This has been a summer of goodbyes. So many colleagues have left (mostly retirements) that one cannot help wondering at what point the individual discontinuities will accumulate into a more culturally pervasive sense of an epoch-shift. The only thing that prevents one from feeling this transition acutely is that the replacements are often people we know. These are predictable and self-assured insiders whose style might be different from the people they replace, but whose cards are on the table and who are not therefore tempted to use bravado as a ploy to send signals that there’s a tough new sheriff in town.
I just got back from the farewell dinner of John Van Vuuren at the home of Judith Garcia. John is a remarkably resonant and authentic leader with whom I have a connection at a very deep level. His expatriation from his native South Africa started around the time I joined 3M 11 years ago. He came in as the MD of 3M Gulf a few months before I joined, and was the one who conducted the last of my seven interviews. I remember that interview like yesterday, as he animatedly explained his agenda for culture change and employee engagement to me. He was drawing shapes to capture ideas and structures, connecting them with meaningfully crooked lines to denote relationships and interconnections. This kind of visual commentary of his thoughts became such a well known trademark of his meeting habits. Although he is the one who moved me from Logistics to HR (proposed on Oct 17th 96), he left Dubai the month I officially moved into HR. His relationship with me from 97 until 03 was as the boss (Regional MD) of my boss (Gulf MD). In 03 he brought me to Brussels to spin Six Sigma wheels for OD in East Europe and MENA.
Though he’s coming chez nous with his wife on Sunday, I met him at the office today to get a kind of closure to the vaguely parental dimension of our relationship. I shared with him where I was in my career and what might lie ahead. The context and theme of our discussion linked today’s meeting so directly with that hour I spent interviewing with him on April 12, 1996. At that time we were both in the midst of entering new phases of our lives – he as a first time expat, “liberated” from a walled SA after 17 years; me as a bright-eyed and somewhat directionally confused fresh-grad ready to get the first taste of work. Today he stands at the threshold of a new phase of his life – a return to his homeland and to a more sedate existence, while I stand again somewhat directionally confused, and eager to have the first taste of something significantly new. The parallels and deja vus are striking.
The farewell was an intimate affair, with John having nominated people whom he had a special relationship with. It was very nice to interact with everyone. However, it was yet another reminder of the parts I enjoy in such social functions (when my knot of small-talking interlocutors is made of no more than three people, and my effusiveness is unbridled), and the parts I feel totally unequal to (when more people join the knot).
Notes to Self 
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