T Mobile and Avast Software visits

Today we had two business visits which were T Mobile and Avast software.  After waking up extra early to try and find who had the iron and ironing board, I went down to the hotel breakfast which was somewhat disappointing compared to the other two hotel breakfast that we had.  On a brighter note, this is the first hotel to serve coffee that I can drink black! (the other hotel coffees were a very dark roast and they were almost like drinking straight espresso)

When we arrived at T Mobile we entered their training room where a woman (forgot to write her name down) gave us a short history lesson of T Mobile, the Czech telecommunications market, and the competition that T Mobile had faced.  What I found most interesting is that T Mobile also offers basically a logistics tracking service that uses their mobile coverage to businesses that want to track their vehicles. Another interesting fact that was almost unbelievable is that the EU has enforced regulations on mobile providers so that there are absolutely no roaming charges of any kind.  T Mobile is basically forced to eat up around one billion dollars a year of its own roaming fees.   After that Milan Vasina, the Managing Director of that division, came and talked to us about leadership.

He discussed the main challenges that he faced when taking up the managing director job and the 9 step model that he has followed in order to meet goals and keep employees involved.  The most interesting thing I found was that employees hold 5 year positions.  After that, they are moved around not only to different positions, but to completely different departments so someone in marketing may be moved to the finance department.  This really surprised me because I wouldn't think that everyone would have those skills and be able to be flexible like that.  At the same time, I think this practice would help US companies a lot with employee satisfaction by not having the same job all the time.  It may also help with integrated marketing communications (promotions term) because everyone would be in multiple departments.

After that we went to lunch where a group of people and me went to a Japanese wok restaurant that was pretty good.  The rain picked up right when we were travelling to Avast Software so some of us finally got a chance to use our umbrellas.  Avast was rated Czech Republic's 2013 Best Employer which was evident why after the presentation.  They're the #1 provider of free antivirus software in terms of users numbers.  They also don't use any advertising for their product because their current users promote them for free on internet forums.  The presentation was also funny because he looked some of us up on Facebook and LinkedIn so we were a little surprised to find out he knew some things about us that he used in the presentation.  Along with that he also gave 2 of us lucky students a bottle of wine which was a very nice gift for us well behaved students!

Dylan Kay