“Through its panes, moreover, we dimly catch the sweep of the dark, clustering foliage outside, fluttering with a constant irregularity of movement, and letting in a peep of starlight, now here, now there.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House Of The Seven Gables Only a peep of starlight here or there is not the imagery we wish for our offices. Maybe on Halloween night we relish creeky doors, dusty windows, and the clatter of unsecured shutters against cedar shingles. For a moment, an eerie, literary, romantic ambiance is intriguing, in the darkness. But that’s for one spooky night. In our offices, our company venues, whether startups in a converted hangar or a Fortune 500 tower of glass, the
I can’t say what Greg Newbold’s characters are thinking in his Cloud Watching artistry. But I know that each of us sees something different in the sky. This is the strength of diverse visions in the well-run firm. Perhaps the little boy sees cumulus shapes as toothy dragons and puffing locomotives. The old man sees them differently. Was the dragon actually a camel, a pack-laden working animal on the Silk Road, while the locomotive was an ancient fortress? Clouds above me paint perspectives. And my lens differs from yours. The ice particles inside those atmospheric shape-shifters bring humidity on land, for good or ill. They are food for crops or maybe unwelcomed mold. They are opport
Is the acquisition you’ve just closed leading to clarity and opportunity? Surely it is on paper; otherwise you wouldn’t have stamped the valuation artifacts with board approving signature. But underlying many mergers are fits and starts that diminish your customer confidence. Are the post-merger workflows leading upwards or downwards? Does everyone know where they are going? Under the attempted integration of newly acquired business processes, is your operation as ambiguous as Escher’s famous Ascending Descending artwork – unclear in the endpoint and elusive in resolution? A merger is just that; it is distinct from an acquisition run as an independent subsidiary. A merger is an integr
