Personal

What makes a great virtual team member?…time to practice what I preach

Today’s my last day in Northern Ireland for 6 months. For the past 5 years I’ve managed a highly motivated part of the Learning Pool team who are absent from our Derry mothership & who work from home in England and Scotland. Tomorrow I become one of them. This past couple of weeks I’ve been really mulling this over & wondering what it will mean for me. I’m also slightly worried that I may not be the exemplary virtual team member that I imagine I will, a carbon copy of the perfect remote worker in the image I have in my mind’s eye.

In my view, these are the qualities & behaviours of a great virtual team member:

· superb communicator – in both directions – giving & receiving information; this applies equally to customers & colleagues

· highly organised in terms of managing appointments, follow ups, phone calls, CRM updates, keeping your online calendar bang up to date

· ability to work efficiently on the hoof (on trains, in cafes, at airports, in the car)

· knack to really bond with people you don’t see face to face much – other virtual colleagues but also the people in the powerhouse or mothership – the people you need to actually do things for you that you can’t do yourself

· planning your schedule to get the most out of each day by combining appointments & using common sense

· gift for really knowing what’s going on beneath the surface at HQ, think that comes about by really listening to what your colleagues say

· makes the best use of the available technology & doesn’t get bogged down in constant technofail

· books travel well in advance to get the best prices

· effective collector & disseminator of customer information back to the mothership team

· self starter with a lot of drive

· ability to complete & finish things (this one is tricky for me) in a fast paced & constantly moving environment.

From time to time I’ve been critical of how other people do some or all of the above. I guess I’ll know by this time next week how I’m doing myself. Any hints and tips from you, my dear readers, will be most welcome as always.

So what am I going to miss most over the next 6 months when I’m London based. Folks – there’s no competition on that score. The photo of Paul was snapped yesterday at Stansted airport. He’d just finished a conference call with our tech team & is posting something up on Twitter. As usual, we had a few right old laughs yesterday – despite both of us having a 3.30am start, a tricky meeting at the Cabinet Office and the usual mixed bag of rushing around London for meetings, juggling stuff as we go. Along the way, and starting at 5.30am, we also discussed everything that both of us are working on, we did some long term strategic planning, we both chatted to a number of colleagues, customers and partners, sketched out a couple of new products or markets for existing parts of the Learning Pool portfolio, swapped the usual load of gossip (mainly about other entrepreneurs or businesses), exchanged views on the content of business books we are both reading (cuts down on individual reading time if your business partner reads it & gives you a précis of course), managed to have both breakfast & lunch in the most random of places, went through some sort of time/space portal at Stansted airport, took two plane journeys & two long drives each, but were emailing again when we got to our respective homes last night. The relationship anyone has (should have) with their business partner is pretty intense and full on. I’ll refer you to a previous blog of mine if you’re interested in reading more about this – it’s here https://kickingassets.co.uk/two-heads-are-better-than-one-10-pros-of-havi

We’ve been working together like this for 8 years, we rarely disagree and you couldn’t put a cigarette paper in between us. I guess that’s what I’m going to miss most.

London Calling

I’m getting ready to move to London in the New Year. There, I’ve said it. Learning Pool started life in London in a rented loft in Crawford’s Passage in Farringdon before shifting our HQ back to Derry. We used to call our London base Crawford’s Pass amongst ourselves because it made it sound more Irish. In our early days we were paranoid about customers knowing we were a Northern Ireland company in case it was a barrier to us doing business. As the last 5 years have progressed, we became less coy about our origins as we cemented our customer relationships although we hung onto our London phone number. These days, our customers love the fact that we’re an Irish company and some of them have even been to visit us at our office in Derry. Others have even been brave enough to join our team.

Our fabulous Head of Content, Deborah Limb, joined us from another more famous e-learning company. Deborah had never been to Northern Ireland before her first day at Learning Pool. She arrived at our office on a cold, wet, Monday morning in November 2007, clutching the remnants of a sopping wet map in her hand. She still claims she never saw daylight during that first winter.

Now it’s my turn to go back the other way and it’s a bittersweet feeling that I have. I lived in London for 17 years before moving home to County Tyrone at the start of the new millennium. I left the pushiness of the city behind & moved right into the middle of rural Ulster. I’ll never forget waking up that first morning & hearing no sounds. Nothing at all. I remember the relief I felt & ever since that day, I’ve half felt as though I’m on holiday – a sort of working holiday where you work harder than you’ve ever worked before but your colleagues & neighbours are so friendly that it somehow compensates you.

I quickly learned to be less brusque & more chatty in my interactions. More talk about the weather & people you know & less focus on the agenda is the Northern Irish way. Gradually the sharp edges from all those years spent living in the city were worn down a little. Of course I’ve been back in London pretty much every week since 2000 – sometimes twice a week – but always as a visitor, staying in a hotel room, running for a plane home as soon as the meetings are finished. I’m wondering how I’ll slot back into the hurly-burly of London life after the deep, deep peace of country living (quoted with a nod to Mrs Patrick Campbell).

So why am I as a person and why are we as a business doing this? I guess we’re fed up with fighting for what’s right (that it should be just as easy to do business from Northern Ireland as it is from any part of the UK or indeed Europe) & accepting what’s reality. Like it or not, London is indeed where UK government’s beating heart lies. It’s also where a large number of our customers, a huge number of potential customers and some of the people we’d like to work more closely with are based. On top of that, our Northern Ireland location is stifling Learning Pool’s growth as there just aren’t the skills here that we need to recruit in to grow our business. We’ve raised this point many times with Invest Northern Ireland. We’re further hampered by having an ornament of an airport 5 miles from us in Derry that we never use as the flight times aren’t conducive to being anywhere on time to do business – and the government agencies and politicians seem more interested in in-fighting & scoring points off each other than looking outwards & making Northern Ireland an easier place from which to operate internationally. In summary, we’ve concluded we’re missing out on opportunities and holding ourselves back by not having a London presence. And I think that’s a very sad state of affairs. Learning Pool was recently confirmed by Deloitte to be Northern Ireland’s fastest growing tech company & the 6^th fastest growing on the island of Ireland, but we have to look to London in order to continue our expansion.

Of course there’s plenty of upside. I’m looking forward to being back in the heart of the capital for a six month period and I’m intending throwing myself into the whole London work/social scene and spending plenty of time with friends & colleagues, old & new. I’m looking for somewhere to base Learning Pool London right now so watch this space & all will be revealed.

I know this is an emotive topic, especially for other Northern Ireland businesses – so I’m looking forward to your views & a lively discussion in the comments below. Keep ‘em coming!

Billy Bragg…songwriter, activist & national treasure

I’ve been a fan of Billy Bragg all my adult life – which is pretty much all his adult life. The photo above was taken today & features my rather tatty but much prized Billy Bragg t-shirt bought in 1985 & survivor of so many wardrobe clear-outs. I almost threw it away when we moved from London to Northern Ireland but I couldn’t bear to. It reminds me too much of the miner’s strike & the stuff that went on back then.

Yesterday, the Learning Pool crew was breakfasting in the Gibson in Dublin following the Deloitte Fast 50 Awards ceremony on Friday night. I don’t have to tell you how late we went to bed. Suffice to say it was a similar time to when I often get up. At breakfast, Billy Bragg was at the next table. I couldn’t let the opportunity pass. I did, however, have the decency to wait until he’d finished his breakfast & read the newspaper before I approached him for a chat.

He was exactly as I imagined he would be & I was delighted to hear he was heading over yesterday afternoon to the Dame St protests in Dublin to show a bit of support & play an impromptu gig on a makeshift stage assembled by the protesters & activists. Good on yer Billy & good luck with your Irish tour. Might see you Friday night at the Empire in Belfast. Details are here if anyone else fancies it too http://www.billybragg.co.uk/gigs/gigs.php

Billy Bragg stories welcome via the comments as always.

Every cloud has a silver lining – oh yes it does

Last week, dear readers, I nearly killed my Mum.

Don’t worry – I haven’t started some peculiar matricide pursuit; it was an accident – but unforgivable never the less.

I took my family to Rome for a break & the temperature last Wednesday in the square in front of St Peter’s Basilica was a scorchio 44 degrees C. Poor Mum collapsed with heat stroke inside St Peter’s & I eventually had to send for the doctor. All’s well that ends well & she’s fine since returning to Donegal where our Irish summer temperatures are a good 30 degrees lower. It didn’t half give me a scare & the stuff that went through my head in that hour & a half I’ve pushed away somewhere so I won’t have to think about it again.

The outcome was that Mum couldn’t go back out in that heat for the next few days – so my sister & I (that’s all of us in the photo) took it in turns to stay in our apartment with her. No internet, no books apart from Rome guides in English, no English speaking programmes on the tv – how on earth would we pass the time? Guess what – we resorted to conversation & I have to tell you it really wasn’t that bad.

I spent hours lying on the sofa listening to Mum telling me stories about things that happened in her lifetime & stuff she’d heard about when she was a child. Some of it I’d heard before but a lot of it was brand new. I heard about:

· the Donegal friend of my grandmother who’d gone to see someone off to America and got on the boat herself, taking her mother’s elastic sided boots that she’d borrowed with her – my grandmother had to go back & break the news to the girl’s mother (I remember the same woman returning to Donegal for the first time in all those years when she was an old person when I was a child)

· the day the soot fell down the chimney covering my sister who was in her cot beside the fire – moments before my grandmother was due to arrive to visit us in Yorkshire

· all the jobs my father did as a teenager between leaving school & moving to England

· the details of my parents wedding which had a guest list of 6 people plus the priest – my Mum is the only one of that group still alive

· an escaped prisoner that my grandmother had given sanctuary to whilst my grandfather was in hospital in the early 1960s

· stories from Mum’s working life as a clippie on the buses of South Yorkshire Transport between Doncaster & Barnsley in the 1950s

and loads of other interesting stuff. We covered a lot of ground & it was thoroughly enjoyable. So it’s true – every cloud has a silver lining & being offline for a few days really isn’t that bad. Tell me some of your silver lining stories please.

Stagecoach 2011 – Day 2 Review

The acts we watched at Day 2 of Stagecoach 2011 were a mix of excellent, bad & downright offensive – ah well – you didn’t expect that I would go to a US country music festival and not be offended did you? Day 2 was another good day of people watching. The stuff I saw in the crowd that I found most distasteful was mainly t-shirt slogan related and here are a few examples:

· Guy with his girlfriend wearing a t-shirt that he’d hand written on the back of “Ladies, what happens at Stagecoach stays at Stagecoach” (see pic no 2 attached)

· Grossly ugly guy with a t-shirt reading “Free Chorizo” and featuring an arrow pointing towards his rather grubby pants (his mate next to him was wearing a green t-shirt that simply said “Stoner”)

· Old man with a t-shirt that said “The Dixie Chicks still suck” – yeah – I’m sure they’re also losing sleep over what you think…

· A lot of anti Obama general redneck stuff.

All of this paled into insignificance however when Jay deMarcus of Rascal Flatts (yep – that’s a band for anyone who’s wondering) stopped playing 30 minutes into their set and announced from the main stage to the 55,000 person strong, alcohol fuelled and very patriotic crowd “that sonofabitch Bin Laden is dead”. The reaction was surprisingly flat. I guess everyone was thinking – Wow – that took a long time.

I dread to think what Larry Gatlin from the Gatlin Brothers has made of this bit of news although I’m glad he wasn’t on stage at the time and able to announce it. His was the musical performance that I would rate as the most offensive of the day. He’s a pompous & odious little man, full of his own importance. He stopped playing one of his songs to berate the audience as he’d deemed they weren’t reacting in a sufficiently excited way to being present to hear the Gatlin Bros playing one of their biggest hits. He claims to keep politics out of his show but talks about nothing else from the stage – oh except for a story about how he & his wife used to live in a small house same as everyone else (he bizarrely included details of how small their tv was) until the day he received a phone call saying that Elvis wanted two songs he’d written and they were able to go out the next day & buy a great big house.

Earlier in the day, Rosie Flores had done her level best to get the crowd in the Palomino tent moving with her lively rockabilly mix but it wasn’t until she was joined on stage by Big Sandy (of the Fly Rite Boys – what a voice he has!) that they shifted their arses out of their portable chairs & got dancing.

The highlight of Stagecoach 2011 for me was seeing Wanda Jackson again. Wanda is the undisputed Queen of Rockabilly and there isn’t anyone out there that can touch her. Yesterday she was in good form and in fine voice and clearly on a high from her recent collaboration project with Jack White of the White Stripes (their album is called “The Party Ain’t Over). She sang 3 or 4 songs from the new album, all of them appear to have been selected to make the most of Wanda’s unique voice – I’ll certainly be buying – it’ll wake me up in the mornings driving the Fig up to Derry.

Wanda played a long set yesterday & even came back on for an encore – something I’ve never seen done before at any of the Coachella family of festivals (Leonard Cohen disregarded his finish time a few years ago & just carried on playing). She had time to tell some of her legendary stories including a few about former boyfriend Elvis. Last time I saw her play was at Pappy & Harriet’s in Pioneertown, CA and Robert Plant was in the audience – that’s how much of a legend Wanda is. She finished up yesterday with her famous “Let’s Have a Party” and everyone in the Palomino tent was up on their feet. (Wanda had previously advised the crowd it would be good for them to have blood circulating to some of the places it might not have recently been. A cursory look around confirmed that she was probably right).

Wanda always has a lovely way of interacting with the audience & making her shows very personal. Yesterday she expressed interest from the stage in the guy beside me’s very impressive Mohican, asking him if he had to start from scratch with it every day and saying she thought keeping her own hair nice was hard enough.

Thanks to Wanda Jackson & Kris Kristofferson for two great shows at Stagecoach 2011 – says something when the septuagenarians are clearly leading the way – long may you both reign.

Interested in your stories if you were also there or comments/questions if you weren’t.

Stagecoach 2011 – Day 1 Review

For those of you that aren’t familiar with Stagecoach, it’s a country music festival that takes place in California in April at the Indio Polo Grounds – the same place that the Coachella Festival happens – way out in the So Cal desert. It’s on this weekend & this year is its 5^th year – but my first time attending. Why am I there this year. 3 reasons I guess – it’s definitely an experience & an opportunity to see Americans at leisure on their home turf, we usually go to Coachella but this year the tickets sold out so fast we weren’t in time; some of the music is interesting and thirdly my friends wanted to go.

This is a quick review of Day 1. We made the mistake of hanging out at the main stage most of the day. Really the place to be was probably either of the two minor stages. As a result the first 3 acts I saw were more like pop music with a bit of country twang thrown in – Steel Magnolia (a young poppy country couple), Chris Young (again – something for the younger pop crowd – he sang a lot of songs about saving water by drinking beer which the crowd loved) and Darius Rucker (once of Hootie & the Blowfish, a rocker turned country – he was wearing a very cool t-shirt). It was all very enjoyable & provided a decent “day out” backdrop for chatting with a gang of friends. The real action at the main stage however was in the people watching. In my life I have never seen as many:

· cowboy hats & bras (the latter on young girls but I saw quite a few men that would definitely have benefited from a bit of “support”)

· semi-naked girls – a lot of them quite drunk

· bad dancers – again – a lot of them quite drunk (American dancing looks strange to us Europeans anyway – lots of waving of arms in the air goes on) (see photo number two for a real horror sighting)

· tattoos

· sunburn

· portable chairs – fine during the day but a menace at night once abandoned

Kenny Chesney was the big act Saturday night at the main stage. We ducked out to go & see Kris Kristofferson at one of the side stages. Very glad we did because he was entertaining & excellent whereas this morning’s Los Angeles Times described the Chesney performance as “lite as usual” & “including many songs about the choice to be made between a beer & a margarita”. Kristofferson is 75 in June but he’s every inch a real heavyweight star – no doubt about that whatsoever. He sang & talked for over an hour and his set included many of his great & famous songs – Me and Bobby McGee, Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, For the Good Times, Help Me Make it Through the Night, The Silver Tongued Devil & I, Here Comes that Rainbow Again. He is clearly adored by his fans and I’m pleased to have snapped one really good photo of him (featured). He told stories as he went along & said he wished he was in better voice – but then went on to say it had always been that bad. He was well worth seeing.

Annoyed to have missed the Cleverlys and Mel Tillis yesterday but better prepped for today & especially looking forward to seeing Rosie Flores, the great Wanda Jackson, the Gatlin Bros and Leon Russell. I’m also going to take photos today of a lot more of the side action going on around the music as that’s at least half of the craic. Part 2 tomorrow folks – happy to receive comments/stories from anyone else that was there yesterday.

Growing old can still be a lot of fun

The photo above is one of our neighbours here at the Ocotillo Lodge in Palm Springs, Ed Rooney. Yep – Ed’s part of our Irish diaspora & when he isn’t sunning himself over the winter in Palm Springs he lives up in Portland, Oregon – which as everyone knows is more like Ireland than Ireland itself – even the weather is the same. Ed visited Ireland a year or two ago with his son, Ted Rooney. Ted’s an actor (isn’t everyone in southern California?) who’s been hampered throughout his acting career by simply being too tall – all the romantic leads are automatically snapped up by short men because all of the Hollywood starlets are tiny.

Ed is exactly how I hope I’ll be when I’m in my mid 80s and he’s a shining example of how a person can still have a lot of fun, even when they’re getting a bit older. He’s independent, keeps himself active, he’s out & about every day, has loads of friends and he’s always got plenty of stories to tell which I love to listen to. I snapped the pic yesterday just before Ed was going for a swim. He’d just been telling me about how his brother Art used to try & pass himself off as THE Art Rooney when they were young, growing up in Pittsburgh. I’d been telling him about how I was next to Art’s famous son, Dan Rooney, in the White House last month on St Patrick’s night – Ed wasn’t too impressed by the whole White House thing but he was impressed that I’d met Dan Rooney.

I wonder to myself why it is that Ed’s the way he is – so positive and so cheerful. Is the answer as straightforward as having been born with a sunny disposition or is there something more that we can do to as we get older to make sure we maintain a positive outlook. Ed has a computer & keeps up to date with what’s happening in the world. He uses skype to keep in touch with his family & many grandchildren. He was a schoolteacher & reads more than most people I seem to meet these days. So is that his secret? Remaining plugged in & up to date with current affairs? Look forward to your thoughts on this subject.

There’s a big outcry in the US at the moment re the price of petrol – it’s $4.50 a gallon in Palm Springs (it must surely be 3 x as much as that in the UK). Everyone’s baying for blood on this – especially as the oil companies’ (massive & obscene) profits were announced this morning. Ed’s talking about trading in his big saloon car for a Mini Cooper – someone’s told him they’re perfectly comfortable for guys 6’3” & taller – I’m only sorry to be leaving Tuesday & missing out on going out for a spin in it. I hear someone in the desert is selling Mini Coopers that have been “Kiss” customised – gonna see if I can persuade Ed to get one of those before I leave…

The night I met Barack Obama…

Sam Barbee & I were in Cardiff getting ready for a Learning Pool customer event the night President Barack Obama was elected. Sam Barbee is American and I’ve always wished I was – although being Irish is almost the same thing. It’s certainly closer to being American than any other nationality. Our Irish diaspora numbers 45m in the USA. As a child I listened to the stories my great aunts and uncles in Donegal told us about Amerikay – they’d all been to the US many times although they’d never been to Belfast or Dublin & certainly not to the GB mainland. At the Northern Ireland Bureau St Patrick’s Day breakfast, Martin McGuinness recited a 2 line poem to illustrate our unique relationship with our cousins across the water – I can’t remember it exactly but it was something like this:

Have you been on your holidays yet this year?

No we’ve just been to America again

The morning of our Cardiff breakfast event, we were a bit tired having been up all night following the election results coming in and watching the President’s wonderful acceptance speech. Neither of us would have missed it for anything.

It was therefore with great excitement that I received the invite to the President’s St Patrick’s Night party at the White House along with a few others from the Northern Ireland business community (that’s us in the second photo). The build up to the big day nearly killed me & it was a relief that I only had a week’s notice. I had to rush out to the shops to buy something green to wear and thank goodness I did or I would have stuck out like a sore thumb (I’ve never seen as much green clothing in my life as I saw in Washington DC on 17 March). I had an amusing incident at immigration when I was asked the purpose of my visit – the immigration officer asked to see my invite and after studying it for a long time appeared to be most impressed. From talking to people around Washington DC it seems that the President isn’t much in evidence locally apart from on the tv – although the First Lady has a significant local presence through the many good works she’s involved in. So what stays with me from the night itself? – the following highlights:

· Hearing the President and the Vice President speak & being at the front with such a clear view

· Watching the way the Vice President & the First Lady never took their eyes off the President when he was addressing the crowd

· Being in the White House for 3 hours and being able to wander round the rooms and freely take photos of the decor, the view from the windows, the paintings and everything else (my full photo set from the evening is at this link http://bit.ly/h8VK1q)

· The craic in the crowd whilst we were waiting for the President to appear – especially all of us being able to try on the Rose of Tralee’s tiara (thanks Clare!)

· The mounting excitement waiting for the President – we were almost hyperventilating by the time 7pm came along

· The pomp & circumstance of the whole evening – the pipe band, the choir, the banquet, the greenness, the beautifully dressed & polite members of the military dotted about everywhere who offered to take photos & were extremely cordial

· The lovely people that we met who were also there as guests

· Rather perversely I enjoyed seeing one woman spill her wine on the furniture

· Glen Hansard of the Frames being joined by Tim Shriver for a rendition of The Auld Triangle

· Being spontaneously hugged by Michelle Obama when I held my hand out to shake hers – I still can’t believe that – she didn’t hug anyone else and I’m glad she picked me

· Meeting the President for a few seconds & telling him how glad I am that it’s him that’s there – Jannine’s photo is a bit of a joke but I promise you that’s the President’s nose!!! You can tell by my face anyway

· Realising that the President & the First Lady were as good in real life as I imagined they would be

· Feeling the warmth from our diaspora first hand – doesn’t matter if you’re 4^th or 5^th generation guys – you’re still ours!

Thanks again to everyone that made this possible – people I knew already (Martin & Stephen & Alastair) & people I hadn’t even met that were so nice and so good to me (Kamala & Grainne). The Learning Pool team has me down as a people collector but even with Robert Plant in the portfolio, Barack Obama’s a bit of a prize so I may give it up whilst I’m ahead.

Nature, Nurture or just plain hard graft…

At the American Irish Foundation gala dinner in Washington DC last Wednesday night I was lucky enough to be seated next to one of Ireland’s cherished treasures – classical pianist, eternal optimist & the greatest living interpreter of Beethoven’s piano music, John O’Conor. Sitting on my other side was John Nolan from Dublin’s National Concert Hall. When he found out that I wasn’t aware of John’s fame (I know – I was excruciatingly embarrassed by my ignorance of classical music and its main players) he described John O’Conor as “being like a god that had stepped down from Olympus to grace us with his presence” – quite a big sell then – no pressure John!

I’d attended an “Unlocking Creativity” event in Derry earlier in March hosted by the magical Sir Ken Robinson and I’d been fascinated by the story that Ken had told us about Bart Conner, the American gymnast, and his journey to becoming a world class athlete and multi Olympic medal winner. In a nutshell, Bart’s mother had noticed he had a talent for gymnastics when he was a very young boy & had enrolled him in a gym early doors rather than force him to continue with school and academic studies to the exclusion of all else. That led to Bart being “spotted” by a coach when he was 10 and the rest is history. This caused me to ask John about his own career journey as to be honest, becoming a world famous concert pianist is pretty unusual. He told me that he was fortunate enough to have a mother that encouraged John & his sisters to try out many non academic things when they were children – so as a result John had learned tin whistle, elocution, singing, Irish dancing and the viola as well as the piano; his sisters learned the violin, cello and ballet. Indeed, John O’Conor is quoted as saying the hardest part of achieving his music degree was the academic side – as all he really wanted to do was play his instrument.

This reminded me of another of Sir Ken’s stories when as a student in the 1970s he approached a guy playing keyboards in a pub band in Liverpool one night. He said to the chap “I’d love to be able to do what you do” and the keyboard player said to him that if he’d love to do it that much, he’d be doing it too. He went on to explain that he’d started playing when he was 5 years old, practiced 5 hours a day come hell or high water & gigged 6 nights a week. Sir Ken’s point is that when you’re engaged in something that you love, it isn’t in fact work at all.

All this does of course link back to Malcolm Gladwell’s idea in his book Outliers of the 10,000 hours a person needs to put in before they will be good at something – so when you’re choosing a career, you’d better be careful and pick something that you love or you’ll never be good enough at it. Harsh but true. I asked John O’Conor about the difference between good and great pianists and he said it’s practice – not magic or anything secret – it’s simply constant daily practice that makes you truly good at the thing you already love – and if you don’t love it enough, you won’t practice enough – and that’s the bottom line. John says that the great pianists have never had to be told to practice – they just want to do it – all day every day.

I appreciate that the photo of us is a bit strange. It’s because I wanted to photograph the great man’s hands…Thanks for your company in Washington John and John!

I confessed to John as the evening went on that my own piano teacher had taken my mother to one side after I’d been attending lessons for about 3 years and said “Mrs McKenna, you’re wasting your money here. Don’t bring her back any more.” He was right and it was lovely of him to be that honest with my poor mum who really couldn’t spare the money for the lessons, but wanted her daughters to learn more than academic stuff.

I know this is a topic that generates a lot of discussion so I can’t wait to read your comments. Keep your stories coming – I love to read them.

Washington Calling…Happy St Patrick’s Day

It’s a bright sunny day (with intermittent showers of course) as I leave Belfast International on the first leg of my journey to Washington DC this week. Sitting here on the plane headed for London I’m slightly panicked that I have nowhere to stay tomorrow night in DC and even more panicked every 5 minutes when I think I’ve lost my bag – I checked a bag in today for the first time in what must be two years of constant air travel.

In my luggage I have my all important itinerary for the week, my mini lint roller (had to run back into the house when I remembered about that – don’t want to be having important meetings covered in lint), a small herd of purple & black Learning Pool pigs (photo opps only – there aren’t enough of them to give away on this trip – and these guys are tired – they’ve already been to Scotland last week!), a bag of salt & vinegar Tayto crisps and a handful of Bewley’s Irish teabags. Also two pairs of St Patrick’s Day fun specs – one for me & one for Learning Pool’s Breda Doherty who’s already in the US having spent the last few days at SXSW in Austin, TX. And an unusual amount of green clothing.

On the plane I read with pride the new Derry City of Culture 2013 corporate sponsorship brochure, hot off the press. Reading the words of our poet Seamus Heaney almost brought a tear to my eye. I really believe the City of Derry is standing at the brink of something big – and that’s the message loud & clear that I’ll be giving to our American friends & potential investors in Washington this week. I’ll also be telling them:

· what a great place Northern Ireland is to live & work in

· how fabulous our standard of living is, how beautiful our scenery is & what an awesome amount of history & culture there is everywhere

· how much fun Northern Ireland is to visit & how friendly everyone is

· what a great entrepreneurial spirit exists in our people and how well educated they are

· how fabulous our emerging digital & creative media sector is

· and what a great place Northern Ireland is to invest in.

I’ll be posting up blogs here whenever I meet anyone interesting or see something worth reporting on.

First I have some people to thank:

· Thanks to Paul & Deborah for picking up my meetings and work this week

· Thanks to the Learning Pool team for scurrying around organising my trip and even going as far as to having new business cards driven to my house on a Sunday night

· Thanks to my friends & colleagues in the industry for being so generous & gracious

· Thanks to Grainne McVeigh, Martin Adair, Stephen Wightman and others at Invest NI

· Thanks to Kamala Lakhdhir & Lorna McCafferty at the US Consulate for making me do things on time

· Thanks to the many people that have made introductions for me this past week to people in Washington

· Thanks to my colleague and friend Martin Bradley, Chairman of Derry’s Millennium Forum and also Derry’s new Culture Company

· Thanks to Mary McNamee from Ilex for driving brochures and copies of the “Voices” DVD to the airport for me today on her day off

· Thanks to my sister for lending me her best party clothes

· Thanks to my nephew for scoring a couple of goals on Saturday & getting full marks in his spelling test at school last week

· Thanks to my goddaughter for teaching me how to say “Happy St Patrick’s Day” in Irish

· Thanks in advance to Breda for her company in Washington this week and for letting me share her hotel room when everywhere is booked up

· Thanks to my Mum for being so excited

· Thanks to Alan for running round after me all weekend & driving me to the airport this morning

I’m wondering about the people I’ll meet this week & what they’ll be like – and also wishing that the two boys that were with me last time I was in DC were with me again today. Paul & Alan – the craic just won’t be the same without you.

Mary McKenna's Blog

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