Sylvia's Journal

I flew across the eastern seaboard with hardly a cloud to obscure the views. The best part was our approach to La Guardia at low altitude over the length of Manhattan, Ellis Island, then circling back right over our old house in Brooklyn. It was breathtaking. It was also breathtaking to catch my connecting flight to Charleston. A delayed departure from Boston left me with only 15 minutes to spare, but I made it and had another fabulous flight on an Air Wisconsin puddle jumper, operating far from its base.

The opening of our board meeting is today, but on the eve we traditionally dine together with whoever has arrived, to enjoy each other’s company without an agenda and to catch up. We also caught a glimpse of downtown Charleston; a series of gorgeous looking restaurants on both sides of what I presume is the main street. Maybe I should have arrived earlier and be a tourist, like some of us did.

It is extremely difficult to organize a large group of very opinionated management and leadership professors for dinner; everyone thinks or hopes that someone else will step up to the plate. As a result most of us were passively waiting for someone to take charge and lead us to a restaurant with great food, good parking, patient waiters and reasonably priced. Some of us oldtimers also know that usually our treasurer does that; she might as well since she also pays the bill. We found everything we were looking for and got there getting lost only a few times.

We are lodged in the midst of shopping centers in one of many competing airport hotels. We sleep here because it saves us some money compared to downtown rates. We are many and all these rooms add up. So we will shuttle in rental cars to the College of Charleston where we will hold our meetings.

I went to bed late, watching ER and then Jay Leno while putting the finishing touches on the goodie bags that are supposed to stimulate and massage the right brain into action to make sure we act balanced as a board and don’t get more cerebral than we need to be. This is a challenge with all these academics. Last board meeting I did not succeed; so I tried harder this time and have thrown Confucius into the mix, for spiritual nourishment and also as a source of great quotes.

Flying up to New York the gentleman across the aisle was reading Thucydides while I was rereading all 20 Confucian Analects in order to figure out how to distribute them among my fellow board members. Imagine that, in a plane, at twenty thousand feet, two people absorbing the writings of (more or less) contemporaries in China and Greece who had something to say that we still believe relevant, 2500 years later. I wonder which 20th century writers will be read in the year 4500 with the same interest; could we produce anything that enduring? And would these ancient Greeks and Chinese still be relevant and popular?