Hello again! It's been a while since I last had the pleasure to write for this blog and a lot has happened in the meantime. However, the task of choosing which subject to tackle on this occasion was made easier by the promise I made at the end of my previous post; where I vowed to return with stories about a long-awaited team event for the auto dealership project. The catch is, we had such a wave of memorable team building activities since then that I decided to relish the nostalgia of those moments and write in full about the Roland Berger experience beyond the slides and the suits :)

Our project team kicked things off with an appropriately-themed karting event, inviting everyone in the office to show their driving instincts, strategic thinking and champagne-opening skills on one of Romania's largest outdoors racing tracks. Though most of us never climbed into a kart before, it didn't take long before we were fighting the g-force and pushing for every extra second, guided throughout by our experienced colleagues. The breaks between races were all about debating what's the best tactic for each corner and conducting thorough "competitor analyses", leading to a grand finale where everyone's performance and love of the wheel peaked.

Fresh out of the incredibly gripping racing buzz, our HR team came to rescue with the annual office team building event; we'd soon be at war with the clock again, but this time, we were battling at sea! Our regatta took place near the coast of the Black Sea and represented the ultimate test of team-work, tenacity and reaction to tasks we had never dealt with before. Divided into 3 crews, each of us soon found their calling on the deck, manning the wheel, raising the masts or running from one side to the other in order to influence the balance of the ship and gain that extra vital knot. Blasting the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack through the speakers, everyone in our crew reveled in their roles and made a hot day in the sun feel just as fun and intense as the bursts of adrenaline experienced weeks earlier on the tarmac.

With our need for speed temporarily quenched, the end of the summer brought about a quieter type of activity, albeit more intellectually-stimulating and just as entertaining. Inspired by our childhood memories of watching "Who Wants to be a Billionaire?" and shouting at the screen in frustration as "we certainly would have known the answers", we teamed up for one of the city's numerous Pub Quiz competitions. While the "Recently in the news" round went as well as you'd expect for a team of consultants and boosted us in the standings, we lost valuable ground in "Films and music", prompting us to quickly assign who's watching what on Netflix until next time.

The past 6 months flew by, as time usually does in consulting, and though no doubt the nature of the work is the main factor, these activities certainly had their contribution in amplifying the dynamism. Moreover, when teams are often away to the client's site 3 or 4 days a week, they are a great way to reconnect to your other colleagues and get to know them better, making the potential transitions to new project teams way smoother. Next time, the focus of the blog will switch back to work, with stories from a recent sales-focused project which had everything from field trips, factory visits and sales pitches to the client's clients.

See you soon! :)