- Posted by jbehrendt on September 8, 2009
Sitting on my desk in Istanbul and watching the clouds above the Bosphorus, it seems I have to realize that summer starts to fade. Now it is more than one week that I returned from the sunny South of Turkey, punished for a seemingly eternal holiday by mountains of work on my table. Last week I made another trip to Germany for the kickoff of the post-closing and migration project that has to follow the successful approval of the two carve-outs for the German retailer we worked on for the last 18 months. Watching the project manager for the kickoff project struggling to align the interests and resource limits of the members of his 14 (!) subprojects, I felt incredibly happy not to be fully responsible for the migration any longer - my role is reduced to that of a co-projectmanager supervising the successful implementation of the agreements made within the carve-out contracts. The only additional responsibility is being the project manager for a small project intending to review and probably redraw the intra-group contracts between the newly established joint venture company and other companies within the group under strict consideration of the arm's length principle. The establishment of intra-group licensing contracts for the brands used within the group is part of this small project as well.
The good part of it is that I hopefully do not need to continue my weekly two- or three-day visits to Germany, which were sometimes very tiring. Waking up at 4.30 in the morning, attending meetings the same day starting at 10.00 and reaching into the evening, continuing with meetings the full next day and returning only midnight at that second day was not always fun. Now these visits can hopefully be thinned out a little bit, decreasing them to one-day visits (ok, that will be even more tiring, but only for one day), or for a trip every second week - and it should not take more than a couple of months to complete it.
However, the additional time I thought I have gained disappeared always immediately when I returned from holidays. Couple of weeks ago we have one another project, a restructuring project for a nearly-bankrupt company we intend to save, in Turkey, which requires a lot of time and attention - plus our ongoing marketing and sales activities are filling my schedule faster than expected.
How will we go on with our blog? Well, our special topic or category "Retail Restructuring Project" can be closed; the project is completed, and most of the post-closing activities are rather of a technical nature. Interestingly, I received a lot of comments like "nice blog, especially the part when you were speeding on a German motorway", or "I liked to read about your one-day trip from Datca to Germany". It seems these issues were read more carefully then the technical explanations related to taxation, arm's length principle, workers rights, etc. ....
Ok, let's face it, not everybody is interested in becoming a tax or legal expert by reading blogs. So we will continue with this blog - but this time not focussing on an indiviudal project and its progress, but rather by providing impressions on our daily life as management consultants, joggling with several projects at the same time.
Our blog will therefore continue with a new category, with a slighly modified design, and with a Turkish version in addition to the English one. Hopefully we can complete the technical modifications soon and start the new blog. Stay with us for the new stuff - we will keep you posted about
"The life of a management consultant in Turkey".