Reflections on my third trip to India

I’m wrapping up a week in India, where I facilitated leadership development for an inspiring group of women leaders.  Every day, I was asked, “Is this your first time to India?”  And every day, I answered, “No, this is my third trip to India, but my first trip to the Delhi area.”  This weekend, I made a short side-trip to Agra.  I’ve previously traveled to Bangalore and Kolkata (aka Calcutta).  So I’ve been exposed to four cities in India.  Really, that’s not much, considering the size and vast diversity of this country. 

A few vignettes from this trip.

The Metro.  I encountered two queues to enter the Metro, one for women and one for men.  I’d seen this previously in Indian airports, where same-gender personnel perform security pat-downs for the respective queues.  But why were there two queues here?  It turns out that due to security concerns there are metal detectors and pat-downs to board the Metro.  These precautions were cursory – are they really deterring any bad guys (or gals)?  Still, the experience made me think of an article that I read in The Atlantic which imagined how life could be changed by terrorism, including security inspections for public transit.  Having passed the checkpoint, I rode the escalator up to the platform.  The station near my hotel is the end of the line, so I walked right onto the first car and I had my choice of seats.  After a couple of stops, the car was filling up, and I was wondering if I was the only woman on the Metro.  Soon the car was jammed with men.  I was the only woman in the car and I felt conspicuous as a female non-Indian.  Eventually I changed Metro lines and at the transfer point I made a discovery.  On the platform was an area marked with a pink line and the words “ladies only.”  It turns out that each Metro train has a ladies-only car.  From that point onwards, I rode with the ladies.  I’m sure the gents on the first train were wondering why a lady was in their car.  If one of them had guessed that I wasn’t local (not a hard guess, since I don’t look Indian), and therefore didn’t know about the ladies’ car, it would have been nice for them to offer the suggestion. 

A glimpse of rural life.  All my time in India has been spent in urbanized areas, so during my side trip to Agra, I asked my guide and driver to take me through a village on the outskirts of the city.  This required a call to the tour company boss, who was reluctant, but eventually agreed to let the guide and driver take me for a quick look.  Impressions:  People and animals (buffalo, goats) living together in courtyard houses…little children everywhere, many toddlers with clothes covering only their tops…older children sitting on the grass in front of the school building with the instructor talking to them…older people lying down or sitting in out of the way corners…men cooking something in an old pot over an outdoor fire in a circle of rocks while under their canvas tent strung from a tree they watched TV (I have no idea what they were using for power).  I didn’t take a single photo in the village.  I was apprehensive about offending someone and I also didn’t want to treat people as objects to be photographed (bad enough that I was looking at their lives just for the experience of doing so).

Indian railway.  The train cars look quite prison-like, with bars on the windows.  The lowest class of cars has no assigned seats, and the cars are positively jammed with masses of Indian humanity.  It made me think of train cars packed with people en route to concentration camps (horrible image, I know, but that’s what came up for me).  I was booked in a first class car with an assigned seat and air conditioning.  The smell on the platform was strong with fresh urine and other human odors.  The toilets on the train open up directly to the tracks, which explains the aromas.  On my trip to Agra, an older gentleman shared my compartment.  He sat in rock pose on the upper bunk and meditated for a while before he laid down and went to sleep.  On my return journey, it turned out that the Indian fellow sitting next to me did his MBA at UCLA in 1971…small world…

Plan the Next Chapter

On Sunday, we spent the entire day on action planning.  This is a typical thing to do toward the end of a personal development program.  The objective to produce a plan was typical, but the approach we took was unique. 

Each person first reviewed all the work she completed over the prior days, highlighting or taking notes on the specific actions to include in her plan.  She then created a set of specific goals, with deadline dates, and a short list of supporting tasks or milestones.  Some people had a few specific goals, and others had loads.  I ended up with ten goals.  It sounds like a lot, but they were clustered into four themes and they feel 100% do-able to me.

We used large sheets of cardstock to create a planning board.  Some people organized their goals into a timeline.  Others used a quadrant format.  Some had an arc.  One person created "books" to hold various goals in themes.  Some people used both sides of their board.  I created a mindmap.  Once we had the goals and steps articulated in words, we cut up magazines and added images and/or headlines to embroider our plans with more layers of meaning and beauty.  Unbelievably, we spent three solid hours on this activity and most of us would have taken more time.

After a quick lunch, we shared our plans with our small groups and got feedback from each other.  Then we rejoined the main group and shared a one minute version of our plans with everyone.  It was inspiring to see how everyone's personal visions came together.

We closed the day with some thoughts about how to take the work forward, how to keep in touch with our small group, and how to stay connected to our plans.  I already re-set the wallpaper on my cellphone as a picture of my plan.  My small group has a call scheduled for next month to reconnect.

Having now completed Life Launch, I'm ready to start the Coaching Certification phase.  That starts on Monday and I'm looking forward to it.

A Full Day of Life's Assignments

Life Launch started today with the same opening exercise: bouldering on the beach.  We are so lucky that the weather in Santa Barbara has been so beautiful these past few days, allowing us to enjoy not only bouldering but many other sessions outdoors.  Four members of our group experienced the bouldering exercise yesterday.  Today it was my turn to be one of the remaining three in our group to experience bouldering.  It was a workout in both a physical and a mental/emotional sense.  I will retain a strong memory of my bouldering for a long time to come. 

Balancing the roles and activities in life was the next thing we tackled.  We looked at six human systems: Work, Family, Couple Relationships, Friends, Personal, and Community.  Our task was to example how we have invested our time and energy into these six human systems in recent months and years, and how we want to schedule ourselves into these systems going forward.  In turn, each of us had a chance to experience our as-is and to-be systems map.  I assigned a member of the group to hold up a sign with the word "Friends" on it and told her where to stand in relation to me and what to say.  I did likewise with each of the six human systems.  The group then bombarded me with their messages until I called a timeout.  I then re-set their places and their messages and they bombarded me again.  We debriefed how that worked, what else to fine tune, etc.  It was fun and enlightening.  I enjoyed participating in this for myself and for each of the women in the group.  We all shared a commonality, in that involvement in community organizations was on the periphery compared to everything else.  Then we sat down and did some personal work on what to change, eliminate or start in order to realize the shift in the balance of our six systems.

Writing a letter from the "old sage" within me was the next activity.  Each of us projected ourselves 20-30 years into the future and wrote a letter from that point of view to the woman each of is today.  We had no idea while we were doing this that we would be asked to read our letter aloud.  When our facilitator showed up to let us know that time was up on letter writing, and she was holding a box of tissues, I had a feeling what was coming!  I'm looking forward to taking some of the advice that the "old sage" within me had to offer.

The afternoon sessions were intense.  We defined our purpose and found our richly detailed personal vision.  Doing this work allowed us to braid in all the insights we had developed up to this point.  Included in one group member's vision was a reunion next December.  I'll be looking forward to that.

It's break time now.  This has been a jam-packed, intense and very worthwhile day. I'm glad for the chance to reflect and regroup myself. 

Tonight we have a group dinner and parlor games.  It should be good fun.

Boulders, Renewal and Passion

We started a very full day in the Life Launch seminar with an exercise called "bouldering" that is designed to address resistance and help overcome resistance.  We worked on the beach in small groups.  One of us shared a goal, and then shared the voices and messages that inhibit pursuit of the goal....things like "You don't have the talent."  or "You'll never be successful at that."  Each member of the group took one of those messages and repeated it, while the group worked to block the goal-seeker's progress.  We were enacting the process of resistance.  Eventually, the goal-seeker broke through the resistance or told us it was time to let her go.  Then we shifted gears and the goal-seeker came up with messages of encouragement.  The rest of the group repeated the encouraging messages and helped the goal-seeker to move forward.  After we left the beach, we talked about how to take the process of boldering forward into real life (e.g., through writing about the voices).

The next segment focused on deepening our work on the Cycle of Renewal.  I settled on Quadrant Four "Getting Ready" as my current status, although I continue to feel that my life experience today is divided among all four quadrants.  I am already doing many activities that are appropriate for this phase.  One of my challenges is that I'm impatient with this phase.  I want to be done with getting ready and move into Quadrant One!  Meanwhile, I do need to continue the networking and learning and exploration that I've got underway.

After lunch we worked on passion and core values.  I've had the same passions and core values for many years:  achievement, relationship intimacy and creativity.  It was useful to revisit how these passions have shown up in my life, how they motivate me today, an dhow they inspire me for the future.  I gained a few insights about concrete things I will do to advance my values and passions.  We're referring to these as experiments.  The purpose of experiments is to gather data to prove or disprove a hypothesis...which means that experiments can't fail as long as you learn something.

The last exercise of the day involved creating a personal symbol.  I did an intricate drawing of a coil pot brimming with what's important to me:  My family, yarn, good food, flipcharts, etc.  I really like the way this drawing turned out.  This may need to end up in a frame on the wall of my office where I can look at it often.

Most of the group had happy hour and dinner together.  It was an enjoyable evening.  I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

Life Launch

This week I took the first step towards becoming a certified coach.  I've done a fair amount of coaching over the years and have even taught John Whitmore's G.R.O.W. model of coaching.  I would like to enhance my coaching capabilities so I can 1) be even more effective in my current role and 2) expand my range of options for future roles.

After gathering recommendations from people I trust, I investigated a few coaching programs.  I settled on The Hudson Institute after talking with one of the faculty and reading a book by the institute's founder, Frederic Hudson.  The book, titled The Adult Years: Mastering the Art of Self-Renewal proposes a theory and model of adult development.  Unlike child development models which are premised on a linear increase in levels of capability, this model is a circle and is premised on a repeated cycle of renewal.  The theory resonated with me.

So here I am, in my hotel room in Santa Barbara, reflecting on my first day.  A pre-requisite for the coaching program is completion of a seminar called Life Launch.  This is a program to help adults who are in the midst of transition and change to reflect and envision a plan for their next steps.  Prospective coaches have to complete the Life Launch program before they can start the coaching certification program.

Today we did a lifeline exercise to summarize our personal history, plotting our peaks and valleys.  My biggest insight was that the peaks were generally things I chose or resulted from things I chose, while the valleys were generally things that happened to me or resulted from things that happened to me.

We also spent some time getting to know the others in the program.  There are 14 participants, 11 women and three men.  We are doing much of our work in two small groups of seven.  My small group is all women, and I'm intrigued by each of them.  I'm looking forward to spending more time with these ladies over the coming days and into the future.

We wrapped up the day with an overview of the cycle of renewal and some discussion on how it might apply to each of us.  I feel like I'm in all the stages at once.  Perhaps I'll have more clarity on where I really am after sleeping on it tonight.  We spoke about ways to "feed and water" the stage called cocooning.  The value of journalling came up.  I used to do a lot of journalling during my college years and early adulthood.  I found myself resisting - - and voicing my resistance - - during the discussion this evening.  I was thinking "I haven't even been blogging lately, how can I journal?!"  And that brought me to this moment.  For the next few days, I'll use my blog to keep a journal of the Life Launch experience.

We closed today's session with a "check out" activity in which each person shared a single word that summarized how they were feeling.  All I could think of was the word "minty" so that's what I said.  I was chewing gum, so of course, I did feel a minty taste, but there is something more to it.  Mint is invigorating, clean, awake, and a little edgy in a good way.  That's how I'm feeling after the first day.

How can we identify and assess creative capacity in leaders?

I just received a form from my child’s school, seeking permission for an assessment as gifted/talented.  I’m  blogging about it because it got me thinking (again) about how we assess and identify high potential individuals (ok, and maybe I'm bragging a little, too, but just a little).

Our school district considers students who fall into one or more of these categories for gifted/talented programs:

• Intellectual Ability - Students whose general intellectual development is markedly advanced in relation to their chronological peers
• High Achievement Ability - Students who consistently function for two consecutive years at highly advanced levels in both English-Language Arts/reading and mathematics.
• Specific Academic Ability - Students who consistently function for three consecutive years at highly advanced levels in either English-Language Arts/reading or mathematics. Students in Grades 9-12 may also be considered in either science or social science.
• Creative Ability - Students who characteristically perceive significant similarities or differences within the environment, challenge assumptions, and produce unique alternative solutions.
• Leadership Ability - Students who show confidence and knowledge; influence others effectively; have problem-solving and decision making skills; express ideas in oral or written form clearly; show sense of purpose and direction.
• Ability in the Performing or Visual Arts - Students who originate, perform, produce, or respond at exceptionally high levels in either dance, music (voice), drama, or in drawing or painting.

This list reminds me of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, although it doesn’t strictly match all of Gardner’s categories.  I appreciate that the schools are making an explicit effort to identify individuals with exceptional abilities not only in academic and intellectual domains, but also in creative, artistic, and leadership pursuits.  Depending on the area of gifted/talented nomination, formal assessments can include intellectual ability testing, auditions or demonstrations, and a review of past work.

To identify high-potential individuals in business, we typically look for a record of high performance (good business results) combined with evidence of leadership ability.   Organizations often compare candidates to a competency model that describes what outstanding behavior looks like in a specific company.  A known problem with this is that competency models are built at a point in time, but leadership needs change, so we may end up selecting high-potentials (or leaders) based on yesterday’s criteria if our competency models are not refreshed often enough.

IBM’s recently released Global CEO Study found that leaders of organizations around the world identified CREATIVITY as the single most important leadership competency for enterprises seeking a path through the complexity that characterizes our times.  The report finds that CEO’s now realize that creativity trumps other leadership characteristics.  Creative leaders are comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation.  To connect and inspire a new generation, they lead and interact in entirely new ways.

How can we identify and assess creative capacity in leaders?  To what extent is creativity and ability that aspiring leaders can develop?

Worldwork High Impact Leadership Seminar

How could I resist a weekend seminar that promised:
- Concepts and tools to understand and work with unpredictable, non-linear behaviors of teams and organizations.
- Inner work to re-discover vision and spark, independent of outer situation and support.
- Concepts and exercises to relate to team members, independent of their willingness to collaborate.
- Methods to collaborate with networks to unfold the impact that they can have on your leadership.

I had heard about the work of Max Schupbach from a former colleague so I was prepared to have an intense experience, and I did.

The content of the session was compelling, starting with the idea of a “second globalization,” in social relations and personal psychology, as a successor to the globalization of commerce. The seminar aimed to expand leaders’ self-awareness and effectiveness in working on a worldwide basis, and to equip them with tools to enable others to do likewise.

Max’s techniques fuse organization/leadership development with art and Jungian psychology. For example, to access a deeper sense of personal vision, one exercise required us to identify an historic, mythic or fairytale figure we could associate with our vision. We then had to make a hand gesture and a facial expression to express the essence of the figure. The next step was to scribble a picture to help us remember the creative, artistic expression. We then talked about how to develop the vision. What daring acts would help it grow? What aspects of our habitial behavior and self-identity would we need to drop or change in order to follow this vision? What dropping ritual could provide support in making personal change?

This work was done in pairs. The paired work allowed each person to get a significant amount of "air time" in practicing the techniques as a facilitator and experiencing them in an applied way. The level of personal discovery was quite high, exceeding my expectations for the seminar.

Max facilitates processes like this with corporate clients, public agencies, and grassroots community-based organizations. Is my organization ready for this kind of approach?

Women Leaders in Latin America and Elsewhere

Did you hear the news that Costa Rica’s new president is a woman? Laura Chinchilla, the former vice-president, won by a landslide 47 percent of the vote.

Her election this week caught my attention because I recently led a couple of workshops for high-potential IBM women in Latin America and I will probably lead similar sessions there later this year.  I thought I might use Ms. Chinchilla’s election as an inspiring example.

As it turns out, Ms. Chincilla joins two other women who are leading nations in Latin America:   Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Cristina Fernandez in Argentina.  Clearly, these women leaders in Latin America are facing and surmounting many obstacles in order to achieve their influential positions.  Wow! 

It turns out that there is quite a global sisterhood of national leaders.  They even have their own official organization, The Council of Women World Leaders.  With just a little digging, I turned up a roster of other women who are leading their countries:

Bangladesh’s Hasina Wajed

Finland’s Tarja Halonen

Germany’s  Angela Merkel

Iceland’s Johanna Sigurdardottir

Ireland’s Mary McAleese

Liberia’s Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf

Lithuania’s Dalia Grybauskaitė

Mozambique’s Luisa Dias Diogo

Netherlands-Antilles’ Emily de Jongh-Elhage

The Philippines’ Gloria Arroyo

Ukraine’s Yulia Tymoshenko

What a list!  I’m inspired. 

Tour of USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies

A few months ago, I took a half-day tour at the University of Southern California’s astonishing Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). As a citizen, I set aside my view of current military engagements and allowed myself to be amazed at the leading-edge training that ICT is developing for our soldiers. As a learning professional in a company that prides itself on innovative use of technology in learning, I was blown away by a new glimpse at the art of the possible (given enough budget).

According to the tour, the idea for ICT was first raised by a woman named Anita Jones when she was the Director of Defense Research & Engineering at the Pentagon. She observed her son’s immersion in video games and wondered about the use of video games in training for the military. A few workshops, conferences, and publications followed, leading to the founding of ICT in 1999 through a contract with the U.S. Army. Its mission was to create synthetic experiences so compelling that participants would react as though the simulation was real. As the tour guide put it, “We were trying to create the holodeck from Star Trek.”

I learned on the tour that from the start, the human dimensions of simulation had priority. While other organizations were focused on functional simulations to develop the motor skills involved in driving a tank or flying an airplane, ICT was focused on simulations to develop skills in interpersonal interaction, critical-thinking and decision-making. The examples shown on our tour included examples of learning simulations for:
-Leadership 

-Cultural awareness
-Negotiation
-Post-traumatic stress disorder therapy 

ICT tackles these difficult challenges by teaming experts in learning, graphics, and computer science together with creative professionals from Hollywood and the videogame industry. Together their teams produce immersive, interactive media for learning and entertainment.

Projects generally start with a cognitive task analysis to understand the activities to be simulated. Subject matter experts describe detailed steps, including physical movements, environmental factors, mental activities such as judgment calls, assessments, or problem-solving, and emotional responses. Care is taken to surface not just the behaviors of actors in the simulation, but also their thinking and emotional processes. Many recent projects focus on soldiers working in the Middle East, so cultural components also receive due care.

With the focus on developing simulations to build skills in areas such as leadership and negotiation, the emotional content is particularly important. Compelling stories are a key way that emotional context and cultural content are included in the simulation experience. ICT uses “story nets” to convey a series of events over a sequence of turns. The story changes (within the limits of the simulation) depending on the learner’s actions and the responses of other parties in the simulation. So, for example, if the soldier using a negotiation simulation foregoes the opportunity to prepare and then, uninformed, takes an action that is disrespectful of the local culture, the tribal leader with whom he is negotiating might derail the conversation.

Non-verbal communication behavior by the avatars -  their gestures, facial expressions, and stance -  also has key importance in realistically conveying human emotion. ICT has advanced the state of the art in rendering avatars through innovations in lighting, photography, and skin scanning. Their advances have been used not only in simulations for the military, but also in Hollywood movies, for which they earned an Academy Award. Realistic avatars help learners become immersed in the simulation.

ICT sees itself as a research center, and so of course it undertakes a huge amount of R&D. This ranges from foundational research in the construction of virtual humans and learning simulations, to the development of enabling technologies such as the “virtual human toolkit” and the LAST method (learning with adaptive simulation and training), to a series of prototype applications.

According to a speaker on my tour, it considers all of its products to be prototypes. Clients don’t necessarily expect deployment, although many of the “prototypes” have been good enough to be widely fielded. During the tour, I saw excerpts from Bilat, which provides training and practice in cross-cultural negotiation, Urban Sim, which was the subject of a recent article in The Atlantic, and the Mobile Counter-IED Interactive Trainer, a blended learning solution delivered to soldiers in the housing of a shipping container which can be dropped at nearly any location.

In addition to conducting R&D to develop new prototypes, ICT also publishes studies about the impact of their innovations. They have found, for example, that the serious-game-based approach to teaching intercultural communication skills in ELECT BiLAT successfully led to learner’s mastery of cultural rules relating to meeting phases and the timing of communicative actions.

How much does all of this cost? In 2004, the Army awarded ICT $100million to continue its overall R&D work. The Mobile Counter-IED Interactive Trainer was the result of a $10million contract in 2009. 

Clearly, the military’s need for state-of-the-art training tools stands to benefit the videogaming industry and its customers who are willing to pay for ever-more-realistic scenarios.

My work involves accelerating the development of corporate leaders. How can we apply the insights and technology developed by ICT? We’ve got enough scale (almost 35,000 first-line managers). If we invested $250 per manager in annual leadership vitality education, that would be $8.75million…more than enough to produce something really compelling. It is possible that one solution, even one with a lot of story nets, meet our needs globally? These are conversations worth having.

The CEO of the Future

A few months ago, a colleague asked me to read a speech given by Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, at the Economic Club of Washington, DC on May 12, 2009. It was an inspiring speech. Even just reading the words - - without the benefit of seeing her deliver them - - you get a sense not only of Nooyi’s intelligence, but also her warmth and humor and humility.

Her message is that the CEO of the future must “marry performance with purpose.” This isn’t a new idea. Peter Drucker advocated that the deeper purpose of a company lies beyond producing a profit for shareholders. Contributing something useful that customers really need is the essence of business. Nooyi goes even further, arguing that the company of the future has to see itself as an organization rooted in the community, with ethical obligations to pay back to society.

She notes that CEOs of the future will still need to know how to operate a company, manage the economics of the firm, and lead people. Those capabilities will continue to be table stakes. But leading a company that both produces performance and serves a social purpose will take a different kind of leader than today’s typical cost-cutting whiz or a financial engineer, or short-term-returns-at-all-costs hard liner. This implies a different kind of shareholder, as well - - one with long-term interests.

There is a lot more to her speech, and you have the link so you can read it and decide what you think about her ideas. As often happens, I’m now seeing variations of these ideas everywhere…from IBM’s worldwide investment in Smarter Planet, including transportation, food, healthcare, utilities, and other public goods….to an article titled “Toward a Common Wealth” in my Cal Berkeley alumni magazine…to a new book by Rosabeth Moss Kanter called Supercorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good.

One more thing about Nooyi’s talk. Only a woman CEO could have given this speech. I love that she talked about her own mother in the speech and that she described how she writes every six months to the parents of her 29 Executive Committee members, telling them about how their grown sons or daughters contribute to Pepsi, and thanking them for the gift of these individuals.

So go read it, and tell me what you think!

Global Work

In the course of career discussions with mentors, managers, colleagues and friends, working globally is always something that comes up. Working internationally is something I’m paid to do, and I’m happy about that! Working globally is often hard, and it is a challenge that I truly enjoy. Why?

Maybe it’s a natural strength. According to Marcus Buckingham, each of us has strengths. He defines these as specific activities that “make you feel strong.” In his methodology, you can look for signs of strength in the following ways:
• If you have some success at it, it may be a strength.
• If, before you do it, you find your self instinctively looking forward to it, it may be a strength.
• If, while you are doing it, you find yourself easily able to concentrate (your synapses firing, your brain literally growing), it may be a strength.
• If, after you’ve done it, it feels like it fulfills a need of yours, it may be a strength.

I have had success working globally, I do look forward to it, I can lose track of time when I’m engrossed in a conversation or running a workshop with colleagues halfway around the world, and I do get a sense of fulfillment. I love learning about people everywhere, and in the process learning about myself. This sums up as a set of positive emotions around this kind of work. (NB – I get a similar charge working with colleagues nearby, but there is a little something extra that comes with connecting with others around the planet.)

Maybe it’s enlightened self-interest.  As Thomas Friedman has written about with such clarity in The World is Flat, if politics and terrorism don’t get in the way, knowledge workers like me will increasingly be part of a single global network. The ability to collaborate with others throughout the world will be more than an advantage, it will be table stakes to get into the game of knowledge work. As we continue to find activities that can be digitized and decomposed and shared with lower cost providers around the planet, then the touchy-feely human relationship and consulting skills that I have will also become more important than ever. Effective communication among people is hard enough, and even more so across distance and culture. So maybe it’s not just a natural strength, but also a sober reckoning of economic advantage.

Maybe it’s a family legacy. Although my grandfather Martin L. Ehrmann passed away when I was only six years old, I retain strong memories and a feeling of attachment for him. He was a mineralogist, and traveled the world collecting minerals at a time when global travel was far more difficult and far less comfortable than it is for us today. He wrote several chapters for a book about some of his adventures to Burma (Myanmar) and other locations where just getting there took a week or more. He seemed to be able to adapt to do business in any country and relished extending his network around the world; I aspire to the same. He was able to pick up a little of the language wherever he went; I too, find it easy to learn at least a few words of any language (and I can do better than that in several). He counted many of his business counterparts as his friends; the same can be said for me (even in a company where this sometimes feels a little counter to the culture). So maybe the explanation goes beyond strengths or skills or economics to something that lies in my genes.

Of course, there is a lot to complain about, too, working globally.  But that's for another post.

Do you work globally?  How do you find it?