehaul all of the Yahoo! processes, rewrite their business model and solve the worlds problems. Not really, but Venkat and Debanjan left on Sunday, David leaves on Wednesday and Vaniah next Sunday. Phew!
However, we have been doing some work over the last two weeks - here's a snap from one of our sessions, trying to decide the best way forward...
Team Infineon in Munich
Going for the SCP to Germany in the final week of the World Cup. What else would you expect than starting with some pictures from our outings to the public viewing spaces.
Big screens on the river
and partying with the Italians after telling them that we are friends of Marco Riggio...
After several months of Domino pizza and Kebabs, the traditional German food was well received by our team.
Infineon team with the bull next to the Frankfurt stock exchange.
Rolf totally rebranded...
...before looking to his future office on the top floor of the European Central Bank.
Now back to business: COMPASS is the name that we gave our project: we will look to future trends in the semiconductor industry and derive strategic recommendations with a 5 year time horizon.
Our office is located in a brand new location (Infineon moved to a new campus half a year ago) with an artificial lake, a small shopping mall and a fitness centre (pictures will follow later). People are great, the sun is shining and most of the upcoming weekends are already blocked for sightseeing ...
All the best from Munich,
Carsten, Martin, Rolf, Tomas
Formway Team: Finding Fat Rabbits
We flew 12.5 hours to LA, and 10 hours to New Zealand. 30 minutes before landing our plane was diverted from Auckland to Christchurch due to fog. Instead of waiting around in the airport all day, we decided to rent a car and head for the slopes.
Now we have been in Wellington, our home base, for about a week. The road was rained out a couple of days, but otherwise things have run smoothly. Gion-Otto has managed to charm all of the locals and has been averaging about 2.5 "zingers" per day. Some of our favorites have been:
"socks and spoons always go missing" -to the production manager at a factory
"in New Zealand we can go skiing for an apple and an egg"- to the team
"in business, it's quite nice to know if you make a profit or not" -to the head of accounting
Gion-Otto has also been hunting for fat wabbits in helping us devise a strategy.
India Planning Commission - Delhi
“How can you make sense of this land? It's like emptying an ocean with a spoon.”
-- Anita Pratap describing India
Namaste! Greetings from your humble Planning Commission crew in Delhi. We arrived last Thursday and have been basking in the sights and sounds that contrast, confuse and delight. Our adventures have included a visit to colorful Indian markets full of spices, fabrics and food, evening rickshaw rides through Delhi’s bumpy roads, a driving tour of the President’s house, Parliament and Defense Building, exposure to Hindi and Punjabi pop music, a Bollywood movie night, and of course, the amazing Indian cuisine. 
I am currently obsessed with paneer tikka but that might only last until our next delicious lunch. Don’t be fooled, though. We ARE working hard! We arrived on Thursday from the airport to be greeted by stacks of documents for our reading pleasure. Thanks Planning Commission! Whilst we have our work cut out for us, we are thrilled to be here. 
Infosys - India
Hi everybody! We hope that you are all enjoying your SCP as much as we do (Leslie, Rachael, Shawn, Alex)!
How is India? We don't know, I guess - and we may never find out....but it's certainly about the monsoon, food (not only Chicken Tikka Masala), millions of different smells and aromas, jungle, chaos, traffic, pollution, incredibly friendly and open people - - contrasts.
The pic above gives you an idea of our weekend trip to Cochin in Kerala, which Infosys had organized for us and about 60 more student interns.
We boarded a train in Bangalore and traveled for 10 hours (sleeper wagon...yep, there were bugs...) through the night to Cochin. We spend the weekend there, in Kerala ("God's own country"), and discovered some of the differences between the South and, well, Bangalore. It was wonderful and we had a very good time.
Rachael, Shawn and I then cheated and took a flight back to Bangalore... But Leslie showed bravery (go Oxford!) and took the train back to Bangalore...we arrived last night at 10pm, she arrived this morning at about 5am - and was back in the office by 10am....kudos to her! ;-)
Cisco Emerging Markets Project
Though not as exciting as the projects in India or Bing in Dubai for Nokia, the Cisco Emerging Markets Project kicked off on Tuesday July 4th. Our project is focused on developing a model that analyzes emerging markets. Not to bore you with the details, let's talk about the fun stuff- notable mentions - Cisco being Cisco, it has advanced facilities (videoconferencing, hi-tech everything), huge selection of great food for breakfast and gourmet lunch, and wonderful views from the campus.
Public Sector Consulting - IBM
We started our SCP Wednesday with 2 days in Swansea, Wales. We are working with IBM Business Solutions as part of a 10 year contract with a client there. We toured the facilities and had meetings to get a better understanding of current processes and operations as well as our project.
For a team that has no one who has driven in the UK I think we did pretty well on the 3 hour drive. Siva did a great job with all those round-abouts!
Before heading home on Thursday, we drove down the shore to an area called Mumbles for lunch. Here are some pictures.
The Bronx Team were invited on July 25th, Tuesday to the NYC Mayor's Official Residence - Gracie Mansion - to attend the annual Mayor’s Volunteer Center BBQ . The fact that the current Mayor - Michael Bloomberg - has not stayed a single night during his term in this grand house speaks no less of his being amongst the world's 100 richest, as he supposedly uses the New York subway (to ride to 
City Hall only!).
We then had the honour of Mac being one of four contestants to be chosen, from amongst a crowd of (literally) hundreds of interns, for a game of multiple questions that was hosted by the Mayor himself!
