it's raining!

I just felt the first rain drop ever since I have been in Egypt. By now it's raining slightly and it's fascinating! :D

In Moses' foot steps

It’s Friday evening. Eleven. We have just been driving for 8 hours and I haven’t eaten since breakfast. I’m hungry and exhausted to point that everything is spinning around me.

Earlier that day we left Cairo in a rented car and made out way eastwards, to the Suez Channel, all the way through Sinai to the very tip, and up on the other side to Dahab – a small not (yet) very commercial divers spot mainly visited by young chilled out half hippies and reminding me strongly to the tiny Thai island Koh Tao. But we did not go diving.

The moment we left the car we hurried to a minibus that took us to the centre of Sinai into the very heart of the high mountains. After driving for about another 3 hours we go out and found ourselves in at 300 other tourists and more shockingly in 10 degrees celcius. After spending a ridiculous amount of money at the tourist shops, equipping ourselves with ponchos, scarfs and flashlights but still with empty stomachs we were set to go.

At 2 in the morning we started climbing up Mount Sinai, the highest mountain on Sinai, which is said to be the place where Moses received the ten amendments from God. It was the first time in some month that I saw the stars and I enjoyed. It was a weird hike: surely it will be 1st on my personal list of the most unpieceful hikes ever, with the hundreds of others storming up that mountain in the middle of the night – some screaming and others yelling in loudspeakers. It was for sure also the most commercial one, with kiosks at all 200 meters selling terribly overpriced water or trying to make you hire a camel that would take you up.

But it didn’t matter. Because I got to hike. I got to see the stars. I got to see the most amazing sunrise in my life and I had good company.

Once we arrived on the peak, we found ourselves some mattresses and blankets and where able to watch how the stars would disappear, the shapes of the mountains started be get clearer and the sky turned red. It was a pretty cool sunrise and I noticed that I was quite unaware of the beauty of Sinai, with its rough mountains.







We came down and looked at the monastery in which there is a bush that’s supposed to be the burning bush from 4000 years ago. There is also the body of the St. Kathrin, who was beheaded for her believe 1800 years ago in Alexandria, and who’s body was taken by an angel to some place far away. 300 years later they happened to find it on a mountain close to Mt. Sinai and identified it as Kathrin’s (astonishing, when you consider it was in the 4th century…)

Pondering over the credibility of many stories that are told, I was strolling around the oldest still used chapel in Christianity, which does give the feeling of eternity somehow. It’s hard to describe, but feels good.



I went for a huge fish that night. Fish soup, tuna salad and fish filet for dinner.

In a job like mine

It has been three months, almost exactly three months in my job. It’s the kind of job that you don’t leave in the office when you go home at night. It’s the kind of job you love one day, at least as much as you hate it the other day. It’s the kind of job where most of the people you work with believe you are the kind of person who doesn’t need to have a weekend. It’s the kind of job in which you get to experience moments of total happiness about what you just achieved and can make you turn white in fear that you will not be able to deal with what’s ahead of you.

Never in my life have I had that amount of responsibility. Never before have I actually known what it is like… to be a manager.

The situation of someone telling me what to do occurs as good as never in my daily life. I might get a hint or a tip to put my mind on something that seems to get neglected at times, apart from that, I’m myself in charge of everything connected to Talent Management (TM) (for many known as HR) in the whole country. That means of course a lot of functional training and following up on the people working for TM on the local level; it means a lot of support and coaching. But that’s not the whole thing. To manage an organisation our size in a management team of 6 people also means that you work on many things not directly in connection with your function (TM). To name an example: I’m the conference manager of the upcoming conference (in 4 weeks) that brings together 300 people in 3 different tracks, plus companies and organizations as well as facilitators form different parts of the world. There are different groups and stakeholders involved, strings who are all in the end of the day, connected in my fingers, and if I lose control over one of them, the ship is about to sink.
“Next” to that I’m the coach of the local committee in Alexandria, which apart from spending a lot of my time on the train also means spending a lot of time keeping track of things and preparing what I do with them.
There are taskforces as well, that focus on the development of different elements of the organisation that I’m in charge off, which again in different ways, consume a lot of time.

In short: In a job like mine, things are happening parallel, not after each other. And the art of managing is to be able to stay on track with all of them, without losing control over any other thing.

The best thing about having been in this job for only 3 month and not for 30 years is that I can see myself improving practically on a daily basis. I have the chance to observe how I’m getting better at managing my time, how I improve at staying calm in moments of stress or desperation (I have those often), how I start to see ways to convince people (especially from a different culture) or how to plan ahead (ah… what a beautiful skill…).

To me, one of the beautiful things of management is to see behind the complexity of management. To realize how an organisation works, why often things don’t work, how much more difficult some things are then they seem, but also often the other way around. For a long time I saw management as something for business administration students who only care about making money. Now I discovered that it’s more than that. It’s an art and I believe that what I learned from it will be applicable to whatever I want to do.