On Sunday afternoon, I traveled to Chicago to begin my nearly annual trip to St. Charles, Illinois, or a training class at the Q Center. This time around I'm attending Core Manager School, a required class for all new managers within the company. I love going to St. Charles because it reminds me of how multi-national, diverse and talented our company is. Every time I meet fascinating people from around the world that are doing all sorts of exciting work. This time, I'd barely stepped out of the airport when the people-meeting began.

I gathered my bags at O'Hare and called the number for the taxi company to take me to the Q Center. As I approached the car, an unfamiliar face asked me, "Are you Chanda? You have an Accenture blog, right?" I thought, "Wow, I'm becoming known for my Accenture blog!" Well, it turns out that standing in front of me was Jackie Shank, one of the authors of the Consulting Analysts Blog. She was headed to St. Charles for the first time to attend a new course, the Strategy College. My chance meeting with Jackie simply illustrates the small world of Accenture. There are only four of us that maintain Consulting blogs and two of us ended up at the same place at the same exact time without planning. I've come to realize that despite the size of Accenture (146,000 employees and growing), I keep running into the same 100 people.

On the first day of class, our instructor summarized the purpose of the course in one word, Value. He said that throughout the week, we would be discussing value - how to identify it, how to sell it, how to deliver it and how to lead to make all of this possible. Sounds like a great class to me and I'll be sure to provide updates as I progress through the course.