There’s nothing dignified about a scuffle, no matter how putatively superior the position of one of the actors. The photo of a dust-up between police and protestors has the effect of a distorting funny-mirror, turning any righteous indignation (real or fake) into slapstick comedy. It is hard to feel anything but amusement at the image of pot-bellied... Continue Reading →
Home to Roost…and Reflect
Drove back from Fontainebleau today. Felt like I'd hit the wall by the time we got in, done in with the combined effects of a flu, a late night last night (SM's event on a yacht on the Seine), and an almost 4 hour long drive back to Brussels. I would rate it as one... Continue Reading →
Remote Post: Blogging @ the Barber
So here I am, waiting my turn at the coiffure, trying to test the portability of the blogging lifestyle. I'm typing attentively with my stylus, laboriously picking out the miniscule letters like a type-setter in a medieval press might have done. My HTC is an improvement on the Nokia 9500 brick I lost in a... Continue Reading →
Respect: Moral Lines and HR Occupational Hazards
Confidential discussions concerning employees are pretty much the bread and butter of HR. However, the tone of these discussions is sometimes not too far removed from plain old gossip - or at least driven by the same base motivations that animate the slanderous tongue. It gets tricky when you are in a conversation which is... Continue Reading →
Lack of Completion Fatigue
OK's newsletter today had a seemingly pithy observation: people do not have initiative-fatigue in companies, as no-one decries something new; what people have is lack of completion fatigue - that sense of frustration at vacillating intentions and aborted initiatives people see around them. While I agree with some of the wisdom in the statement, it... Continue Reading →
Leadership & Culture
We were working on the design of a new program today, aimed at instilling a strong sense of cultural identity and evolution in new managers. It is proving to be quite a sterling success, at least design-wise. In the process of brainstorming and playing with different design ideas, I seemed to feel more and more... Continue Reading →
Two Roads Diverged: A Frisson of Frost
Cycled to work today. It takes me about half-an-hour, but my favorite part is the final 10 minutes through open fields and farmland. Parts of the track wending through the grass are little more than a few inches wide, punctuated by puddles and bumps. In the summer, overgrown weeds along the edge of the track... Continue Reading →
Cows & Goats: A Day at the Zoo
Took a trip to Planckendael today - the sprawling and somewhat unkempt quasi-zoo between Brussels and Antwerp. They don't do zoos well in Belgium. This was a kind of safari on foot through an unpaved and confusing meshwork of tracks, bearing little resemblance to their ostensibly user-friendly hand-drawn map. We walked for what seemed like... Continue Reading →
Modesty: Holding Back & Shining Forth
Today was the first of three days of Executive Exchange that each of us is signed up for as part of the program. I'm with Pascal, the CEO of the main water utility company of Antwerp, the commercial hub of Belgium. He spent the day with me on the 20th, and I was at his... Continue Reading →
Seas & Swamps: The Never Ending Story
A dreary day. Lassitude has stolen into me today, and chloroformed any sense of initiative. It is all the more frustrating when one cannot see any obvious explanation for the paralysis of spirits that seemingly strikes at random. I suppose there is a ready enough explanation though: several small sources of malaise might converge around the same time - really trivial... Continue Reading →
Notes to Self 