Ireland Experience Journal - Dec. 14 (Sat)

I say thank you Ireland and goodbye, I will miss thee!

Ireland Experience Journal - Dec. 13 (Fri)

We started today with a GREAT presentation and interactive session with Susan Dargan from State Street Corp. I was particularly interested in the views of outsourcing to India versus Ireland. Their experience in India where the gap between managers (once promoted) and their teams, and also the lack of loyalty to a company with frequent job hopping based only on remuneration was interesting to hear. It is something I've heard often and definitely is a factor to consider.

We then later visited Realex Payments again to speak to a number of entrepreneurs regarding creating an indigenous startup in Ireland and the challenges they faced.

We ended our program with a closing dinner at Ely Bar and Brasserie.

 

 

 

Ireland Experience Journal - Dec. 12 (Thu)

We started today at the UCD Smurfit School and Dr. Esther Tippman on how subsidiaries can become global solution providers. Some of the best insight to date on operating in another country.

 Then we got to hear from Dr. Laurent Muzellac regarding digital media. A really great lecture on some nice insights with examples.

We finished off the day at Fidelity Investments and a presentation by David Murphy & Edward McDonnell.







Ireland Experience Journal - Dec. 11 (Wed)

We started the day taking a bus to the UCD Quinn School of Business where we got to hear from Allen Higgins regarding some of the reasons to move fungible jobs such as manufacturing to other countries. He mentioned that even though IT jobs are treated as fungible, they are not.

 

We also got to hear from Karl Whelan an economist who gave us a great overview on the economic outlook for Ireland.

He had provided a wonderful context to understand the economic climate and the advantages of Ireland even though he predicted a slower economic growth than the previous decade has seen.

We completed our time at UCD with a lecture in Irish history with Dr. Tom Feeny, before taking a quick walk around the campus and admiring some wonderful atriums that were first suggested by our professor while he still taught at UCD.

We then made our way over to Microsoft Ireland where we met with Bill Danna and Joe ffrench. It was a great visit and they provided the most honest and open dialog of any company we visited. There were also some great tips and ideas that they presented such as Reverse Mentoring and establishing a connection through social media to acquire talent. They spoke of the need to "TIP" -> Trust (contribute from day one), Impact (go beyond the job to make a difference), and Personal Development (consistently evolve and increase skills). They also mentioned to work in developing each employee as a leader "Look up, Step out".

 

To top off such a productive day we visited Johnnie Fox's Pub and Irish Hooley!

 

 

Ireland Experience Journal - Dec. 10 (Tue)

Today we started by visiting Citibank and their Global R&D Innovation Labs. We were greeted by Cecilia Ronan and later heard from Therese Walsh who is their expert in Lean strategy.

We learned that Lean is simply eliminating headaches - those things for which your customer does not want to pay for or those that are preventing you from meeting your customers needs.

Lean is about people, it is a framework for thinking.

Lean is used when there is no time or money for a technology solution.

We should always be asking ourselves and our teams - "What have you improved this week?"

Later that afternoon we got to visit Google! We all were able to try out Google glass as well as hear from a number of their employees including David Anderson from their Business Intelligence operations. The suggestion was to not think incrementally, but in a 10x fashion. We also got to see a cool free tool Consumer Barometer (global market finder).

 

Last but not least we got to visit Accenture where we learned that one of the advantages to Ireland being a small country is access to political leaders which allows it to be more nimble with changes in public policy. They also spoke of how more location agnostic jobs could be moved over to Dublin.

 

 

Ireland Experience Journal - Dec. 9 (Mon)

Spent the morning at RealEx Payments with presentations from the founder Colm Lyon, followed by Michael Stapleton from the Industrial Development Authority (IDA), and then Carol Murphy from Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC).

Learned some background information specific to the Irish/Dublin environment including the importance of the four T's (Talent, Taxes, Track record, Technology). Also some illumination on global problems to solve:

• Global teams
• Problem complexity
• Need for speed and response

and their solutions:

• Person to Person collaboration
• Faster knowledge transfer

 Then later in the afternoon we were able to visit the Dublin offices of facebook Ireland. There we met Rick Kelly who talked about some of the things that make Ireland attractive (English speaking, close to the US East Coast, infrastructure, talent, international community).

 

We also saw earlier in the morning the place where U2 recorded their early albums!