Tag Archives: budapest

Business Image and Professionalism

Last night I watched the film of Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van, in which Dame Maggie Smith plays Mary Shepherd, a malodorous, dishevelled,  but equally imperious version of ‘Lady Grantham’ in Downton Abbey. The mentally fragile Miss Shepherd, a former pianist and nun, in flight from an imagined crime, took up residence in a van in Alan Bennett’s London driveway in the 1980s and stayed there until her death 15 years later.

maggie

Step by step, though with characteristic indecision, the playwright becomes involved in her life. At one point a social worker asks Alan Bennett:

‘Are you her carer?’

He recoils from the word.

‘I hate the word carer,’ he says.

And one can see why. You can care about someone, care for someone, take care of this or that, but who, or what, exactly, is a carer? Are not all human beings carers?

For similar reasons, I’m always puzzled when someone’s behaviour is described as ‘unprofessional’. It’s usually meant as criticism, but when I hear the word I’m always cautiously optimistic that something interesting has happened.

I hate ‘professionalism’. But what I mean is that I hate the idea that there’s something more than doing a good job, with all that implies in terms of skill, knowledge, experience, courtesy, pragmatism and economy. What does ‘professionalism’ add to the mix?

What people often mean by a professional style is a gloss of conformity with some entirely artificial notions of standard business behaviour.

I’m still angry with something a client once said to me twenty years ago. I was working on a systems implementation project for an international company that involved simultaneous implementations of SunSystems in both Prague and Budapest. I was shuttling between the two and on one occasion I worked until the early hours of the morning at the company’s Prague office before flying to Budapest to continue working there. The question arose, at around 7pm, towards the end of a very long day, as to whether we should begin a new task or down tools for the day.

‘I’m rather tired,’ I said. ‘We need to be very precise with what we’re about to do, so it probably makes sense to continue in the morning.’

Everyone agreed, but later it transpired that one of the young, arrogant, financial controllers had remarked that to say that you’re tired is ‘unprofessional’. He had worked for Arthur Andersen, and at Arthur Andersen no one would have dreamt of saying such a thing.

I’m still angry. I was being entirely honest and sensible and I expected a little sympathy.

I strongly believe that we should be entirely ourselves at work, not some ‘professional’ other self. We should neither look alike, nor behave alike. Diversity brings creativity to teamwork, and the less energy that we spend on attempting to be a person other than we are, the more energy there is available for the task in hand.

History, I think, is on my side. The worlds of work and leisure have coalesced. We work from home, we work on holiday, we don’t quite watch the clock as assiduously as we used to. We are flexible, and we are more ourselves, and, in my company at least, we rarely wear suits. Technology has made it possible for us to live and work in different ways.

Social media also reflect this change. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, these are tools that blur the edges between workplace and home. We no longer project a ‘professional’ and a ‘domestic’ style in carefully separated ways. When marketing ourselves and our values, especially if we work for a consulting company, we present ourselves as real, diverse and whole people, not as androids formed from pliable material in a specific professional mould.

Facebook is where this is most evident, and to that end we have recently published a new Facebook banner for LLP Group which celebrates our diversity and individuality. Have a look at it here.

LLP Group

From left to right:

  • Veselina Portarska, Administration and Marketing Assistant at LLP Bulgaria is passionate about driving.
  • Adam Bager, LLP Group’s Chairman, plays the oboe.
  • Alinka Varhegyi, Chief Accountant at LLP Hungary, trains dogs.
  • Irina Ilieva,  Country Manager at LLP Bulgaria, does anti-gravity yoga.
  • Gabor Varadi, Consultant at LLP Hungary, loves surfing.
  • Valeri  Yordanov, Technical Consultant at LLP Bulgaria, races cars.
  • Dimitar Dimitrov, Consultant at LLP Luxembourg, enjoys skydiving.
  • Lada Svecena, Senior Consultant at LLP Czech Republic, runs marathons all over the world.
  • Dana Benakova, Senior Consultant at LLP Czech Republic, sings in a choir.

Let us all be interesting!

NOT in Search of Eva Duarte

Why would two highly-educated, cultivated British men drag themselves half way across Buenos Aires to visit a cemetery?

Obviously not because Eva Duarte, otherwise Eva Peron, or Evita, might be buried there. I have absolutely no interest in celebrities, living or dead, and loathed the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (though I did enjoy seeing Budapest double for Buenos Aires in the film version, when I wasn’t cringing at the utterly ghastly antics of Madonna). Our visit,, naturally, would have much more to do with an academic interest in funerary customs and monuments. Indeed, to bolster that claim, I should point out that I once won an essay prize, at the age of sixteen, for an article on the Municipal Cemetery of Milan, a gloriously extravagant graveyard as different from an English one as HIgh ‘Smells and Bells’ Catholicism from plain bread-and-water Puritanism. And I’ve spent many happy hours in the Cities of the Dead in Cairo, where some of the most wonderful medieval mosques are to be found. I’ve also crawled through the catacombs in Rome. And I’ve twice visited the grave of Igor Stravinsky, my favourite composer, on the cemetery island of San Michele in Venice. I have a history, and of course I will have a future too, as we all will.

In any case the cemetery was conveniently located on the way back to our hotel in Palermo Soho, the ‘in’ suburb of Buenos Aires where all discerning tourists now stay, and it was just the way to end a joyous day – a suitably cautionary contrast to the fun of the flea market in Santelmo (quivering to the music of Astor Piazzolla) and the grandeur of Plaza de Mayo.

It wasn’t all that easy to find, though. An elegant middle-aged lady with perfect English found us poring over our map on a street corner in upmarket Recoleta.

‘We’re looking for the cemetery,’ we said.

‘Ah, you’re going to see the grave of Evita Peron,’ she said.

‘No, certainly not that,’ I said.

‘Then why would you go there?’ she asked. ‘Half my family is buried there, so I really can’t imagine going there for pleasure.’ She seemed to shudder.

‘Well…..’ and then I spoke eloquently about funerary customs and monuments.

We moved on rapidly to happier topics, and in no times we were chattering about Leicester, where her son-in-law plays top-league Rugby, and then, of course, about the awfulness of the English weather.

The cemetery, when we finally got there, was indeed interesting. It reminded me of Pompeii. Long streets of small houses, all of their inhabitants dead. And it was a conveniently condensed architectural microcosm of the city – neo-classicism, Beaux-Arts, art deco, and even a hint of modernism about some of the more recent dwellings.

cemetery2x

Our guidebook mentioned that Evita’s grave was amongst the most humble. She was, after all, a determinedly humble megastar, and never forgot her roots. Even when her husband attained the highest office in the land, she was never happier than when handing out shirts to the shirtless and bread to the poorest of the poor. But we weren’t looking for her grave anyway.

There weren’t very many tourists, so we kept coming across the same groups as we criss-crossed the maze of cemetery high-streets and low-streets. None of them was looking for the grave of Eva Peron, except for an American couple (he, a plastic surgeon, perhaps in search of body parts for reconstructive surgery) who wondered, idly, where her grave might be found.

cemeteryx

‘Well, since we’re here,’ they pointed out, ‘It would be silly not to see it.’

‘We’re not looking either,’ I said.

We wandered on, glancing now and then, with idle curiosity, at the family names adorning each mausoleum, and finally found our way towards the exit, entirely satisfied. We came across the Americans again, also just about to leave. None of us had noticed it before, but there was actually a very helpful map that showed exactly where Evita’s grave could be found – number 88 in quadrant C7.

‘Well, we might as well,’ we all agreed, ‘since we’ve come so far.’

So we did, and it was thronged with Asian tourists. Pointless of course, if you have no interest in celebrity, but since we were there.

Here she is:

evaperonx

 

 

 

The Iron Curtain – Then and Now

How things have changed, and yet not at all.

I took the train from Budapest to Vienna on Friday for the first time in about twenty years. When I first lived in Budapest in 1987, the city was still behind the Iron Curtain, and it was a journey I made regularly, especially in the winter, to get away from the greyness of Budapest to the colour, culture and sophistication of Vienna, not to mention the nightlife. Passengers were few and the journey took more than four hours. Eastern Europeans, as they were then called, couldn’t travel without an approved purpose and a visa, and foreigners living in Budapest were very few.

It took nearly half an hour (and the stamping of half a dozen documents) to buy a ticket at the railway station in Budapest, and when the train stopped at the border it might take up to half an hour for the border guards to make their sweep of the train. Suspicion abounded, and I was often the focus of it.

iron curtain

On Friday last week, it took me just one minute to buy a ticket (though, admittedly I waited 30 minutes in the queue with dozens of other eager travellers) and the journey was scheduled to take only three hours. The train left on time, was full, and stopped for just a few minutes at the border. After all, we were all travelling from one Schengen state to another, and in theory passports aren’t required.

But suspicion still abounds, albeit of another kind. As the train left Budapest Keleti Station hordes of a new generation of police (no more polite than the Communist-era variety, but nowadays multi-lingual) swept through the train, demanding (often very aggressively) that anyone ‘suspicious’ (which in their book meant anyone of any colour other than white) should show his or her passport. I sat in the restaurant car with a middle-class Singaporean family (probably ‘ethnically’ Indian). I didn’t have to show my passport, but they had to show theirs. About ten passengers were then removed from the train before we reached the border.

I suppose that what I saw was the EUROPEAN IMMIGRATION PROBLEM at first hand. Hungary has recently and unilaterally adopted an aggressive attitude, though why this means preventing them from leaving the country rather than letting them go, I do not know.

We are back where we were. Borders still matter. If the government of Hungary can get away with it, there will be a new physical Iron Curtain soon on the country’s border with Serbia.