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.