How to Win a Pitch and Impress Your Client

I have been reading a book called "Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life" by Eugene O'Kelly. The book has been very inspirational to me, not only because of the views on work, family, and life shared by Eugene, but also the way he handed crisis situation at work.

I have never worked in a company with a boss like him before. I think it would be great to learn from someone who values the client management and relationship building experience like he did. People just don't seem to understand that you need to INVEST to build a relationship and there is always RISK involved.

On p.21 "Back when I was the head of the firm's financial services division, its biggest arm, and we were competing to become the auditor for a major investment bank, I knew that if we were really serious about winning the account, I would need to get a face-to-face meeting with the president of the bank's Australian unit. The bank was expected to make its decision very soon. I did everything I could to schedule a meeting with him - made my calendar completely available, called his secretary repeatedly.

Sorry, I was told. His secretary said there wasn't single moment her boss was in the office that was unbooked. For weeks. If I waited until he had an opening, I knew, the business would be lost.

I called his secretary back. Given how often I'd called her, we'd developed a bit of a rapport. So I figured I'd try: Would she be so kind as to tell me her boss's upcoming travel plans? He was a man on the go, in transit much of the day - surely a pocket of that travel time was not taken up with meetings? She told me that in two days, he was flying from Sydney to Melbourne. Nothing was scheduled for the time he was in the air.

"Perfect," I said.

I asked her for his seat assignment. She told me. I called the airline and booked the shortest longest business trip of my life, reserving the first-class seat next to his. That night I packed, showered, and shaved, and the following day I flew the 22 hours from New York to Sydney, landed, boarded my 90-minute flight bound for Melbourne, sat down, and introduced myself to the banked I'd flown halfway around the world to meet, briefly. When I described what I'd done to get there, he was dumbstruck. I asked if I could explain why I believed we were the best firm to audit his bank's books. An hour and a half later, we touched down. I offered him our presentation, shook his hand, and headed to another fate for my 20-plus-hour trek home.

We won the account."

I'd love to meet a manager with such courage and vision to get the job done. If you are the one or if you know someone, let me know.

Chasing Daylight - How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My life

The Olympic Torch finally arrived in Hong Kong today. One of my best friends messaged me last night and asked me whether I wanted to witness the Torch Relay with her and her friends in Kowloon in the morning. Originally, I thought about joining them to witness one of the historical moments in the history. However, given the amount of work and stress that I have been enduring at my new job, I decided to call a rain check and spent the time catching up on work at home.

It doesn't quite make sense to take time off from work to do more work at home. However, if I stayed in the office, I would have ended up spending all the time replying to emails, attending meetings and conference calls. I decided to free myself up from all the managerial tasks to focus on getting some hands-on work done.

Despite having worked from home, I managed to take some time off to do a little bit of my own leisure reading. It's been almost 3 months since I got the luxury to spend time reading a book that I bought. What happened in the past few months was that I ended up buying more and more books, hoping that I would get a chance to read them. In reality, there are enough work-related materials for me to read each day. I barely can keep my eyes open when I hit the bed at night.

I am reading through this great book called Chasing Daylight It's sort of memoir about the former KPMG CEO Eugene O'Kelly, who wrote the book in three-and-a-half months between his terminal diagnosis with brain cancer and his death in September 2005. The book provides a vivid account of his reflections on life, death, and sucess. It's a very compelling reminder of the importance of living a balanced and meaningful life, which is the focus of my former employer and the current senior management of my company.

There is a quite quote from Socrates at the beginning of the book that I want to share with everyone:

"For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they know quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?" - Socrates

I will write more as I finish reading the book.