It is almost one year since I started as a management trainee at Handheld. I remember how exciting it was to enter the office and meeting all my great colleagues. The first month me and Christian spent most of our time in the conference room with colleagues who educated us in products, logistics, organisational structure, strategy and much more. During that time a hunger grew to go out and implement everything we learned and believe me, we got that chance. After only 5 week we went to Cebit in Hannover, this was our first chance to meet with customers and potential customers. From Cebit and all the way through the program we worked with sales and different internal projects. The program has taken us through many European countries and to USA.

In USA we have really been tested, our main task here has been sales and business development but at the same time we are managing projects in Sweden. I can tell you that it is not always easy to do this from the other side of the earth. It has been a very good experience to meet clients here and to see the variety of ways than conduct meetings in, I have held presentations in everything from nice board rooms to sitting in a diner and showing products between dishes. I have realized that you cant sell in a standardized way, you need to adapt to situations and to customers.

Right now we are wrapping up our work here in USA and prepare to leave for Sweden. A year goes by very fast, I am looking forward to starting a new one at Handheld and also starting my new postion (more on this later).

Merry Christmas everyone!

/Johan

Time is flying and the end of the trainee program is coming to an end.

I have been in the US for approx 3 months now and it’s been a great experience with hard work, laughter, and a lot of travelling. I have been in charge for the business development for the Southern US market so you can imagine the traveling I have done during 11 weeks now.  The great memories that I’ll take with me involve for example morning surf in La Jolla, San Diego, saying grace with a customer in the desert :-), and having a nice coffee break among the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

Both Johan and I have been working very hard and it’s been paying off so we can leave US with our heads held high! We are about to finalise our project and looking forward to a nice Christmas party with not only our American colleagues but also people from HQ and their families.

Our Company Owner flew over to US in the beginning of November to discuss our future at Handheld. The positions are not official so I won’t be able to mention the outlook yet but what I can say is that it is a great program and hard work really pays off.

Happy thanksgiving!

Christian

Three weeks back in Sweden, India already seems like a long gone dream, especially last week when the first snow for the season fell in Stockholm. Once again I’m amazed by the ease with which I have adjusted back to life as I’m used to it; no more hotel, no more driver, no more Indian colleagues, no nice weather, just plain old Sweden.

Leaving India

Four weeks ago I did my last working day at Uninor in Bangalore. My last day was in many ways “business as usual”, presenting my last project to 30 people, but in many ways very special. First thing in the morning outside where I lived, I was surprised by a truck (a movable ad) announcing that I was leaving with a big picture of me on the side. Later the same day a radio station called me and had me wish for a good bye song. All of this is the credit of the remarkable Uninor Marketing Communication team in Bangalore; you are the greatest colleagues and friends. Together with the rest of everyone in the Bangalore office you made my half year in Bangalore incredible. The last six months, I have done things I never would have imagined, I have learnt things I never thought I needed to know and I have a change mindset leaving India. India is truly an incredible nation with great potential for a long time to come. I would love to come back and work in India again.

Back home

Leaving Bangalore meant coming back home to Sweden. As every time I have lived abroad before, I’m always surprised by how easy it is to readjust to “the old”, in my case living and working in Stockholm again. And even though I miss India, it’s great to be back home. Since two weeks I’m back working in the Telenor Sweden office in Stockholm, now working in a group called Channel Management in the Consumer Marketing Department. This time my task is to optimize our portfolio of handsets. A task that will continue throughout the whole last module of my third and last trainee assignment, in March I will no longer be a trainee. Even though the Indian and the Swedish cellular markets are very different, my experience from working in marketing and sales in India will come in handy. I’m once again in for new and exciting challenge!

More about that next time!

Handhelds IMTP involves both national as well as international presence.  So far I have been exposed to numerous European countries while also being Country Manager for an Asian country.

It’s been approximately 9 months since I started at Handheld, and 9 incredibly interesting months.

I’m currently in USA where we finalize our program. I’m still working on a few projects that were established earlier this year but the main focus here in the US is to boost our presence on the US market. Our US subsidiary has been in business for almost 3 years now and it is extremely interesting, challenging and fun to be a part of something rather new and successful.

My main task while I’m in the US is to segment, evaluate and establish business partnerships with the most potential business partners for Handheld. So right now I’m in San Francisco where I had a few meetings + Trade Shows and now on my way to catch up with a few mates from Australia and go and watch the San Francisco Giants play baseball. Next week I will be in San Diego…

Hey!

Two weeks in US we are finally starting to get into the american lifestyle. After one and a half week in the office I have finally started to travel around and visiting partners and potential partners. Right know I am sitting at a Starbucks in Seattle, the sun is shining and my white Mustang is standing outside. Soon I will head downtown an grab some dinner before I go to the hotel to work some more.

I really enjoy working like this, instead of spending most of the time in the office I have gone mobile… As long as I can find a internet connection (and coffee) I can work.

This was just a short breifing, a longer “novell” is coming this WEEKEND after the football game between OSU and Arizona. Go Beavers!

Have a nice week!

Now me and Christian has set up shop in USA. We work from a small city called Corvallis, the city has around 50 000 people and around half of them are students at Oregon State University.

After a long flight we managed to get through customs at the airport and got pick up by Mike Zellman, VP of Business Development at Handheld. Mike showd us around and took us out for food and drinks. After this and a visit to the office to meet Amy Urban who is Director of Marketing me and Christian went home and passed out.

The next day we got the task to build our own office with desk, chairs, etc. This took a while but after a few (read many) hours we where done. After that we went to pick up our company car, the car was apparently in the work shop. How do you solve this? You solve it by taking a Mustang instead of the other car! Happy as few we felt that we should take the car for a drive and drove 56 miles (90 km) to Woodburn to buy some clothes.

After three days of work it was time for our first weekend in US. On Saturday we went one more time to Woodburn to buy some more clothes and on our way back we decided that we needed to join a gym. We found one close to were we live, Timberhill Athletics Club. This was a really nice training facility with squash, basketball, gym and pool. The only thing left to do nos is to actually go and work out at the gym. On Sunday we took the car and headed for Newport to check out some nice surf spots and we can tell that it looked nice! We will head out there next weekend to do some surfing.

This is all for now, see you again soon!

/Johan

ITM, Exportstiftelsen

It hit me that you might wonder how the theoretical training is provided and by whom. Handheld decided to let ITM Exportstiftelsen provide the theoretical training during the 12 months trainee period. This decision was made due to the fact that the trainees receive an outside perspective where we apply Handheld as a real-time case during the 12 diverse seminars.

The seminars that ITM offer include e.g. International Trade Management, International Payment & Financing, and International Law. You might think that “oh I have already done those” but so have I and I can assure you that these seminars are highly valuable since the professors are incredibly talented, reputable and have extensive work experience. These seminars are held by industry professionals and reputable professors from all across the world.

The idea behind ITMs concept is to offer SMEs a full trainee program similar to the trainee programs offered by large corporations. ITM offer 4 different concepts where we are enrolled in the “International Management Trainee” program. So, ITM assist Handheld with most of the recruitment process along with theoretical training during the trainee period. We just finished our last seminars and received a diploma from ITM which is also a part of the Executive MBA program that ITM will offer in a short period of time.  Below I have attached the link to ITMs webpage. http://www.itmworldwide.org/Default.aspx?objectID=80

Ps just arrived in the US, will talk more about that in the next post…

Christian

Update

I recently got back from a wonderful vacation and thrown straight back into all the exciting projects and vital milestones that Q3 & Q4 entails.

First, I can gladly announce that Johan & I finished a rather large project, the ISO Certification Project. The ISO certification process was a great learning curve since we were exposed to the entire organisations internal and external processes. It’s also been a key milestone for a growing company like ours! The project took roughly 6 months and I managed the qualitative parts while Johan managed the environmental parts simultaneously. In Sweden we certified 3 companies, Handheld Group, Handheld Europe, and Handheld Scandinavia. Please let me know if you want thorough explanations on the actual organisational structure. While we can put “check” on the ISO project we have more projects under development and even more coming up. These projects involve new revolutionising products, organisational structure and lots more. This is going to be an interesting year 🙂

The next milestone is a move to the US in September. In roughly two weeks, Johan and I will catch the flight to Corvallis, Oregon to start a new journey at the Handheld US subsidiary.  More on this is coming up…

India never stops to amaze me. During the last few weeks I had the opportunity to explore Kerala, the southwest most state of India, start working with a new group of people at work and celebrate my birthday Indian style. All memories for life.

Vacation
Before coming to India I had a very simplified view of this country, for even though it is a country I have come to realize that one must think of it more as a continent. My vacation to Kerala, one of the smaller Indian states on the southwest coast of India, opened up yet a new world within India. The nature is greener than I have ever seen anywhere before, yet another language apart from English and Hindi is spoken and the culture seem to be slightly different, may it be because Kerala has the highest literacy rate of all of India, at almost 100%? Anyhow I had a great week in Kerala, seeing how tea is made, travelling the backwater channels along the Arabic Sea coast and relaxing on the beach of the Arabic Sea, all in all a great break from intense work.

Retail 2.0
The last month I have been the project manager for a project we call Retail 2.0; taking the next steps within our retail business. Essentially the project focuses on going from a state of launching new stores into a state of operational excellence, not a very easy task since everyone needs to be onboard and aligned towards the same goal, everyone from store managers and store sales executives as well as backend support functions and retail management. After an initial month we are starting to see some accomplishments but there is still a long way to go. Before I leave India in end of September we will have finished this project and I’m hoping to leave retail in a much better place than it was when I came here. 🙂

Tea bushes in Munnar and Chinese fish nets in Cochin, both in Kerala.

House boat and backwater channel ferry, Kerala.

Indian cab and a lit Mysore palace at night.

Birthday celebration Indian style. No comments 🙂