Double Decker

As I was pondering what to write, I was about to say that I’m on the verge of starting a busy two weeks for work with trips to South Africa this week and India next (leaving tonight in the top deck of an Airbus 380 from Paris to Johannesburg). Then I thought that that actually does a serious disservice to the last couple of weeks which saw trips to Paris, Amsterdam, Geneva and Zurich (the latter including a lovely 3 hour train journey through Switzerland). The good news is that despite all this movement, I’m still managing, on the whole, to keep trips to 3-3.5 days a week; for example this week I left home Monday afternoon and I’ll be back on Thursday night. The trip to Zurich was particularly fun because I met up with my old boss from Wipro, and I was also welcomed like a long lost family member at the hotel where I used to stay every week whilst working at Credit Suisse. My old boss is really fun to be with, and he most definitely knows the best restaurants and wine in the city! I was happy to be back in a wonderfully warm Zurich and catch up with him and meet his new girlfriend. In any case, the next two weeks are now going to start with, hopefully, a good night’s sleep before arriving in South Africa at 11AM tomorrow morning…

The Economist is King

I was show jumping last weekend in Lege near Bordeaux. I was accompanied by Maxime and the new American au pair Jessica. Whilst Maxime slept in the back after a weekend in a nearby sandpit, we talked at length on the journey back on Sunday after a relatively frustrating weekend (I rode well but invariably had a bar or two down). We talked about the US. I confided that I did enjoy going, at least for the first couple of days, because of the over-the-top excessively friendly and false “have a nice day” type of service which does, at least for a short while, make you feel sort of good about yourself. Maybe it has this reaction on me because I have lived in a country where customers are the scourge of any shopkeepers or restaurateur’s life. Customers are clearly not king in France, and are more often resented as being the people who prevent the aforementioned retailers from an easy life. Good service in Europe is therefore all the more noteworthy when it does actually occur. I was most impressed by the customer service team of the Economist magazine who fixed a recent problem with my subscription which had unexpectedly expired. They listened, they explained (in clear English), they fixed, and they were pleasant throughout the whole process (making me feel less stupid than what I actually had been). Why oh why is such pleasant and competent behavior so remarkable?! In any case, I kneel and salute thee my royal Economist master.

Teaching a young dog new tricks

Maxime and Capucine are good little movers (although Maxime has now definitely moved into the stage of enjoying being carried everywhere, as my lower back will testify). Gaston however has always been the last to take up dangerous new pastimes such as walking. Indeed it was only last week that I watched him keep himself occupied for 10 minutes shuffling about on all fours in the kitchen chasing a small ball that he would throw for himself to go and fetch…However serious progress is now being made – he took his first steps at the weekend. A momentous occasion indeed because it probably means that he’ll soon be able to be taken to show jumping competitions at the weekend without fear of him crawling through horse manure. All movement in the right direction you understand!

How the other half lives

185,000, 110,000 and now 55,000 are the rough sizes of each of the different companies I have worked for; Accenture, Wipro and EMC. There is a part of me that thinks that despite being an old world European, at some stage I think the downwards trend (size wise) will continue, and that I’ll end up being involved in a tiny start up type-company. Despite the size thing, another thing that strikes me is the different levels of diversity in each of the different companies. I now believe that there is a very clear difference between cultural and personality diversity e.g. EMC has a lot of white middle class Americans working for it, yet there are fewer different personality types in Accenture. Indeed one of the biggest challenges in EMC is that we don’t typically hire young graduates so our experienced technologists all have very diverse backgrounds meaning they all tend to work in slightly different ways. As a result I would suggest that Accenture teams are actually easier to manage. One of the good things about this personality diversity in EMC is that I am exposed to more people who have been involved in and sold start-ups and small companies. Conversations with them really are very interesting. That said here’s an interesting article which reminds me why working for a big corporate, rather than a start-up can still be pretty good. http://www.fastcompany.com/1825592/9-reasons-to-choose-a-corporate-job-over-a-startup?partner=rss&utm_source=pulsenews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company+Headlines%29

Big Brother

Nothing to do with any Orwellian best seller, more of a posting which I think is well suited for my big brother Kieran...http://m.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/21/how_to_get_paid_more/ The cat herding youtube video was particularly amusing....

So finally they made a cartoon

Life with Maxime. Enjoy....... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNkp4QF3we8

10 pennies and 2 shopping trolleys off the old block

Sandie is very good with managing her money. I hadn’t realized how much Maxime was like her until I spoke with her this afternoon. She had taken the car to the garage because we had had a problem with a malfunctioning CD player which rattled every time we drove around a corner. Given that we don’t live in Australia or the Mid-West in the US, this became quite annoying quite quickly. Upon examination it was found that the rattling was due to not one, not two, but twelve different coins (including two plastic shopping trolley tokens) that had been popped into the CD slot. And the price of a new CD player (which turns out to be tightly integrated with the GPS system)? 1500 Euros – now there’s a false economy if ever there was one… In hindsight we should never have given him his first money box for Christmas last year which is no doubt the root cause of this overzealous popping of things into narrow slits. Thankfully for us, Nissan graciously suggested that we claim this under the guarantee!

The sum of the parts

I was meeting with a major bank in the Netherlands today. The meeting was most interesting for lots of reasons. At one stage the (British) client told me that there is a widespread belief in Holland in “general management” i.e. a good manager can manage anything without any need to understand the content. This reminded me of my days in Accenture… When I was an analyst and consultant in Accenture, I was always troubled by the fact that the manager always got the junior people to do the effort estimates on projects. This to me always seemed to call into question the credibility of the manager – surely he had to understand what was going on otherwise he was no more than a well paid fraud? Whilst I still don’t believe that a manager can run things successfully without any notion of the detailed content, I do however now believe that the job of the manager is to work out how to bring together lots of complicated sub parts to create a cohesive whole, rather than having to develop every single complicated sub part himself. Bringing everything together is already pretty complicated, and it’s something that I am pretty sure that I couldn’t have done as a lowly analyst or consultant.

Cloudy twitter

Arrived safely in Amsterdam where it is overcast. In the hotel lobby doing emails and conference calls. Should this type of post really be a tweet? Do I need a Twitter account as well?! (Yes if I want a new job in the future I suppose - see earlier posting).

Alive and kicking, just

Mr. Wall is still with us despite his being home alone this weekend as the whole family trundled off to Barbaste for the first major show jumping event of the season. A good weekend was had by all. Sandie even suggested that it was an excellent competition (through gritted teeth) and that it was very do-able from a small child perspective. On top of that the horse jumped really well. A clear round on the last day was very satisfying and just shows what happens when the rider applies himself properly (two small errors in the two previous rounds had blotted my copybook). Maxime needless to say very much enjoyed both the aperos in Michel's truck on Saturday night and also pushing his little sister into a door. She now sports a lovely black eye and Maxime a red handprint on his bottom. No sooner as I was at home I was packing a suitcase to head to Paris this morning. The day has gone well although I am tired....tired enough to go to the wrong hotel. I comforted myself with two pancakes before jumping in a taxi and going to the correct Crowne Plaza. I now need to get to bed sharpish before an 8AM flight to Amsterdam tomorrow....I'm already looking forward to getting back home on Wednesday for a full 8 hours night of stilted sleep.

Welcome Mr. Wall

Thanks to the generosity of our neighbours Franck and Beatrice, we are now a real family…we have our first family pet; a goldfish named Mr. Wall. Mr. Wall will reside in a rather splendid aquarium in my office (which has a mantelpiece high enough out of reach to prevent small children from trying to see if Mr. Wall can survive outside a shattered tank and 5 litres of spilt water). In my day, goldfish languished in a simple glass bowl – I suppose this must be the fish equivalent of our own “Generation Y” and constantly increasing expectations. Given the copious amounts of food on offer and the luxurious surroundings in which Mr. Wall lives, life expectancy is looking good (for him). The feeding of Mr. Wall will now actually be integrated into Maxime’s bedtime routine (which seems to be getting longer rather than shorter. It is currently; bath, food, pi-pee, teeth, nappy, wrapped up like a sausage in his quilt, prayers, lullaby routines, granting of iPad, removal of iPad, kiss from Mum, kiss from Dad, leave the door open, close the door but leave the landing light on). Anyway, a new chapter of the O’Brien family has started, and it is infinitely more palatable than a fourth baby – Mr. Wall comes fully house trained and he rarely cries, vomits or punches his sister.

And they’re off

A clear round in the preparation class, one refusal in the vitesse and a horse that jumped sublimely all day signaled a decent start to the show jumping season yesterday. While there was one notable blot on the copybook (a turn too sharp which was my fault), it’s nice to see that the three months of hard work over the winter paid off. The only downside was the cold, wind and rain that meant that family and friends couldn’t stay longer to enjoy the day. Not to worry, there’s another competition this weekend in Barbaste that’s on the cards – Sandie is particularly motivated because of the hotel which also boasts a swimming pool and spa – I suspect she’ll not be seeing much of the horses next weekend either!

The Council Will Meet

It’s been a busy few days (why do I keep finding myself writing that)…Within EMC I have become the executive sponsor (read owner, organizer and facilitator) of what’s been labeled as a technology council. Last Thursday and Friday saw the first meeting of that group. I had planned to make things as easy as possible on myself by ensuring that the gathering took place in Pau. So far so clever. However a plane, train and automobile (taxi) strike in Paris and the South West of France made things inordinately more complicated on the Wednesday as people battled to arrive from London, Amsterdam, Munich, Rome and Stockholm. Oodles of credit have to go to that group because we managed to get everyone together only one hour after the original rendezvous for the opening dinner on the Wednesday evening. The meeting itself was a success as we covered a lot of ground and got a lot clearer on what we should and still need to do. It was most refreshing because we were essentially cut off from the connected world (i.e. no internet and therefore no emails), and because we were talking about topics that we don’t normally have the time to talk about, it really felt like we were in some sort of vacuum which enabled everyone to focus and concentrate. These days, a meeting without people multi-tasking and doing their emails at the same time as supposedly listening is most definitely something noteworthy!