Imagine a country where:

-  You can be stopped 12 times by ‘customs’ service during a 5 hours travel. That’s how you can first assess how free trade is taken into consideration.

-  Investment concept is just a terra incognita word. Switching from a day to day P&L culture to an investment and ROI culture can be a tough one sometimes.

-  Drinking nine green teas per day is a minimum requirement. That helps to turn oceans of data available to islands of insight, they say.

-  For every investment decision you take, you should bear in mind that additional costs are particularly prevalent: maintenance costs, hiring talents to operate it and risk to failure. That’s real TCO.

-  Cronyism sometimes is translated into a weird expression close to “familial and fragile management” in extreme difficult situation.

-  Is Inch’Allah a wise expression of stoicism or an evil appearance of procrastination? Anyway that makes me remember the Peter Drucker expression: unless a decision has ‘degenrated into work’, it is not a decision; it is at best a good intention.

-  The Little Prince, reading his night story in the desert could be happy blowing his nose in the sky full of stars. Silence in the desert can make you deaf. Night in the desert is surely more securing than daytime.

-  When you touch the financial structure or the forces shaping a business in a developing country, you should take into consideration the real impact of your choices: not only the potential changes in economics, but also the potential change in capabilities and in relationship.

I was waiting at the airport departure gate when I felt like it was time for a quick breath  refreshing with a chewing gum. I have kept for a while now this Chinese chewing gum pack that I re-filled frequently with local gum. I don’t know why I keep it, makes me remember the Beijing good times, a sort of plastic ‘Madeleine de Proust’. 

Now I realized that it was a good idea to keep my old Asian receptacle because for a couple of times, this pack proved to be a good conversation starter.

There was first this student at CEIBS at the airport who asked why I got this Chinese pack while I was waiting for a flight for Paris. Discussion revolved around interesting topics:  how bad Chinese executive managers need help in their struggle for going abroad, how thrilling it is to start working in China and to see the world from a challenger’s view…

Second was during this interview with during a case done end of 2008, a due diligence project. Build up acquisitions was a large part of the strategic audit and we discussed for two hours about their strategy in China following this chewing gum exotic pack conversation. From this conversation, we built an interesting relationship based on trust.

Yes sometimes, insignificant whim used as a (n)ice breaker can leverage business networking.

… I saw last night about Phillipe Petit’s story, the Man On Wire.  Story about the mind-boggling journey of a French high-wire walker and what he did  on August 7th, 1974.

“Life should be lived on the edge, see everyday as a true challenge and then you live your life on a tightrope”.

That’s an inspiring thought as I’m thinking about my 2009 resolutions.