Inaguration

This may well be the last inaguration blip of the day... I couldn't be there in person but the whole group gathered in one of the lounges to watch the oath and speech ina half-hour break from our days work. I think the speech was lower key than many people expected, but I thought the sentiments in it were worthy and I hope he can make progress towards achieving his goals.

I promised 42 a few days ago I'd say something about what we are being taught. It's actually quite hard to wrap it up in a form that's digestible to others, as a lot of it is coming from interaction in the sessions. One of the things I' taking away from our sessions is a toolkit of templates and models that help me to deal with situations in business as I encounter them...

One such example is the Timmons Model of the Entrepreneurial Process which helps to explore the relationship between the opportunity addressed by a venture, the management team of the venture and the available resources (including but not limited to cash!). If you just look at the picture it doesn't make that much sense, but the teaching here encourages a lot of discussion and the application of models to businesses through the use of case studies. Other models I think are significant include an Enterprise Architecture template which explores the interplay of the structure and processes of a business, and models for opportunity evaluation and achieving market leadership. These models are extremely useful in understanding my own past experience and in ensuring that in future when addressing situations I take into account as many factors as possible!

This afternoon we received reports on our personal style in work situations (from an internet assessment we did last week). Although these things are never perfect I think most people (including me) felt the reports raised many good points and were helpful in understanding some of our strengths and weaknesses in personal interactions, or more broadly "Emotional Intelligence". My report held few surprises for me, I know some of my weaknesses fairly well. That doesn't necessarily make it easier to address them, but this is a pretty good environment to try in, and the tutor was able to offer lots of helpful suggestions for approaches to changing behaviour.

Just at the end of today I was put slightly off balance by something, then I spoke to MrsCyclops and found out about something that has inconveienced her a little. Then I missed dinner because I had been misinformed about the opening times of the dining hall, couldn't phone for pizza because of a telephone problem, and eventually had to call back to pay because of a brain problem.... I didn't really want to eat pizza either, because I'm trying to eat healthily at the moment - this is already killing me given the amount of cakes, crisps, sweets etc I am surrounded by. Then to top it all off I'd processed my blip without a timestamp so I had to go and fix that (and it wasn't that great an image in the first place). So tonight has been a thorough hassle, and it's 9:15pm and I still have loads of work to do.

Better press on....