Cylinders of Excellence

Print of a cartoon by M.K. Brown. I know her best from the National Lampoon in the 80's and 90's. We saw a show of her work at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, where I bought this print.

Nothing's better than waking up in your own bed after a long time away from home.

I woke up in my own bed this morning after spending a week at the White Oaks Resort in Niagara on the Lake, attending the Niagara Institute Leadership Development Program.

Readers may recall that just a bit less than a year ago, I sent dispatches from Kingston, where I was attending another executive development program. The only memorable outcome of that two-week stint was a case of the shingles.

I think I'll get a better result from this past week. I'm still processing a lot of what I saw and heard. But, the title of this post is something I wanted to share right away. It was how one other participants described the silos in which she works. It got a huge laugh.

Here we all are. The two course facilitators, Marc and Nick, are at the ends. Nick's the tall one. Of the twelve participants pictured here, six were from the provincial government. Three guys were from the same Maritimes-based blueberry-and-other-food processing company (and I'll never think of blueberries the same way again). The bearded gentleman fourth from the left was with the Bank of Canada (and we all wanted to work with him because he said they swim in vaults full of money). The woman in the yellow sweater worked for a Polish company operating a mine in Chile for Japanese clients (wrap your head around the linguistic/cultural challenges there for a minute).  There was also a guy from Hamilton who worked at a chemical company.

As is always the case with these courses, I had a lot of fun hanging with a bunch of exceptional people. As is less commonly the case with these courses (see Queens, above) I learned a lot about myself and will go back to work with the objective of making things better for me, my boss, my peers and my exceptional team.

Together we'll build even better cylinders of excellence.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen