I was really proud of how our team pulled it together over the past week. Normally (and my ex-consulting colleagues will recall), you scramble the last few days before the last presentation and all nighters can happen. We, however, went for a little trip outside of Tangier on Monday afternoon and to nice dinner yesterday – and had time to pre-wire half of the clients so we had no surprises today. We visited the Hercules cave which is a natural cave that has an opening to Atlantic in the shape of Africa and where Hercules supposedly stopped by to do something – I don’t really know much about it as Moroccans are not very good in supplying their tourist sites with ANY information. You can however find hundreds of souvenirs, tajines and folks trying to sell you anything. So Google !
Today is also our last day in Tangier, it has truly been an amazing experience. We have spent the past 3 days preparing for our final presentation which was this afternoon. FTAM has received a several deliverables, including a final report (over 80 pages), marketing and fundraising strategy and website. I was really proud of our small team as we were passionately presenting a month worth of work. It was touching to see Ryo present his website as he has spent much time researching best practices and building it. The difference between his English now and the day we got here was noticed by every single client member and IBMer. Ultimate example of what language immersion can do!
We got very emotional at the end of the presentation as our client asked us to have a moment in our own language – and given we have been working across all of their languages – they wanted to hear ours. So we had a little speech in Portuguese, Japanese and Czech. Amazingly, once people speak in their native language, their demeanor changes and everyone softened up – especially me who almost cried !
Tomorrow we are off to Casablanca on the bus (5 hours), then press conference with Morocccan journalists and IBM Morocco team, presentations, roundtables and dinner. And then off to Spain and bye Morocco on Saturday morning ! Off to pack after a month in this hotel room which I will not miss. #ibmcsc
sbmamatravel 