Thursday, September 23, 2010

#330 All-Employee Mtg

I was asked to give a short product update at the Cat Suzhou all-employee meeting this week. You can see me hard at work above making my presentation to the group. The woman on stage with me is Misty, our department secretary who acted as my translator.

We now have about 1000 employees at CSCL and the multi-purpose room holds only about 300 at a time, so we had to hold the meeting at four separate times over two days. I felt a bit like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog day as I kept reappearing to give the same presentation again and again.

You can see the audience's rapt attention as I share the progress on our new Wheel Loader field follow program and product cost reduction efforts. I especially like the guy in the second row with the gaping yawn as he claps.


I pulled out some simple Chinese to warm up the crowd and finished with a plea in Chinese that people with cost reduction ideas submit them to me. In China, a foreigner (me) attempting to speak Chinese to a group of locals can always earn some cheaps laughs and enthusiastic applause. I enjoyed receiving both.

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