03 August 2002
Week
One
My room-mate Loren had his wife
and a friend over last night so there was general confusion in the residence and
Mr. Wu our Chinese roomate (Taiwan) ghosted in and out. It was good to hear
women's voices breaking the normal silence of this apartment. I am a little
homesick, and a little fuzzy this morning, but generally OK. I had a V&T at
the house before we went up to the college for dinner. They had three kinds of
kebabs: beef, shrimp and chicken. Plus wine.
We dined with the
Ambassador-at-large from the Foreign Office of Azerbaijan. Neat guy. He is
trying to position himself to understand America and Americans and this is a
superb networking tool for his foreign ministry. His insights about the Saudi
diplomatic structure in Washington were fascinating during our case study on the
Khobar Tower bombing yesterday. I wonder about all the activities that are
happening here, the ones in the front of the house, Marie-Christine and her
elves in the background, and the various personal, institutional and national
agendas being played out.
I am getting used to three meals a day. Time to
cut back! At least there is a forced march involved in any educational or dining
experience. Not having a car focuses the mind wonderfully. We walked out in
Cambridge after dinner. There was a street performer working the corner across
from the JFK School. His patter was fabulous, I have never seen a guy work a
crowd like that, maybe because we no longer see entertainment in person any
more. He had a sort of parti-colored floppy hat, parti-colored vest and trousers
and juggled. He juggled balls and knives and dragged kids from the crowd and he
was marvelous. Maybe part of the marvel was that we don't see people in person
anymore in America. He was a bit like Gallagher from the cable TV, only
real.
We have two case studies today rather than the regular three. The
first is about creative financing in the Forest Service. I know where that one
is going, since I have wandered in Federal Budget land for the last decade. The
second, which I am reading while typing and trying to consume enough coffee to
keep my eyes open, is about top management team performance and workforce
stability in the data-display industry. The team in question is composed on
30-something-aged executives, so I have a hard time taking them very seriously.
My world coming up in Naval Intelligence was so hierarchic that is bears little
similarity. I wonder about the broader applicability to the rest of the
bureaucrats here in the audience. We'll see how they pull this off.
We
also lose our three professors for the week and they bring in a new team, Pete
Zimmerman on "Implementing Strategy" and Nancy Katz on "Team Building." We had
just bonded with our last team an now we start over again. Marie-Christine
looked at us over her dark European glasses yesterday and informed us that they
were shaking up our big class sessions, mixing the seminar groups together in a
new combination and changing the seating arrangement. Presumably this will bring
new inter-personal contacts, like moving people at a dinner party in between
courses.
I do not like working on Saturday morning. It is six-thirty and
I slept in till six and am accordingly disoriented and running late already.
Thankfully there are just two seminars today and we should be done by
noon-thirty. There are to be box lunches and we are free for the rest of today
and Sunday. That will complete Week One here at the JFK School, seventeen class
hours with five hours of seminar preparation. I don't know how long the reading
took- between fifteen and twenty hours. I think the taxpayer is getting her
money's worth.
It has been pandemonium here since the one-year mid-career
masters program of 180 people just checked in. They had all-day sessions to get
them organized, build teams, do all that stuff we have compressed into three
weeks.
They have handed us the binder that includes all the readings for
the next two weeks. With the dinner at the Kennedy Library and the Red Socks
game coming up in the evening this week, they recommend reading ahead for those
days. I would rather goof off tomorrow but if I hit the books pretty hard I
should position myself to take the weekend off next week. I'll do the laundry
and make a store run and that should cover the waterfront for creature
comforts.
Well, it is almost 0730 and I need to get my ass in
gear.