What a whirlwind of a past 18 hours or so. Zubir are in Lisbon airport – me in the TAP lounge and Zubir shopping before our flight leaves to London. Yati (Thee) and Intan had an early start as they are en route to London. Fara and Yati are also already off on their European travels. Elsie spends another day in Lisbon before heading to London and who knows where Mike is going.
I still can’t quite believe that we have come second in this major competition – Zubir was just replaying a conversation he had about the budget for the Aviva Customer Cup – and I am glad I didn’t know before! We do have a job to do now – we must document what has been done so that it can be shared and we must identify ways of taking it forward and delivering more. We need to do this to convince next years judges that we can deliver before a Malaysian team is selected again. But this is for later…..now is the time to share with you some of the fun and antics of the Awards dinner – and there was plenty going on!
Pooooof – I am now sat in MAS lounge in London – this is like time travel! (Just checked my bag again and I still haven’t broken the trophy!) Funnily enough I am sat down writing this and Zubir is – guess what? – shopping again. Anyway I have an hour or so to get this done and post some photos for you as I’d like you to have this tomorrow (Friday).
So – evening was brilliant – started off with cocktails on the terrace area with everyone looking dressed up to the tees – especially us. We were definitely the most colourful and sophisticated of the attendees…..i reckon even Simon wished he was dressed up properly like us. unfortunately he couldn’t be as he was the event MC for the evening. My sampin did not fall off so a big thank you to Zubir and Intan – I have learnt something new.
He was sat at our table and as soon as we discovered that he was MC Elsie was probing and testing him – she quickly squirreled out of him the face that he had the envelope in his breast pocked. I’m pretty sure she even went as far as trying to pickpocket him – either that of he was swatting a fly off his jacket – good try Elsie but Simon gave absolutely nothing away.
The meal flew by and soon we were listening to Amanda introducing Simon who in turn introduced Andrew. Andrew bought us all up to date on the corporate news ie New York SE listing, Delta Lloyd, Australia sale and the management reshuffle all leading into the share price. He managed this in less than 5 mins as he knew the attention was elsewhere. He then said that he wanted to get on with the main event quickly while the energy was high – as in 10 mins 90% of the people present would know that they were losers – (groans from the HR people). He then went on to say that he didn’t really believe in all this “everyone is a winner rubbish” -there was only one winner tonight (HR people writhing in agony on the floor). Of course this was very light hearted as all the teams assembled are already the winners – but for me the message did hit home – there was a genuine winner – the best team – and they would get all the glory. It has to be this way as we all want a piece of that next year.
So Simon took us through the Sponsor and Coach of the year which I won’t detail as you won’t know them. The short list of Captain of the year was projected and our Yati was there. 10 seconds later Yati was the Captain of the year – everyone was on their feet and Yati approach the stage. 10 more second later Yati was lapping it up / taking her bows and everyone cheering. What a moment! I think I have some of that on my camcorder which I will try and edit so anyone interested can see.
What does it mean? Well Sponsor and Coach are important of course. The captain though has to drive the project forward over some months. This she has done and will no doubt remind me during our Q3 performance review. The other important part though is the event itself – keeping the team aligned, together and switched on and – most importantly – making sure the 10 min performance is the best that it can be. In sporting terms this award is similar to the MVP – most valuable player – person of the tournament. This is what she won – and to the acclaim of the other participants. That says it all!
The the team awards. I confess I was nervous. I am naturally optimistic – and I had told Yati and Elsie (and perhaps the others) that I was 100% confident that they had got themselves into the top 3. So I was very worried that if the expectations set and we didn’t achieve that then it would be a real downer. Simon explained that 2 second placed teams were inseparable so a joint second would be awarded – at which point I think I stopped breathing. So it was sort of a relief when I heard Infinity mentioned first – relief that we had done it – and some disappointment that we hadn’t crowned all the hard work with a victory. But the cheering soon got me up on my feet and I think I was grinning for the next 2-3 hours. The Polish team also joined us – also outsiders and the RAC team were announced to thunderous cheering.
Just a little bit of context for some of you on how well we have done. There were originally 400 teams across Aviva which entered. One hundred teams made the semi finals. These 100 teams went through a rigorous scoring and Infinity scored 84%. This was the lowest score to make the final (shared by one other team). Once we had this information the project was already complete – there was no more content we could add. So our game plan was simply to deliver a HUGE 10 minute performance will as much PASSION as we could muster. When Phil came to coach us he agreed this to be the best tactic. Our approach was to get into the presentation (ie make it 3d not just a 2d ppt) and to get the audience participating. This is what we did and we gained 8 places on our performance. If this isn’t incredible enough you have to remember all the teams were trying to do the same!
HUGE effort, HUGE achievement, HUGE team
We’re getting ready to go now so I’ll quickly add some photos. This is my penultimate blog posting and I will post one more on Saturday will my final reflections and then leave it to the team.
Have a great weekend everyone!
Evening gets under way

Real new friends everywhere

Lots of fun



Zubir beginning to seriously lose his sense of humour about the size of the portions over the week (this not a joke – this was his meal! My venison and mash potatoes was lovely though

H1N1 rumour..

Gritting of teeth and waiting

Except for Mike who is impervious to tension….


Yati – apparently calm and serene before the big moment (at least on the exterior)


Here we go – get on with it guys!


First one – team building activity

Tension building

Cometh the moment, cometh the Yati



The whole team on stage, dressed in traditional attire, with Andrew Moss (left) and Simon Machell (right).

Mike now really on a roll… (and on a slope again ed.)

Yati, another hero and trophy

The awards





Final thought – this blog will soon be closing down. What I will arrange is for a hard copy to be created – if you have any comments, thoughts, messages, reflections, observations, jokes etc – now is the time to leave them so that they can be immortalised as part of Team Infinity Aviva Customer Cup 2009 adventure.