Skip to main content

SAE Activities - or "The Week of Food en Masse"


A very exciting and interesting week has come to an end. One of AutoCom’s bigger events, the SAE Annual Supplier Dinner was held successfully at Coach Insignia atop of the Renaissance Center Detroit. Additionally there were two client luncheons also held in the GM Tower. This past week I spent so much time in the RenCen that I already feel at home there. But even after struggling with exceptionally stuffed stomachs and getting lost in Detroit at night on the way home, which almost caused two young interns to have a heart attack, we got back safely to our regular office routine.
Looking back at the previous week, a simple but important question comes up: What have I learned from this? Well, there are many points, but here are a few of them:
#1 The direction signs at the Renaissance Center are.. let’s say improvable.
#2 Getting lost in Detroit in the middle of the night is not fun.
#3 I like food.
But these insights are obviously not really related to our work here at AutoCom. So what have I learned from helping to organize those events, preparing on site and participating myself that helps me for my internship at a PR agency and for my future career?
I would say I have definitely realized the importance of teamwork and communication. It is not only something stated in every management related book and something they tell you almost every day at business school, but it is actually true and very essential for working efficiently – especially when putting together a row of events with in total 6 different clients and nearly 70 participants. Since every person is working on different assignments and responsible for a different area of the event, it is of great value to hold regular meetings in order to keep track of the particular progress and in order to meet the time schedule. Even for persons that usually get along without putting a lot of effort into organizing things on paper it has a great effect to actually assemble things in a list that can be checked off once done. Furthermore it can help all participating organizers to stay on top of things and not get lost on the way.
So always remember: “The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.” - Marcus Aurelius

Véronique

Comments

Jack Harned said…
Great that you "got a lot out of it" as well as put a lot into it.

Popular posts from this blog

Time to say Goodbye

Only two days left until Don Haberek will leave the AutoCom Team. He was our COO, interns supervisor and the best cake cutter ever! He always had time for the intern's issues and was listening very patiently and carefully to us. Even if he had to repeat his advice a billion times for the foreign interns! But he wasn't only a great interns supervisor. He also gave everbody the oppotunity to gain some weight, when he was cutting perfectly our (nearly weekly ;-)) cake. We really hope, we will find somebody who has the same great technic to cut a cake: 1) Be very gentle to the cake! 2) Use a very sharpe-edged knife, especially our chocolate junky Mareike doesn't want to waste a bit! 3) Be sure that you cut enough pieces. But we think we allready have a new cake cutter. After a long long time Don finally found his twin brother. And accidentally he is working for AutoCom aswell. :-) Who is dressing like Don, must have the same skills! Thanks for everything, we wi ll miss having...

I won’t be an intern anymore. :)

Hi everybody! There is news again from my life. You know, I am a person who never stops doing something. Either I travel almost every weekend (like I did in the States) or I am looking for new challenges all the time. :-) Well, my internship in Munich as a marketing consulting intern is not too bad, but I have finished University…so what I want is a real job and not an internship. (The only internship I would love to do, even after I graduated, is the one I already did with AutoCom). :) So I continued applying for jobs. I restricted the area to Bavaria for the first applications, because I love that part of Germany. I love the Bavarian dialect (it is so cute and sexy the same time). I love their “Brezn” and their white sausages. And here is the news: I will start on the 26th of November as an employee at Novartis. Novartis is a huge German pharmaceutical company. I will work there for the strategic sourcing marketing. So I will be the one choosing agencies, advertising materials and so...

Traverse City 2009

Squeezed in a Jeep between dozens of boxes filled with flash-drives, key chains, pens and pencils, part of our staff headed to Northern Michigan last week for the annual Management Briefing Seminars (MBS). The MBS is one of the highlights in the automotive events calendar with the “who’s who” attending from the global auto industry. It has become tradition over the years that AutoCom hosts several special events for its clients during that week. This year’s AutoCom team was Larry, Jim, Craig, Jack, Tedi, Eleanor and me. Arriving in Traverse City on Monday afternoon, we started decorating the suite that AutoCom rents during that time at the Grand Traverse Resort and Spa. The suite was open from 7am until 9pm, Monday until Friday, and provided a place for our clients as well as for journalists to work and relax in a nice and quiet atmosphere. To say that Eleanor, Tedi and I weren’t exactly dressed in business clothes would be an understatement. Somehow we had a different schedule in mind...