I Need a Spa Day

My feet need to go into intensive care. They never recovered from six consecutive days of golf. Yesterday's forced march on the Freedom Trail didn't help. And today's hike to Harvard Square sealed the deal. My feet hurt. They're tired. They're blistered. They're a bloody mess...

I bet they have spa treatments for this in Provincetown. I will be there tomorrow...

But...I DO need to keep my public up-to-date. So here we go...

I walked up to Harvard today. I'm guessing it's about 4 miles or so... On the way I passed through the MIT campus. Very interesting. Everyone was speaking Chinese (some REAL Chinese - plus a Babel of other legitimate languages of which German and French stood out). The remainder (probably a majority) were speaking English - but in a dialect of which I am ignorant. The subject of most sentences seemed to be something like "particle" or "matrix" and the meaning unintelligible to me. On any given street corner one half expected an impromptu Star Trek convention to occur spontaneously.

The Harvard campus, by contrast, appeared quite conventional. A diverse student body, to be sure; but everyone appeared to be speaking regular late teen/early 20 something American English.

I spent a couple of hours in the Harvard Museum of Natural History. It was quite fun. A tad musty but well worth the time.

Our Family tree

Got back to the hotel tonight and had supper. Met a very interesting fellow at the bar who illustrates the global import of this particular neck of the woods.

Mr. Dieter Ortmann, Global Head Quality Management, Novartis Pharma AG strikes me as a very good egg - in a German sort of way. He lives in Basel, Switzerland. He heads a unit that does audit/IT/quality assessment work at Novartis research facilities. Cambridge is one of his primary facilities. Indeed a walk between the hotel and Harvard takes you through a jungle of biotech, pharmaceutical and other research facilities.

Mr. Ortmann was discreet in discussing the nature of his duties. But he was very forthcoming in talking about managing a truly international unit. His group includes a young Egyptian woman, several Germans, a Brit, and several Americans. I flat-out asked him if the benefits of obtaining culturally divergent advice and opinions outweighed the costs associated with managing a culturally diverse staff and the answer was an unequivocal "yes". And this from a German!

An interesting conversation...

Well, I'm going to soak in the tub.

May not post again until Friday...