The Workshop at the Saujana

As promised, a very long post on the Workshop in Subang, which took place on Wednesday and Thursday last week. Or read - what you get when you pay a management consultant exorbitant amounts of money to conduct a session where you have to do all the dirty work yourself.

When I checked in at the Main Hotel Lobby on Wednesday morning, I was told that my room would be at 'The Club' and I had to check in there instead. Ooh, sounds pretty exclusive. They had a car bring me round to the Club, which was located towards one end of the resort. I checked into a room which had a view of a landscape pool, with the lake in the distance. Having settled myself in, I called up the guy I was supposed to meet for the briefing.

We agreed to meet at the lounge, where he explained to me that all I had to do was 'interview' a member of the Top Management, get together with other similar interviewers and 'synthesise' our findings into a presentation back to the Big Boys (and a Lady). Oh, and watch some video set in the future which was supposed to be very impressive. The top guns had already been briefed about the interview, and it seemed as if they had quite a lot more to do over the next two days, so I was set for a quite relaxing stay here. Or so I thought.

I went back to my room, feeling really hungry, so I ordered a Hamburger and a pot of Milo that cost just under RM50. At 2.45 pm, as agreed, I made my way down to meet with the rest of the group. When I got there, I was told that the session was postponed to 4 pm, and the venue had changed. When we regrouped at the restaurant for the interview, we had to wait another hour before it was time to 'pick up' our partners in their briefing room.

I have to admit to panicking for a while, as I don't really recognise the Top Management except for maybe 3 or 4 persons. My partner was not one of these 3 or 4. Someone described him as wearing a coat and a red tie, but when we got to the room no one had a coat and tie on. Fortunately, he was sitting right next to someone else I knew, who promptly introduced us.

The interview went quite well. I hardly had to do any prompting, and before I knew it, the interview had ended. Then the tables were turned and I got interviewed instead, starting from where Iwork back to my schooling. As we walked back to the briefing room, the topic turned to my pregnancy. The small size of my tummy, hidden under the voluminous black abaya I was wearing, misled him into thinking that I was actually in the earlier stage. When I informed him I had 3 weeks to go, he seemed genuinely surprised that I was still up and about.

Anyway, because of the delay that afternoon, the 'synthesis' discussion took quite some time. I don't understand why they have to make us get into four groups, present each group's findings then combine into two and finally one list of findings, when everyone had pretty similar results. By the time we finished the list itself, it was almost time for dinner. We hardly had enough time to squeeze in Maghrib prayers, let alone take a nice long shower, before we had to turn up at the same interview venue for an Italian dinner.

The food itself was good, but I have to admit I wasn't very good company. I've always been really bad at making small talk. I mean, how do you speak to company VP's, especially when the topic was on BMW's and golf, two things I have never really had the pleasure of indulging in?

In a way I was glad when dinner was finally over, but we had to head back to our discussion room to devise a presentation format for the next day. It didn't help that the room's aircon wasn't working, and I really think we were not that productive considering the time and the location. Hubby and Nuaim had decided to come over to spend the night, but by the time I trudged back to my room, both of them were already dozing away. Nuaim slept soundly the whole night, in fact when he left with Hubby in the morning, he hadn't even laid eyes on me.

I was tired, sleepy and missed playing with my baby. I think I deserved to have a good cry, so I did.

When I made it downstairs to breakfast, I had my professional, confident face back on. We worked on our presentation, again in that really hot room, and didn't get to watch the video. Lunch was a hot and humid affair, despite having it indoors, and we were 'treated' to a speech by one of the consultant's big shots that, to my engineering mind, didn't offer anything concrete or tangible to take away as food for thought. I felt like a plant wilting in the heat, so just had to take a shower. This resulted in me being late for our last minute presentation dry run, and I wasn't really able to take in the last slides before we had to head off to do the presentation proper.

It could have been worse. No one told me that they decided to make do without the music, so when the slides came onscreen I thought it was just a technical test and I missed my cue for the narration. Fortunately things went smoothly enough, and my insipid attempt to wrap things up with a golf joke was warmly appreciated.

I was looking forward to checking out, going home and spending a couple of hours with Nuaim before heading back here for another dinner, but we weren't let off so easily. I suppose after the huge amount of money we must have paid them for the video, we were obliged to at least watch it.

It turned out to be a collection of 10 different scenes, all intertwined, set in 2010. The scenes were supposed to depict how things would (ideally) be like in the future, especially concerning Leadership and Performance Management. I was expecting a very hi-tech look a la 'Minority Report', with arms sweeping over virtual screens and retina scans, but the only difference was that everyone, despite having Asian names, spoke in an American accent. I was hungry and hot (temperature, not personality) and really couldn't be bothered to analyse all the stuff. My table kept making funny remarks about the people appearing in the video, which lasted a whole 2 hours.

Dinner that night was much more enjoyable. Knowing that it was finally over brought a huge sense of relief to me, and my dinner companions stuck to topics I could really appreciate. The waiter must be new, because he kept misreading all the non-verbal instructions (and misunderstood some verbal ones too) and I bet he actually hailed from mainland China, judging from his accent.

Hubby picked me up at 10, but when I reached Mak's house my in-laws were there, and I couldn't just excuse myself and go straight to bed. Add to that a restless son who wouldn't let me sleep and a busy weekend, it's no wonder I feel as knackered as I do today.

And I still haven't started on the Forum notes.