In the morning we had a standard coordination meeting for the Committee’s senior management, but in the afternoon we retired to a conference room in a nearby hotel room, all blackberries and mobile phones off, for one of our occasional seminars. It has been fashionable to take the management team to a more geographically remote location, and to spend at least one night together in the hotel, and thus to favour team-building and socialization. But there is a crisis on out there and so we slimmed things down. The first part of our session was spent discussing how the administration can support political continuity, as we move into the last four months of Mario Sepi’s presidency. It is in the entirely understandable nature of things that each successive President wants to run a distinctive presidency. The administration is there to help ensure that the best of a presidency is preserved whilst each succeeding President is given the best possible support to achieve her/his aims. In the second part of the seminar we heard from an experienced management coach about the different ‘lenses’ through which colleagues can be viewed (for example, generalists versus details people). The underlying point is that a team needs differences in approach to complement team members’ strengths. Differences are not weaknesses, but strengths.