Icing on the Park City cake!

Last Sunday afternoon, I skied – I should say ice-skated, most of the Park City Mountain ski runs, with my daughter and we were lucky on many counts. Not to hit a tree, fall and slide without ever stopping as we glided, most of the time on sheer ice. 

Think of it as “on a wing and a prayer!” Something so bad I never experienced in 72 ski seasons, the world over from Australia to Zermatt! 

That should say a lot. Blue ice was visible in numerous spots and everywhere, including on bumps, everything was smooth, but super hard, the kind of material never letting the edges bite. 

Only on flat sections had the traffic abraded snow enough to turn it into some kind of semolina, making “skating” more pleasant. 

Since the combination of noise and vibrations was extremely unnerving, we did our very best to be “brief” and not linger on the harder spots, which gave anyone who watched us the very false impression that we were quite “at ease” on this forsaken terrain. 

Anecdotally, I’ve always thought and said that skiing on ice demanded brevity and I stand by that principle! In fact, we were just terrified and rushing to put an end to our descents. This said, we stuck on the mountain till closing time and tried everything that was available to find better spots, but they weren’t available. 

At the day’s conclusion, we felt good like the survivors we had become...

The 2026 Subaru Outback

Subaru has always been in my blood, at least from 1975 to 2022 when I made a fateful switch to an electric car. Subaru was about to come with its own, the Soltera, reluctantly developed by Toyota, but that I didn’t love enough to purchase. 

Yet, Subarus have always held a soft spot in my soul and I was just devastated when I caught a glance of its new 2026 Outback model. An ugly box to my very discerning and visually demanding eyes! There are also too many distracting details on that car that are plastered around to try to make it cool, fail badly at it.

A case of less is more… I felt a sense of betrayal and now found a justification for my fleeting loyalty to the Japanese brand. I may be old, but still can change! 

How should I have been hired? (Part Two)

As we discussed yesterday, I wondered if I should have asked what educational benefits (mentoring being a big one) I would get from my employers some 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Of course, the short answer had to be “Absolutely not!” 

It sure wasn’t unrealistic to want mentoring 30–50 years ago, but it was uncommon and largely infeasible because workplace culture and employer incentives were totally different then, and formal mentoring was “terra incognita”. Employers typically expected new hires to “pay their dues,” learn on the job at the “school of hard knocks”.

Formal mentoring as we know it, only began to be studied and institutionalized in the late 1970s–1980s. It’s only relatively recently that mentoring became a formal organizational practice. As far as I was concerned, the above research and any formal mentoring program began to appear after the time I hit the job market, while academic attention (like Kathy Kram’s work in 1988) helped legitimize mentoring as a workplace development tool. 

Kathy Kram

During my active life, workplace norms were top‑down and transactional. Employers expect employees to learn on the job and through their own mistakes; with structured professional development budgets and talent pipelines being far less common than they are today. Let’s say it was more like “sink or swim!” Job seekers also had far less bargaining power if any! 

Labor markets and hiring practices gave employers more leverage, so negotiating for non‑monetary benefits like mentorship was a rarity and most often than not would have seemed to be incredibly presumptuous. 

Today, things have evolved and are much different, so to console myself, I can only accept that I operated in a system that didn’t prioritize employee development; my choices were rational given the incentives. 

I'll have to reconsider this as an important emotional reframe. Another instance when I was clearly thinking far too ahead of my times!

How should I have been hired? (Part One)

As a kid, I never received much praised from my parents. This wasn’t part of their upbringing and their rather tough Alpine mountain culture. That kind of notice would have to come from my elementary school teacher who spotted my potential as a kid, give me an opportunity to shine and sent me on my way to success.

All this to underscore that when I talked about my favorite boss a few days ago, I should have mentioned one of the few regrets I got from my professional life and the fact that I sold myself, instead of having my prospective employers sold me about working with them and showing me (or not) how they would mentor me and participate to my personal growth while extracting huge benefits in the process. 

That’s right, I’m lamenting about the fact that I gave a lot, was compensated monetarily, but didn’t receive much in terms of professional education and I suspect that I’m far from being the only one in that situation. It’s true too that in most of my job searches I was so eager and desperate to get the position 

I wanted that I would have been afraid to have my employer laugh at me and, in the process, tell me to take a hike in being too demanding and difficult. I was simply not self-confident enough to dare ask for free mentoring. While this makes so much sense today, was this unrealistic to ask 50, 40 or 30 years ago? 

We’ll try to find an answer to that question tomorrow…

A twelve year anniversary!

Throughout our married life, my spouse and I have always stayed in one house less than 12 years, as we’ve moved 12 times together. 

Today, however, marks a family record. We have for the very first time lived at least one dozen years in our home and have no plans yet to move out, as we enjoy our place, its convenience and great location.

So, God willing, we might start setting a new record of living an unprecedented number of years in our beloved abode!

My favorite boss…

Often, my wife asks me: “Over the years and in your different jobs, who was your favorite boss?” I’d answer “Tough question! I don’t really know…” What it meant was that one or another wasn’t bad, but I didn’t learn much from him or her. 

As you know mentoring is an extremely essential benefit of being bossed around, and I must admit that none of my former bosses were good at that. In fact, they wouldn’t have even known how to start mentoring the people working for them. 

They seemed to have hired some kind of expertise and were to happy to extract some productivity out of them without having to spend time coaching or guiding them well towards reaching important company goals. 

This pretty reflected how I felt about the subject and my lackluster way of addressing my spouse’s question. Deep inside, I kind of knew that there was a more obvious response to it, but I just couldn’t see it and express it. That was until just a couple of days ago it hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized that through my entire career my best boss had simply been me. 

That may sound pretentious, but please, read on. In a huge way when I was managing my own ski industry distribution company in the 80s and 90s and to a lesser degree when I was a ski instructor in Avoriaz, France, I felt that having me as a boss was swell. In those days, I was in charge, I had full mastery of my destiny and was less disappointed in myself than I would be with all my other bosses on the many occasions I’d venture on the other side of the fence. 

On my own, I would define my goals, refine and modify them as needed, and evolve by espousing the circumstances and the terrain. When needed, I would also become my own coach, improve on that very special skill and refine it as well. I was fulfilled, happy and in control of my conditions and my fate. This wouldn’t come even close to my relationship of dependency from a boss who would not measure to my expectations. 

What a quantum difference!

Trump and the idea of “regime change”…

Since the beginning of the Iran war, Trump has been vacillating about the many reasons he joined forces with Bibi Netanyahu to inflict pain on the Iranian regime and its people. 

After giving us a bunch of reasons, our president and his administration have drifted towards the need for “regime change”, a very tall order when you think that the Mullahs are deeply planted in the governance of their country.

In actuality, Trump and his staff should have conducted a better job of preparing the terrain, but to their credit, they had no idea where they were getting into. This is typically what happens when one is, at the same time, lazy, impatient, lying and hypocritical. 

So here we go, we will be serving regime change that’s always a dangerous and uncertain bet. The only fair question left is where this change is going to happen first, in Iran or in the United States?