The tagline for our company is “rigor and relevance”. This means that we try to connect the rigor of academic rigor to the relevance of consulting. In our daily work this means that we spend quite a bit of time on research. Twice a year we have a “strategy works university session” (SWU). This time we received a wonderful invitation from family van de Merwe to visit Schloss Biendorf in Germany.
We left on Wednesday morning (the goal was to leave at 7AM, but two of my collegues were dreatfully late). The bus was really really comfortable. Comfy seats, more than enough to drink, nice facilities (including a laser show and a lot of TV-screens). We managed to hold a few sessions of presentations in the bus which works pretty well. We covered quite a bit of ground before reaching Biendorf.
The weather in Biendorf was absolutely marvelous. Our host told us that the night before they had temperatures as low as -30C. It was still pretty cold, with a clear blue sky, by the time we arrived. Wonderful view, with all the snow. We had a few more sessions on location before dinner. The evening was pretty amazing too, as we had a juke-box to play with, together with a bunch of pinball machines!
On the second day we did a bit more work and had a wonderful trip to a nearby mining area. The driver avoided the highways. This did make for a very nice view, but left a few of us with an upset stomach. I was smart enough to sit next to the driver and have a chat. Nice guy from Gilze-Rijen! Either way, we had a really interesting tour of the mines. The history of the area and the way of working were explained, and illustrated with old tools that were still functional. We also saw the old carts that were used underground, and even walked a few meters without light at all – which was pretty scary.
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After our trip to the mines we had another wonderful dinner, this time in the town of Biendorf. We finished the day with a big pinball tournament. Turned out that both Bob and myself were real fanatics. I was pretty lucky on getting a good score on 2 of the pinball machines, but it must be said that Bob is the real wizard. At 01.30 AM I finally had to accept defeat as I couldn’t break the high score on Frankenstein Pinball…
The last day started with a late breakfast, some last pictures and loading the bus for the trip back home, which went relatively smoothly. It seemed that we did start a bit late, or had some slight delays (or both), though, as we arrived a bit late at “de Lutte” (near Enschede). The original plan was to go to the adventure king for a GPS puzzle-walk. Since we were late, though, we decided to only have a short walk through the area before it got to dark. Finishing with a nice dinner (“stamppottenbufent”) was a good way to end a really cool trip! Perhaps “de Lutte” will be our next holiday destination.
More pictures of the Winter SWU can be found here