What a month December has been. I have spent quite a bit of it in Paris, Zurich and Basel as well as a few days in Biarritz. It’s been a bit manic as we come to the end of the quarter and the end of the year. It was a case of trying to see lots of people face to face before the holiday period (the internet can only take you so far even if I am now a confirmed Skype supporter). I realise I haven’t posted since the 4th December but I realise I must...not because of any particular commitment to my blog, but more because of a commitment to my bank manager.....Sandie has been on at me over the last few days that because I haven’t blogged it means that she has nothing to read in the middle of the night when she is feeding the babies. She has threatened that she will start logging onto eBay more frequently if I don’t post something – my financial health depends on it apparently!
So what have been my major musings over the past 3 weeks? Don’t judge a Swiss man by his pot belly, embrace the chaos and Christmas is most definitely coming (and thankfully the family is all well and together for the big day this weekend).
Earlier in the month I went out for dinner with one of my project teams in Zurich. After underestimating how many people wanted to eat sausages and cheese on a Tuesday night, we finally managed to find a restaurant. Whilst you can work as much as you want with people, it’s only when you get them out in an informal setting do you really get to know who they are. Our dinner reminded me you can’t judge a book by its cover. Two of the people there that night were a short stumpy Swiss fella with a pot belly and a tall Cypriot guy with hands like shovels. Both were near enough 50. During the conversation it turned out they had both played a lot of football in their past – despite being someone who played football for almost 25 years I still managed to guess incorrectly what position they played – my Swiss friend had been a goalkeeper in the first division and the Cypriot had been a tricky left winger (or so he tells me). It made me smile. Neither of them guessed that I had been a cynical centre half!
The other thing which Wipro’s Head of Europe told me when I met him in Paris was that I should not expect process and organisation in a company that is experiencing 20% year on year growth. Wiproites often talk about the company being a 6 billion dollar start up (our annual revenues). He talked about “infant mortality statistics” (the number of people who leave Wipro within 1 year of joining), and he told me I needed to “embrace the change” if I wanted to survive. I’m a bit German in my outlook on how things should be run, but that one comment helped me put my first 6 months in Wipro into some sort of perspective, and it reminded me of one of the main reasons why I left Accenture. I chose not to explain to him he could have chosen a better term than “infant mortality statistics” given recent family events!
The other thing which has struck me over the last few weeks is that Christmas is coming. Whilst the UK heaves under a heavy dose of the white stuff, the key thing which has made me realise this is not the number of fat men in red pyjamas walking around Biarritz but more the number of English TV series that are being concluded. I’m not a big TV watcher but I do have English TV in the south of France and for some reason over the last 3 months or so I have managed to more or less follow Strictly Come Dancing, The Apprentice and X-Factor. The finals of each show have been happening over the last week or so - Stella has been hired despite her modest background, Kara has a glitter ball and a new boyfriend, and I have just heard that Matt Cardle has been crowned Christmas number 1. Surely I shouldn’t know this type of thing! I need to stop having so many small children requiring regular feeding of hot milk meaning I am chained to the sofa on a Saturday night.....
On that subject the news is pretty good – Capucine is now out of hospital. She’s putting on lots of weight and this time it really seems like she is back on track. She’s 2.7 kg and Gaston is 3.6 kg for the statisticians among you. Maxime is increasingly interested in both of them, well at least removing dummies and putting blankets over their heads when we are not looking. He also seems to have really cottoned on to the idea of Le Pere Noel pretty quickly which is fairly impressive – why just this evening he told us that he has already baggy’sied the mince pies and pint of beer we’ll leave out for Santa Claus on Christmas eve.....
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