Recently in corporate life Category

Term is starting for Mandarin evening classes and I had better dust off last year's work and see if any of it is still lodged in my long-term memory. Of the class of eight, only two of us decided to sit, and happily pass, the GCSE exam at the end of last term.

My two speeches on "My holiday in California" and "My favourite sports" (this latter a tissue of lies), which I rehearsed diligently for weeks and thought would be stuck in my brain till my dying day, are now but a distant memory. My insights into why Wayne Rooney is a top footballer are sadly lost to posterity.

Watching the table tennis team of the People's Republic of China at the London 2012 Olympics, the Blog's daughter asked if ping pong started in China. I'm not sure if it did, I told her, but I certainly said it did in my GCSE speech for the oral exam. It was a great eye-opener to learn from the teacher that, "it doesn't have to be true." It is so much easier to give a presentation if the facts don't have to be true.

Since I now have half a GCSE in Mandarin, I change my LinkedIn profile to "Mandarin - Limited Proficiency."

From time to time, my ICIS Asian colleagues ask how the Mandarin is coming along. I tell them about my holidays and they look at me blankly. I think it will be a long time till we can talk about petrochemical markets.

"You'll hate the commute," my ICIS suburban colleagues warned me when I told them I was moving to work in central London. My new office is on the corner of Trafalgar Square (site of today's Olympic Victory Parade), and it takes a fair bit longer to travel there each day.

And it's on public transport, so I will be catching colds and moaning about delays and the expense and over-crowding...

Still, one week in, and I'm enjoying the time on the train to read. I like the ten minute walk over the new Golden Jubilee Bridge in the early morning. The view from the bridge in the blazing sunshine every day in the last week has been uplifting and energising.

Once the winter comes, I will treat the morning journey as if it is a day's walking in the Highlands of Scotland: sensible shoes, waterproof clothing with a hood, gloves. Between entering my office building and getting in the shiny lift in the atrium, I will undergo a Cinderella-like transformation, emerging unrecognisable.

(Photo: view from the bridge, walking to work last week.)

It turns out that one of my colleagues is a trained flight attendant. She knows how to deliver a baby, deal with drunks and passengers with flight-phobia, as well as smile all day and put her hair up neatly.

I was on the same flight with her only once, when we flew into Berlin together for EPCA, and her luggage was lost somewhere between connecting flights. I was unaware of her relevant background then, or I'd have been watching her reactions more closely.

As I remember, she did not seem very concerned about attending a conference without her luggage. She borrowed a jacket and away she went.

Not like another conference attendee (let's call him D) who found himself at APIC in KL this year without luggage, and managed within three hours of landing to get out and buy himself a suit, two shirts, tie, shoes and full accessories - all later reclaimed on travel insurance.

(photo: Rex)

Mike Cromack has been appointed Global Business Director for Aromatic Feedstocks, and Rafael Cayuela has moved to become European Commercial Manager for Aromatics at Styron Europe, focusing on both styrene monomer and benzene.

The moves are the result of Chatchai's departure to take up a senior commercial leadership role in the SCG-Dow Group, a joint venture company between The Siam Cement Public Company Limited and The Dow Chemical Company in Thailand, the company announced in an email to the Blog on 16 July.

Rafael Cayuela's former responsibilities as European Butadiene Commercial Manager will be passed back to Anamaria Cioanca who will now have the newly configured role of European Butadiene Commercial Manager and Global Raw Materials Purchasing Manager for the Rubber business. 

Roof gardens created by expandable polystyrene (Styrofoam) roof insulation are advertised by Dow in today's glossy AFPM special publication. It is part of the continuing trend for petchem companies to promote the green credentials of petrochemicals.

The AFPM magazine, produced by ICIS, is being given away to delegates in the petchem conference delegate pack.

Polimeri Europa has changed its name to Eni Versalis, the Blog heard on a company visit today.

The new name was made public by Eni's chief executive officer Paolo Scaroni on 15 March 2012 in a speech outlining the company's strategy for 2012-2015.

"To reflect the new strategy we have renamed the business Eni Versalis. It will be

expertly led by Daniele Ferrari, who joins us with 25 years of experience at ICI and

Huntsman," Scaroni said.

Ferrari had originally announced the planned name change in a speech to GPCA in December, but had not revealed the names under consideration, according to an article in ICIS Chemical Business (ICB).

Guy Keymolen of Vopak Belgium is moving to the company's Houston office, he informed business partners by email yesterday.

Keymolen, who was at Vopak Belgium for six years, will become Vopak Global Account Director based in Houston, Texas.

His role as commercial manager will be filled by Birgit Henderickx, formerly sales manager at Vopak Belgium.

"Preparation, preparation, preparation" - are the three most important points in giving a successful presentation. It is the equivalent of the property world's "location, location, location." But where to do that preparation? That is the question.

In the office with your peers? In the AV theatre? At home to your unimpressed family? How about on a plane, where you shouldn't even be reading sensitive material (Code of Conduct, section 4) in full view of adjacent strangers?

Even the most experienced presenter needs a few runs through to make sure there are no obvious mistakes and that the slides segue smoothly from one thought to the next.

One speaker at a past Aromatics Conference told me that he had gathered together all the staff in his Rotterdam building, not just once but twice, to practise his paper before the big event.

Another aromatics speaker told the audience that he had just thrown the paper together that morning, and I could believe it as he shambled through it.

Once the presentation has been submitted, that is the time to rehearse, but deep in every presenter's heart is the desire to put it off. It is like exam revision. One colleague told me that she had had her speech sitting on her desk for a week, taken it home for the weekend, brought it back to the office, taken it home again, and still hadn't been able to force herself to look at it until a couple of days before the event.

So here I am, sitting on the plane, with a print-out of my slides held together with a bulldog clip sitting on my lap. I would rather be reading "Heidi," which I downloaded (free) onto my Kindle this morning to imbibe a bit of Swiss culture. Unfortunately, every reading of the presentation reveals questions which will need further online research. Luckily, there are three days to go, so there is still plenty of time to knock it into shape.

(photo: Rex)

Most people are scared of public speaking, rating it up there with divorce, bereavement and moving house as one of life's most stressful events. Really it is not that bad after the first few.

The best kind of presentation is one you have done before, or at least one that is not very different to previous ones. The familiarity and the memory of previous good deliveries, turn the ordeal into an almost pleasant experience.

By contrast, the worst kind of presentation is delivering someone else's material. From friends' horror tales, it is clear that this scenario has a high potential for disaster. "I looked at your slide and my mind went completely blank," one told me.

One thing the Blog has learnt in recent weeks is that the worst kind of slides to borrow are ones involving Chinese petchem plant capacities. Never, never borrow slides showing figures or graphs for Chinese production, because they will keep you up late into the night trying to work out whether these are in thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions.  

In China it is commonplace to talk in tens of thousands (wan), so a 5 on a graph with no explanation is most likely to mean 50,000 tonnes. But a slide borrowed from an English-speaking colleague may or may not already be converted into thousands (ie 5 = 5,000).  It is the road to ruin, and the only solution is to take the slides out before anyone notices.

(photo: Rex)