Slingshot

I’m in Heathrow on my way to the Seychelles via Zurich.  It’s a roundabout way of getting there, but it was much cheaper than the direct flights.

I’m going to experience long-haul economy class for the first time in a year.  It will no doubt be good for the soul.  I’m always breathless with admiration at people who stomach sardine-like conditions to go on a journey.  That doesn’t mean I want to be one of them.

I managed to miss the train to London this morning.  I had a very good reason for being late, but it wasn’t the kind of reason you can share with the check-in staff so I simply pleaded for mercy and they changed my ticket at no extra cost.  Usually Eurostar staff just look at you stonily and force you to buy a new ticket.  I must have looked particularly worthy of special consideration this morning.  If only I could figure out how to bottle that…

Something about holidays makes me a little too happy to spend money.  Without really thinking about it too hard, I went and bought the Panasonic camera I’ve been coveting these past 6 months in duty free.  It wasn’t a smart thing to buy on the grounds that I already have two digital cameras, one of which is quite compact and the other takes excellent pictures.  But the LUMIX range of Panasonics is better than both of my other cameras combined (I’ve seen the pictures it takes) so I wanted it.  If I had thought for a little, I would undoubtedly have talked myself out of it, although I can’t seem to feel unhappy about the purchase.

I also bought the maximum allowable amount of alcohol for import into the Seychelles, the better to ensure the boat has everything it needs for a satisfactory cruise.

We’ve heard that the seas are quite rough around the Seychelles at the moment.  People already on site over there are telling us that there are 4m swells and 25kts winds, which is not particularly pleasant when the main objective is to relax, spend time with friends and take advantage of secluded coves and beaches.  We’re not there for competition sailing.  I hope the weather works out well for us, it would be tragic to go so far and find ourselves struggling through difficult days of sailing when we really just want to kick back, relax and watch the sun go down in all the most beautiful places in the islands.

I’ve been looking forward to this trip for a long time, and it’s finally here.  Sitting in a busy and air-conditioned Terminal 2, it doesn’t feel like I’m about to be basking in sunshine, but I’m sure I’ll be more in touch with it once I arrive in Mahé.  Assuming I manage to stand after being folded into a seat the size of a dog kennel for several hours.

Corporate policy dictates that we fly to Niamey from France in economy class.  This is the second time I come to Niger on this flight.

Because of the frequent traveller advantages, I get a few privileges in the airport – quicker check-in, shorter queues at passport control and security, and access to an executive lounge.  These advantages are nice but in no way essential to the perfect travelling experience.  The real privilege is not guaranteed, and you only find out if you have been lucky enough to get it when you arrive at the gate.

You hand your boarding pass to the girl, the piece of paper that tells you you’re in row 67, seat G, between a sumo wrestler and a 55-year-old donut lover with a snoring problem, and the girl passes the fancy bar/dot code in front of a scanner.  If you’re lucky today, the machine beeps angrily, and flashes up a message that says “Classe Incohérente” – basically meaning that your class of travel is “incoherent”, or doesn’t make sense.  Then it spits out another boarding pass, and lo and behold you are now in seat 5A, with a glass of champagne and the greatest luxury of all, leg room.

What drives it is not really a desire to please me, but a desire to move people from an overcrowded economy class cabin into an almost-empty business class cabin.

It’s one of those moments that somehow manages to make the drudge of spending so much time in planes and airports and hotels and security lines seem completely irrelevant, and I end up feeling like I’m really special.  Yes, it’s childish.  Yes, it’s an unfair privilege.  Yes, it makes me absurdly happy.

You study a lot of stuff when you go to business school, and much of it defies application in the real world.  Nevertheless, some of the things you learn are incredibly leveragable if you can find a way to transfer them out of the academic environment.  These valuable things are not necessarily the precise subject matter of the courses you’re following, sometimes they’re organising principles that are not explicitly taught.

I have long wanted to understand how I was able to do so much, with so little time and so little sleep, while I was at Wharton, and yet I can’t seem to find any free time, nor the energy to do anything with the free time I do have, when I have to work for a living.  The contrast between the two is remarkable, and I’d love to get at what the causes of the difference are.

I think it essentially boils down to three things.  Self-organisation, timeliness/predictability and variety.

Self-organisation is the fact that I choose how to deal with the demands made of me by a business school.  Those demands are severe but the requirements are clear, and the manner in which I produce the correct output is entirely up to me.  This allows me to self-determine how I tackle the time constraints rather than have to contort my approach to fit the work schedule someone else has designed.

By Timeliness/Predictability, I mean the simple fact that things begin and end on time, and at clearly defined times.  I also mean that things don’t last longer than they need to.  At Wharton, we never spent 3 hours doing a piece of work that could be tackled in 90 minutes.  Meetings were not a place for idle speculation, we expected everyone on a team to have done their work ahead of time and to be able to express clearly their point of view.  At work, meetings turn into insufferable and intermlinable talking shops that consume your day with meaningless to-and-fro conversations that lead nowhere and seem to serve peoples egos more than they do the project.  When things begin and end on time, the value of the time in-between the meetings you have is multiplied by a hundred because you can reliably plan to use that time.  If you work in a culture where nothing begins or ends on time, you never leverage the time in-between meetings because you never know with any certainty whether you’ll really be free or not.

Variety refers to the fact that although you may be working solidly for 6 hours of the day in classes, it’s 4 different classes and the different subject matters keep you alert.  You’re not being asked to switch gears every 5 minutes (which is what happens in my office because of constant interruptions from nearby colleagues, the telephone or ‘urgent’ emails), but nor are you required to review the same 80-page contract for a solid 5 hours, which is a skill only lawyers are genetically programmed to be able to complete.  The variety of tasks and subjects allows you to stay alert.

So how to transpose this into your work life?

1/  Take control of the work you do.  Don’t let others organise you.  This means taking ownership and responsibility for the projects and your input into them because otherwise you become a cog in a machine, and you’re forced to work at the pace set by others.

2/ Impose your schedule on others.  Don’t accept meetings outside your working day unless there’s a real need (someone else’s heavy schedule isn’t a real need).  Start meetings on time, finish on time, tell people you have something else afterwards.  Don’t let meetings be open-ended.  Use agendas.

3/ Don’t answer the telephone when it rings.  People abuse their ability to speak to you whenever they choose.  Filter your internal calls, answer external calls where necessary.  Shut down your email program and restart it when you’re ready to check email, rather than dealing with stuff as and when it arrives, and allowing it to set the pace of your work.  Flush your blackberry down the toilet.

Easy principles to state.  Harder to put into practice.  But when you look at how much we are able to get done in a regulated environment, the payoff from this sort of approach is staggeringly large, both in terms of productivity and lifestyle.

So day two (out of 10) of Harvard Executive Education, and I’m finding it surprisingly pleasant to be in the student lifestyle again.

I probably don’t mean what you think I mean by that.

What I mean by the student lifestyle is that I’m getting up just before 6am, spending my days in classes (6 hours), group discussions (2 hours), preparing for classes (~3 hours), doing sport (1 hour), and eating (about 45 minutes).  Then there’s the time I spend chatting to people and writing about it on blogs no-one reads.

This is a little reminiscent of the Wharton lifestyle whereby I would get up before 6, go rowing for 2 hours, and be in class by 9.

What’s so good about all this?  Well it’s simple.  I’m getting about 3 times as much “switched-on time” as I normally do.  I’m getting a lot more out of my days than I do in Paris.  If I had to guess at the reasons for this I would probably come up with a list a little like this :

• Variety of work and activities keeps me energised
• Interesting and active workload prevents boredom
• Peer group provides discipline and a reason to do the work
• Change of scenery shocks me out of my routine
• Someone else deals with the menial stuff (providing food, cleaning lodgings, etc)
• I’m getting up very early
• I’m drinking a lot less alcohol (not particularly key, since I didn’t drink less at Wharton and the same outcome occurred)

I have to find a way to store this up inside me so that I can keep it with me when I return to Paris.

It’s nice here.  If you can look past the miserable weather.  It’s got that student town thing going that big cities so sorely lack.

It’s not limited to the student, everyone who lives here gets to benefit.  It comes across as a wholesome, outdoorsy, enjoying-life-for-the-moment attitude that helps people just get along.  It’s pervasive here, Cambridge (Mass.) is really a big campus, and it’s apparent in the attitudes of the bar staff, as well as the bar patrons.  It’s apparent in the effort people put into everything, like running despite the rain, or smiling despite the damp.

My jet-lag has me up early and there’s a long walk through the streets as I look for somewhere that can do the cooked breakfast I’m craving.  I end up in a place called “Crema Cafe” which doesn’t really do cooked breakfasts, but some American prefabricated version of it that gets put in a bagel.  It’ll do.  Especially with a 4-shot latte.  I’d forgotten about those.

Registration at Harvard Business School for the Exec-Ed programme is this afternoon, after which I expect it’ll be solid work for the following ten days.  I’m looking forward to it although it would have been nice to have a little time to appreciate the town.

I need to absorb a little of the ambiance here so I can carry it home with me and keep it.

The trip is going exactly as planned, but it isn’t exactly going as well as the plan suggested.  I’m flying the new BA airline Open Skies from Paris to New York and then on to Boston on Delta.  I’m in Boston for an executive education thing organised by my company at Harvard Business School (which is very cool, but promises to be fairly intense given the schedule).

The idea behind Open Skies is to purchase a bunch of second hand aircraft (or just recycle old BA aircraft), do them up so that they’re 90% business class and 10% first class.  You then charge less than a normal business class or first class ticket, but still much more than an economy ticket, for the places.  Since the airline is entirely business class you don’t get the additional cost of treating people differently.  The additional feature, when it’s all business class, is that it looks like they can get away with a level of service that isn’t quite the same as it would be on other airlines.

For example, the airline is too old to have a modern entertainment-on-demand system, so instead you get handheld movie players.  That’s all well and good, except they don’t hold as many movies, the quality isn’t the same, they don’t stow easily and they’re all scratched up and cheap-looking.

Similarly, the meal and the level of service isn’t the same – the entire plane is business class so the service is spread a little thinner than usual.  The wines aren’t as good (now I’m being really snobbish!) and the airline uses second-rate airports and terminals.  In Paris they fly from Orly, and in New York, they land at JFK terminal 7.  Sherementyevo airport in Russia gets you through customs quicker than JFK 7.  I had to beg to cut the queue so I wouldn’t miss my connecting flight.

Then I had to get to terminal 3 to get my Delta flight, and so you leave one decrepit terminal to go to another terminal that makes the first one look good.  If ever you’re flying out of terminal 3 in JFK on Delta or NorthWest, I recommend you allow lots and lots of time.  The check in was a disaster.  Bagage check seemed to take forever, the staff were stressed, every ticket seemed to have some problem with it.  You had to sympathise with the poor counter staff who looked like they were way beyond the point where you burst out crying and in a zone beyond pain or psychological torture.  The passengers were getting justifiably frustrated and I was getting worried (for the second time since landing in JFK) that I was going to miss my connecting flight.  Being an idiot, I had forgotten to pull rank with my frequent flyer card and was in line with all the other struggling travellers.

I finally managed to get to the gate, on a mission to change the seat I’d been given because it was a middle seat, which is equivalent to the four-and-a-half’th circle of hell.  The guy at the gate was still trying to check in the previous overdue flight to Fort Lauderdale was was as sympathetic as a skunk with a bladder issue.

Some time before I got to the skunk at the gate, I had had a slight epiphany in the form of a gorgeous blonde girl who had been somewhere near me in the line for security.  She had been on the telephone, smiling, and seemed not to notice the pandemonium around her.  She had one of the old iPhones, and if Apple could take pictures of her using that phone for their marketing machine, their sales would double.

As occasionally happens when I’m confronted by someone whose good mood transcends the grotesque, I look in the metaphorical mirror and come to the age-old realisation that…

I’m the source of my own discontent.

Damn I hate that.  But it’s a good feeling really.  I began being really nice to everyone, faking the good mood until the pretending fades and all that’s left is the mood.  I was really friendly with the grumpy overweight lady who checked my passport, I kept smiling as I removed my shoes, my belt, intimate parts of my anatomy, and allowed them all to be x-ray’d.  Then I smiled as the skunk with the bladder issue pissed all over my problem.

Finally, I remembered that I have status on this airline because it’s associated to Air France.  So I whipped out the Platinum card and made my way to the executive lounge (called the Crown Lounge in terminal 3, apparently) and, maintaining my unusually good humour, asked the lady at the counter if she could help me change my seat and put the Air France frequent flyer number on the ticket so I would get the miles.

After tapping away and asking a couple of questions, she looked at me really apologetically and said that since I hadn’t come in on a SkyTeam airline, I couldn’t use the lounge, because the flight out was domestic.  I am always learning new rules concerning the various frequent flyer programmes I am a member of, and these rules rarely work to my advantage.

I just kept smiling and said it was absolutely no problem, I didn’t have long to wait anyway and so not waiting in the lounge was no biggie, but I would really appreciate it if she could have a try at changing the seat.  She found me a middle seat on an exit row and said I should try the gate a little before boarding as they would be freeing up additional seats at that point.  Then she looked at me and said,

I’m going to let you stay in the lounge this time.  It’s on me.  Because you seem like a really nice person.

Well you know it’s a small thing.  It basically amounts to a glass of red wine while I type this at the bar of the lounge.  But after so much hassle and so much struggle to get normal stuff done.  It’s actually really something.  My good mood reflected back at me.

I’ve got to look into this happiness thing.  Seems to work.

We decided to continue to Namibia despite the horror of the trip so far.  There were meetings we needed to have and things we needed to do.  We telephoned every Air Namibia number we could find and worked out the departure gate, then talked our way through security despite not having boarding passes.  Then waited in a really tiny lounge for hours before getting to the gate where a bunch of very haggard-looking passengers were in various states of disarray.

When the crew arrived, some of the passengers applauded.  I have yet to figure this out, and have decided to put it down to confused, incoherent exhaustion.  These individuals are part of the company that had cost some 200 people 13 hours of their lives.  That’s over half a year of waking life.  And they were applauded as they arrived.  I have no explanation.

We got on the plane, into the same seat as the day before, and flew to Windhoek.  Upon arrival, I did my usual arrival routine : prepare well in advance, leave the aircraft like a bullet from a gun, and be the first in line at customs.  It was 1am, and I had a slightly surreal conversation with the female immigration agent.

You come to Namibia often?

Yes, actually…

You always come for negotiations?

Yes…

You should get a visa.

I thought getting temporary stay stamps was Ok…

It is, but your passport is going to run out of pages if you carry on like this.

The driver who was waiting for us in the arrivals area was also waiting for another 6 people who were there for a convention of some description.  I didn’t know we would have to wait for anyone else, and they clearly didn’t have the same aircraft dismount technique as I did, so I was going to have to wait for ages as they queued and cleared customs.  After some consultation with my travelling companion, we told the driver to find us someone else who could leave immediately.

Windhoek airport isn’t in Windhoek.  The area is mountainous and you have to drive 40 minutes out of the city before you get somewhere flat enough to build an airport.  So we had a 40 minute drive in.  We got to the hotel a little past 2 am.

The fellow at check-in was borderline comatose.  It took him at least 2 minutes to copy my credit card number down.  We did manage to talk him into reopening the bar to serve us a couple of beers so we could deal with a very intense need to unwind.  The beers were very good.  African countries in general make great lager.

We made it to our rooms… I was too tired to figure out that the reason the air conditioning remote wasn’t working was that the batteries in it were back-to-front, so I slept in the heat, and four hours later, I was getting ready for breakfast.

We’re leaving tomorrow…. On Air Namibia again… And if we’re lucky, the flight will take off.  If we’re really lucky, it will take off at a time that somewhat resembles the stated departure time.  This will certainly not have been either the most productive, or the most enjoyable journey of my travelling career…