Two very intensive weeks. Some colleagues/friends from abroad with whom I had wanted to work with for quite some time visited my team in Finland and we did a strategy storytelling workshop with an international group of dedicated management practitioners. I find myself energized, refreshed after seeing this group work.

This extra energy paid of as I facilitated a two-day workshop on organizational culture with a group of eMBA -students in Oulu this week. Having watched my friends work with their facilitation techniques gave me a bunch of new ideas and I had a really great MBA group to try new ideas with. These people were willing to appreciate contradictions and paradoxes in management literature and we could look at culture phenomena from multiple angles and appreciate the differences and tensions.

For some reason, I find myself really abhorring the tendency to make syntheses out of things nowadays. I seem to relish conflicts and struggles.

I am faced with a learning challenge: next autumn I am going to have to be able to speak Swedish on an everyday basis at work. The humiliation involved in speaking a language I practically have not spoken since high school will probably do me good.
Have been reading "The Club Dumas" by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Many of us know the movie "The Ninth Gate", directed by Roman Polanski. The movie is one of my favorites, and the movie follows the book quite closely. Still, it's been an enjoyable read, as the author has a very entertaining way to build on anecdotes from classical literature and mythology. He also introduces enticing details about book-collecting. Besides, the book shows what a great actor Johnny Depp is. His performance is a virtuoso portrayal of Johnny Corso, the cynical book hunter, a true antihero.