some blatantly obvious insights

After a week in meetings and being exposed to the views of a few people who are much higher up the greasy pole than I am, I thought that I share some of the insights and how to deal with those inevitable 'so where to now brown cow?' questions which just jump out.

The first thing that pleases me about the experience is that the gulf is only on a corporate level, something which I have experienced before but there is nothing like a bit of positive reinforcement of that fact.

The other thing that was particularly striking to me was that in many other facets of life, I am way ahead of the game, I am a much more interesting person, I am not a "company" man and I draw inspiration from a host of sources which constantly challenges this fraternity. They need to believe in their way because if they stopped then that world would begin to crumble, quite a responsibility of sorts.

Still we (I) did realise that we needed to be careful when dealing with them because these people and have the ability to make decisions on things which indirectly affect "us" down South.

Our first seductive aim was to impress, because this almost guaranteed that we'd have a greater say about our existence as a team before the expected "refocusing" of resources, and when you have a global stamp of approval from London then the locals toe the line - we resoundedly achieved this objective.

The second objective was to impress via some show and tell, the perception still exists that all good things originate from London or Chicago (the first world H/Qs) and anything coming out of Africa is viewed with suspicion, a tiring, frustrating reality - we achieved this objective.

The third objective was a personal objective, to see how I matched up in this company, and for the most part, I was good except on the final afternoon when I forgot something that I generally don't - that while I like to be right, when I am right it's not essential, I am not a teenager it hardly matters since being right doesn't mean being effective. But on the whole it was good personally.

In wordy conclusion, I had a look at the top brass, and it's apparent that they continue to make sacrifices on friends, family and all things personal for this type of existence, they believe that they lead, perhaps they have influence but leadership, mmhm, they are at the head of the caravan plodding ahead we follow because we've got other personal objectives (like buy champagne for the fridge) which we'd like to fulfil. And when the chips are down, their lives are no more exciting or enthralling than ours near the bottom of the food chain.

And thankfully there are other roads that lead to the "dessert of life."