Thursday, May 19, 2005

HONG KONG

We took some time out of our schedule this morning to debrief our visit in Hong Kong so far. Each executive shared their lasting impressions of and new lessons learned in Hong Kong and how they will use these new insights when they return to the states and their daily lives and jobs. We then had briefings by Credit Suisse and Hong Kong Disneyland. Hong Kong Disneyland will open its gates to the world in September 05, and their CFO, Carl Williams, talked about the process thru which Disney went in order to bring the magic of Disney to Asia. Disney learned many important lessons when they built Euro-Disney in Paris and the danger of making business decisions based on assumptions (cultural or otherwise). After lunch, we travel to the international airport and visited an airline maintenance and repair company and an air freight logistics company.

It was a long and exhausting day, but that evening we were treated to a nice dinner sponsored by FedEx at Shangai-Shangai Restaurant located in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Hong Kong Island. FedEx outdid themselves on a wonderful evening, and we all enjoyed the opportunity to meet and interact with members of the Fedex team from Asia as well as other local executives who joined us for dinner. We even got to spend time with a EMBA alum from 2001, John Dunavant from FedEx, who happened to be in Hong Kong. It was a very nice evening.

Everyone had a great time at the reception and dinner sponsored by FedEx at the Ritz Carlton in Hong Kong	After seeing the air freight logistics operations at AAT Terminals, we all gathered on the big freight scale. As a group, we weighed 2670 kg.

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