Hello everyone, and welcome to my blog!
I just recently joined McKinsey and finished EMBARK, our learning program for new hires. About 50 of us from the Greater China office gathered in Shanghai to familiarize ourselves with McKinsey’s mission and values, master the problem-solving approach, and have a lot of fun! In the photo above, my team is building a parrot-themed pizza restaurant with Legos to learn about the principles of design thinking.
Looking back, I am most thankful for the wonderful people and everything I’ve been able to learn from them. Here are the highlights:
- "Zeitgeist" is a German word that means the spirit of the times. One of our assignments was to create a summary of McKinsey’s values in six words, and my colleague Jiawen suggested using zeitgeist. In my surprise at her amazing German language skills, I remembered the new vocabulary term!
- You know Jay Chou, but do you know Hokkien rap? That was the performance we were treated to by our Taiwanese colleague Peter on our last night out to karaoke. Look it up!
- Fall means crab season in Shanghai
- When my colleague Cathy told me she was a designer, I thought that meant she made PowerPoint slides look good. Actually, she works with engineers to create user-friendly products
- We should all ask for feedback often. Our last exercise during training was to give each person on the team we’ve worked with feedback. It was incredibly useful to understand how others perceive me, and I’m going to try to do this more in the future!
Until next time,
Felicia