Friday, November 26, 2010

Strategic confabulation

Two days, 30 colleagues and one large hotel room (which varied from icy cold to suffocatingly warm). Yes, time for the annual get-together for the China region in which we...

- chewed the cud
- questioned our purpose
- talked 'digital', 'cross-pollination' and 'seedcorn'
- compared directives from London with what we thought we should be doing locally
- made jokes about pandas
- narrowed it down to Arts, English and Education
- stood in circles, semi-circles and took our shoes off
- juggled EO&D, SBUs, T2s and Tier 2s
- drank too much coffee
- and actually came out with the basics of a new astrategy by the end of it, an hour ahead of schedule.

One can snigger at these things, but actually I found almost all of it positive, constructive and fairly energising. Great to get away from the emails, phone calls and frantic office schedules and just spend time getting to know your colleagues (some of whom were completely new to me) and how everything fits and works together.

1 comment: