I can’t believe my luck. Harvard’s weather is notoriously changeable and last year at this time there was snowfall after snowfall. But today it is, quite simply, a beautiful day. So once I’d settled into my temporary digs I got my running gear on and went for a run along the Charles River. This place is a joggers’ paradise. There are footpaths on both banks of the river and they just go on and on. I did a ten kilometre circuit out far beyond the boathouses. I thought about one of my favourite authors, Haruki Murakami, who wrote evocatively about running along these pathways in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

The London cabbie is famous (do I mean notorious?) for his self-opinionated wisdom on everything. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, they do things differently. I had to swap to a hall of residence so I hailed a cab. The driver was nice and talkative. When he heard I was from Europe, he told me that ‘You’ve got to get that Eurozone stuff sorted and pretty damned quick.’ I agreed that there was urgency. ‘Mind, we can’t give you no lectures,’ he continued. ‘We are all in this together. The way I see things, only the Chinese can save us and I reckon that pretty soon they’re going to realise that they don’t really have much choice.’ So you’re optimistic? I asked. ‘In the short-term,’ he replied, ‘but we’re not creating real wealth at the moment. Sure, we create jobs, but how many of them are in burger bars and pizza joints? We need to create real wealth; jobs in manufacturing industry, that’s what we need.’  All on a Sunday morning in sleepy Cambridge.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a frosty, blue-skied Sunday morning. In New England there is always this feeling that history is not too far away. Just around the corner from my hotel is a monument to the field where in 1775 George Washington took command of what was to become the U.S. Army (indeed, the hotel is named after the event and has a scale model of it in the lobby (see picture). War booty, in the form of British cannons, surround the monument. A little further along is an atmospheric old (1635) burial ground where some of the earliest settlers, landowners, slaves, soldiers, presidents of Harvard and ‘prominent men of Cambridge’ were laid to rest. In such places at such times America still feels like a very young country proud to have fought for, and won, its freedom.

This was a timely in-flight film to set me up for a week-long seminar on leadership. Over a thirty-six hour period in 2007 we see Wall Street risk analysts and trading desk heads passing bucks and blowing whistles to floor heads and senior executives and division heads and chief risk officers and, finally, the amoral, world-weary CEO, played very well by Jeremy Irons. Basically, his trading firm (said to have been modelled on Lehman Brothers) is horribly over exposed to toxic assets. Fire sales, mass layoffs, sacrificial lambs and rolling heads are the only solutions. Irons’s figure, John Tuld, is unmoved. He has seen it all before. Survival is the name of the game. The next bull market will surely be along sooner or later. In the meantime, though… Well, we all know what happened next.

This afternoon I took a flight to London Heathrow, prior to flying out to Boston Logan. It was chronicle of a delay foretold time. I had an evening flight. Snow was forecast for the evening. Would my flight get away before the snow? Answer: no. At least the flight wasn’t cancelled but by the time we had queued up for de-icing we had lost ninety minutes and were probably one of the last flights out of the airport. Zen. Om. Inshala. Oh, and, er, fingers crossed…