Dear allMy next trip took me to
Paris. The I am part of a team called “HR 4U” whose purpose is to improve he experience of HR professionals within the company. We had been in the team for some weeks and it had been decided that we might make more progress if we met face to face. My diary is always tricky so I flew out from Heathrow at lunch time and landed about 2pm local time. Came out of Charles de Gaulle and took a taxi. My taxi driver was keen to tell me that he was just back from the
UK having  spent a couple of years working on the bread counter at Sainsbury’s in Willesden Green. I am sure that this not only improved his English (though we conversed in French), but also improved his self-defence skills in that part of
London. 

Sadly it did little for his understanding of he topography of
Paris  and we  had several false starts before we finally pulled up acceptably close to my hotel. 

I have already described La Defense. The good side is its amazing architecture, the bad side its effective remoteness. I was staying at the Sofitel. An OK hotel but very overpriced. Knowing the prices in La Defense I walked to a nearby suburb Puteaux , and after a brief negotiation in a brasserie agreed they would  provide a baguette. At 3 pm in
France a substantial lunch would be considered sacrilege.  It was great to see the waitress return from the boulangerie with a baguette and the arrival of my sandwich five minutes later.. There’s nothing quite a like a fresh French baguette- simply heaven. 

A walk to the office to connect with email (the lifeblood of our company).  A couple of hours at the office and then the walk back to the hotel  We were due to have dinner in the hotel later, but before that I walked a kilometer or so to Courbevoie,  my haunt close to La Defense, and it was great to people watch and observe the French way of life. I called at a familiar bar, and watched  a couple arguing vociferously in French about the guy’s (alleged) cheating, and walked back to the hotel.  I love these moments when you have free time abroad and sample the local culture. Business travel is often unglamorous but at other times it’s fantastic. 

Despite only 20 minutes in the bar, it was clear on arriving back at the Sofitel that I smelled like a cigarette factory, so took a shower, changed my clothes and went down for dinner. 

The party was assembled with Vanessa, Silvia, Caroline, Anja, Catherine, Sonja and Albert. We ordered our food, and Albert, who is the project sponsor, outlined his aims for the project, and the team priorities. The hotel restaurant was fairly open plan and the menu claimed an Italian flavour. I am not keen on big hotel chains and their restaurants, as they are always expensive and the food is rarely better than ok.. My starter, a mix of Italian antipasti was good, but the main course was a “ravioli with mixed meat and vegetables.” This when it was arrived was interesting. The ravioli was singular (raviolo?) and instead of pasta was actually a folded cabbage leaf with the meat and vegetables inside. All of these had been cooked to the point of being ready to dissolve. 

Despite the food we had a great conversation and team spirit was high. We had a last nightcap before heading to our rooms. 

Up early next day, and we all eschewed (love that word) the 24 Euro breakfast (what a rip-off Sofitel) and went to a traditional French breakfast restaurant, (Starbucks) for our petit dejeuner. 

Thence up to the team meeting. Albert was not participating in the meeting, so I was in the rare situation of being the only male in the meeting. However the ladies were mainly gentle with me (though Caroline has a wicked sense of humour- she is so funny, and I came in for her brilliant mockery on occasion). We had a really productive discussion  analyzing what were the issues facing the HR community, and there was a lot of energy and ideas. One idea that stuck and resonated was my mention of “cheap fun”. This was never my idea, having been coined at Sun, where we had had a programme of managers being able to charge $10 a head to expenses to run a cheap fun event every quarter. It’s become a team in joke ever since. 

After lunch we took a break and walked on the  esplanade looking down the great avenue of the Grand Armée towards the Arc de Triomphe (the modern “Grande Arche” at La Defense- a spectacular building, has been built to line up directly with the older Arc in
Paris itself.). Anja (team leader) went back into Starbucks and bought a mountain of cakes- more cheap fun, though I don’t eat sweet things personally. 

Anyway a great meeting , and then I caught a cab with Anja to Charles de Gaulle. Had some trouble persuading the taxi driver that she was a colleague and not my wife, (not really clear why), but we arrived at our separate terminals without incident. I sat in the Air France lounge at Terminal 2, witnessing a strange phenomenon. My flight was scheduled some 2-3 hours later, so the previous flight hadn’t arrived, let alone taken off it was (full though so I couldn’t go earlier). All the boards showed that there had been delays at Heathrow due to storms. The flights were late and it was clear that later ones would be delayed, but the airport persisted in the fiction that our flight would still miraculously be on time. Anyway eventually they abandoned the pretence and we limped back to Heathrow landing at 10pm ( 11pm French time but we gained an hour by changing time zone.). 

A couple of weeks later to
Munich. This was to take part in the re-launch of a training course “HR 101”, for new HR starters. When I had joined, this had been one of my headaches- the class had been run once before I arrived, and it had been badly received. We had been through an extensive redesign, with some tough critics and this was make or break.  

Landed at Munich airport and took a cab to our office, This is in a town called Unterschleissheim, just outside of Munich, and has to be one of the quietest of quiet towns. Interestingly the driver was very uncomfortable in German, and I quickly established he was from
Cameroon. He was quite happy to talk in French, but it felt strange to be doing this in
Germany. 

A useful day of meetings before meeting some of the delegates the evening before the course in our hotel in nearby Freising (very slightly less quiet than Unterschleissheim). Although we had invited them to meet for drinks, only two folks from
Holland, plus my French colleague Benoit, actually came. We walked to a very good local restaurant, and were later joined by Anja (my alleged wife) and had a great meal. 

Next day was the big test, so in the Russia room we welcomed our 23 delegates from everywhere from Eastern Europe to
Johannesburg. The first day went well, though we still had some work to do on keeping the length of the presentations to time. I became the timer from hell. There was a whiteboard at the back of the room and I started writing on it at the appointed intervals, in full view of the speaker, the time remaining for each presenter e.g. 30 minutes left, 15 minutes left, etc. The audience laughed and started announcing the time left. We could have been  there longer otherwise. 

We finished the day about on time, but the delegates were clearly tired. 

One of the complaints about the earlier course  had been that there was no social activity to help delegates to get to know each other and network. To help this process as well as organizing a  group dinner I had written a team game that could be done during dinner. I’d written a spoof mystery based on a pastiche of the “Da Vinci Code” and substituting senior HR team members as characters. In preparation I had re-read Dan Brown’s book and am firmly of the view that my 3 pages have more plot. I handed out the briefs with some reservations that the delegates might be too tired to make a success of it. 

Before I carry on with this story, if you will indulge me, I just want to go back further in time to give you a little (hopefully amusing) history. 

HISTORICAL INTERLUDE. 

I first came across the idea  of the “creative presentation” alternative when my wife and I were able to go on a lavish weekend away provided by Unisys as a reward for excellent performance (“Chairman’s Elite”). Over dinner one evening there was a professional “murder mystery” performed by actors. The idea that I was impressed with, was that they set up the mystery with two ways to win. If you wanted to be the detective then you could come up with the right answer, but if you were no good at such things, you could still win, as there was also a prize for the most creatively presented solution, however wrong.  

At our table that night we had consumed too much wine to detect (or care about) the murderer, so we went for the wild presentation, winning with a spectacularly tuneless attempt to sing our solution in four part harmony.. maybe they gave us the prizes to shut us up. I’m not sure that giving us more  wine as prizes was such a smart plan. 

Anyway, when later I first became Director of Learning and Development at Unisys, we were having an HR conference with our worldwide HR heads from
Philadelphia coming over to take part. My boss Tim, asked me if I could do something by way of evening entertainment, so I wrote my own murder mystery, and had fellow European HR leaders doing incredibly bad overacting in between courses (they were very talented at doing this). 

There is nothing like working in an organisation where people are very competitive. The teams were incredibly feverish and single minded and dinner was almost forgotten (and me ignored) as they worked to make their presentations. I can still remember some of them, including a mixed group of HR directors doing a choreographed version of Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” with excellent choreography, and another where the victim was resurrected after 3 days (been done before I think). 

Afterwards I was persuaded by a colleague to prolong the entertainment using a “con trick” that we did for entertainment sometimes. By this stage I had been away with several colleagues running classes for some years, and we had used this trick for entertainment some evenings. I’m not going to tell you all about it, but basically this trick involves someone claiming to have psychic powers. Due to these powers they can leave the room and while they are out someone touches one of a row of objects. The psychic comes back in, hovers their hands over the objects and then can identify which has been touched. The trick obviously relies on an accomplice seeing which item has been touched and passing an unobtrusive signal to the “psychic”- I am not telling you how. We had  perfected  a version of this (we spent many nights away) in which I was the rational scientist who denounced the whole thing as rubbish. This usually was very effective as ruling me out in peoples’ minds as the accomplice, so whilst being “proved wrong” I could have great fun randomly accusing innocent people who might have scratched their nose at the wrong moment. Anyway, on this night somebody decided that we would play this trick on the Worldwide leadership team. 

Now one last piece of background. The centre where we held the conference was a beautiful company-owned management centre in St Paul de Vence near Nice. As well as having great facilities, tradition was that when they went home, the bar staff would hand the keys to a Unisys person who would lock up when everyone was finished. You will be shocked and horrified to learn that I did regular bar duty on such occasions. This presented a new opportunity.  

There is a famous short detective story by GK Chesterton, where a man is stabbed in his house and everyone denies that anyone approached the house all day. The detective successfully realises that the murderer is a postman, who walks up to the house in broad daylight, but no one notices a postman approaching a house and he blends into invisibility. 

In the same way I became the invisible accomplice. I was on one side of the bar polishing glasses, dispensing drinks and passing the signal (not very subtly), but I was invisible.  

The other innovation was our new psychic, a dear friend called Hansha. Hansha is of Indian Hindu origin, and showed a scary capacity for lying shamelessly, explaining it all as being linked to her religion.  

“Psychic Hansha” was unstoppable, Our head office colleagues wanted to test whether it was only metal objects, but Hansha could detect using glass, metal, coins , stones, you name it, they even tried areas of pattern on the carpet. Several of our European colleagues who knew about the trick were not making a good lob of looking very serious- indeed one colleague Phil K, never a man to mince his words, described them rather loudly as “bankers”. At least I think that’s what he said. A less qualified person would have said they were mocking.  

Anyway the spirits communicated with Hansha until 2 in the morning when they became bored. 

 (Some months later at the same venue we did the trick again. This time we were facilitating a customer event (different “psychic” this time), and the audience were a set of police chiefs from the UK. This was particularly fun. Policemen are spectacularly untrusting of human nature and knew they were being fooled, but they couldn’t work out how. One particularly devious Chief Constable from
Lancashire tried touching an object when  he thought no one was looking. Unfortunately for him he was focusing on people on the other side of the bar. The invisible barman saw him and the “psychic” was just as accurate) 

At the HR conference though I came unstuck the following morning. One very senior VP was telling my boss about the amazing psychic occurrences the previous night. 

 “Was
Gary there?” asked Tim cynically. As word went around the leadership team I could feel my name slipping down the succession plan. Sometimes cheap fun can be career-limiting.  

BACK TO FREISING 

Anyway, we are back in the upper room at Freising, in a traditional German restaurant (“Pasta and Co”). I’d been worried when I had handed out the briefs that the delegates were too tired, but soon their competitiveness kicked in  and as dinner progressed the teams were getting more frenetic.. Some great fun, one team miming their entire presentation (try miming
Barcelona which was part of the answer), one team all mysteriously getting pregnant (not sure why), and the winning team going for the enthusiastic and robust singing solution. The prizes (Teddy bears of course) were distributed, and duly appreciated. 

After this day 2 was easy. The class was a great success and a big headache removed. Funny experience going back to the hotel after day 2 . I was travelling with my French colleague Benoit and a delegate from
South Africa who was also not returning until the following day. Benoit was excited as our cab driver (actually from
Croatia) also spoke Italian, so Benoit was conversing with the driver in Italian, I was talking with the driver in German, and with Benoit in French. Our colleague Nandi was confused. She spoke several languages other than English, but Xhosa and Zulu aren’t spoken much in
Munich. Benoit asked the guy in Italian if he spoke French. “No”, he said in Italian, “I wanted to but I had to learn bastard German didn’t I”. Charming as he lives a better life in
Germany. 

I was staying overnight to do review meetings with team members next day. Hence Benoit and I were out to dinner again. I wanted to see if there was another decent restaurant so we went down a side street from the main square. A short walk brought us to what looked like a restaurant (it said it was) and an Italian flag suggested good things. The windows were covered in net curtains so you couldn’t see inside, so we walked in. 

What a disappointment. The place was really a bar which served food. There were only 3 other people in the place. A teenage couple were, as the Americans would say “making out” at a table, with no concern for the public spectacle they were creating. Their aggressive attempts to eat each other’s faces was pretty unappetizing. A solitary guy was reading a book. There was no sign of any server. We sat there in some horror, not quite sure whether to leave. After some time passed, the solitary reader cracked under the pressure and admitted to be the barman, and we ordered two beers. Benoit picked up the menu, but I suggested in French that we shouldn’t encourage anyone to think we might eat there. We drank our beers as quickly as possible, and left, with the barman buried in his book and the teenagers locked in mortal combat with their suckers and tentacles. 

In the end we went back to our German restaurant. We had an interesting altercation with our waiter. Benoit had chosen steak and wanted it “bleu”- “blue”- very very lightly cooked (the English would say unsafe and raw). I tried to explain in German. 

The waiter’s response surprised me. The Germans have a lovely phrase. Where we would describe a dish as “Italian style” the German phrase would be “after the English art” (my translation). The waiter when he read back the order said “one steak after the English art”. I was horrified. The English have a reputation for cooking everything to the point of extinction, so “English style” could mean “cremated” when applied to a steak. I thought it was my German so started explaining, but he was adamant that it should be English style. I thought it was my German so switched to English. He spoke English perfectly, and it became apparent that he was adamant that English style meant “very lightly cooked”. So those of you out there who criticize English food as cooked to death, there’s a man in
Bavaria who thinks we don’t cook our food enough. I wouldn’t like to eat any vegetables he cooked. 

Flight back completely uneventful. Wish I could say that more often.