After struggling for a long time with one of those classic “what shall I do about X and how will I do it?” issues, I realised that I hadn’t had any decent coffee shop time recently - in fact, none at all in the last six months or so.

So I took myself off to Cafe Nero yesterday, armed with my notebook and, for a treat, a copy of the Guardian. I gave myself the whole afternoon to just sit there. No pressure, just read the paper if that’s all I felt like doing.

Two cappucinos later and the solution becomes as clear as day - and it feels like a pretty attractive way to go forward as well.

What are you wrestling with right now that an afternoon in the coffee shop might smooth away?

Mmm, I can smell the coffee now; and see the barrista banging away on that shiny, steamy Gaggia…

Had one of my many “duh” moments yesterday.

I finally decided that a commitment I’d taken on was too much for me and went to see a colleague to talk about doing less of it.

You’ll understand how deeply embedded is my usual pattern of ’struggling on alone’ when I tell you that I was genuinely surprised to be told:

 ”Oh, that’s OK, we’ll get you some help. All of the others are getting far more support than you; but everything is always alright with [my bit of the operation] so we normally just leave you to get on with it.”

Duh!

The moral of this tale is obviously about asking for help - but I’m also beginning to see that for me personally it’s not so much about asking, but about a pattern of isolating myself in order to get on with stuff that often seems to precede the need to ask. The isolating is the thing to watch for.

And this also proves one of my other favourite points - that the best coaches are twits like me who have fallen over enough times to have gotten some insight from it!

Now that Aston Martin has some new owners, does anybody know if that means we’ll see a Formula One Aston Martin team in 2008?

The team of investors that yesterday bought Aston from Ford for £479m is lead by David Richards, an ex British Motor racing champ. Richards is also chairman and chief exec of Prodrive - who recently won the right to race in Formula One. Prodrive’s Formula One team will be the 12th on the grid when they make their race debut in the opening Grand Prix of 2008.

As I start to write, I’m not sure if this post will be a book review, a tale of undying but unrequited love, or more evidence that I’m a crashing bore.

Anyway, what I want to tell you is that I just received my latest copy of the “Pocket World in Figures” published by Profile Books in association with The Economist.

I do sincerely love this book, and The Economist magazine as well, even though they continue to refuse to publish any of my “Dear Sir…” letters to the editor.

I’ll open the book a couple of times at random to illustrate just how good it is:

page 73 Transport:
league table of countries by head of population “Most Injured in Road Accidents”
1st = Qatar, 9,681 injuries per 100,000 people
2nd = Kuwait, 2,155
3rd = Rwanda, 1,764
The UK is at 24th place in the table, with 375 people injured in road accidents per 100,000 head of population.
- what are they driving over there in Qatar?!
On the same page is also a table of deaths in road accidents by country, in which Botswana is top with 30 per 100,000 population, and the UK not making it into the top (or bottom, I guess) 50 places.

page 152 - Country Profiles - Hong Kong
Area 1,075 sq km; Capital: Victoria; Arable as % of total land: 5%; Population 7.1m; and so on (two whole pages of this stuff per country!).

I used to have a boss who really believed in the old maxim “What gets measured gets managed” and who put it to very good effect in raising quality and efficiency in our company.

Get hold of a copy of this book and start asking your own awkward questions about how there can be such large differences in things - like “Total Expenditure on R&D: Sweden 4.35% of GDP; UK 1.88% of GDP” - and don’t even get me started on GDP per head, life-expectancy, air quality, costs/time to start a new business, etc, etc

What is it about live music?

Went for a drink with a mate last night and we ended up stumbling into a session by a pretty decent pub-rock band.

To get the feel for this right, you have to imagine bad lighting (harsh and yet too dim at the same time), somehow feeling sweaty but in a cold draughty room, your shoes occassionally sticking to the tacky floor, and that sweet-acrid smell of somebody smoking an ‘interesting’ cigarette.

Highlight of the gig - a faithful rendition of Cockney Rebel’s “Make Me Smile”

 - which it did!