1. A company that installs its products before it develops them has approached you to in order to understand how OD can support their business. What are the major issues you want to emphasize in your 15 minute introductory meeting?
2. A US based company acquired a development centre in a country in which  the culture shows respect towards elder people and women are generally in junior administrative roles. The boss of the acquired site will be a 29 year old Canadian female with a PhD from a leading university, who will manage the site remotely from Vancouver. She (the boss) has asked to meet with you for “cultural tips”.
3. A Boston based company is about to launch an “anti-mansplaining” campaign in all 12 countries  (including Japan and Malaysia) in which the company  operates. The Human Resources Board Committee of the Board wants an OD consultant to provide a sanity check on the idea. Your approach?
4. Frank manages a group of chemists and physicists PhDs who have a very poor level of coordination. Frank has decided that “working from home” is banned starting March 2025. The board has mandated that Frank implement his plan with an OD consultant. Your approach?

I don’t remember what I did with the 2 huge posters I that used to hang in my room in Ville St-Laurent: Mao Tse-tung, and an Israeli fisherman throwing his net onto the Sea of Galilee.

To be honest, I cannot even remember if I took them down. I do know that I left behind my beloved Phillips tape recorder which I had received from my grandmother as well as all my clothes save what I had put in a very small duffle bag, along with a few other items. The crate I was allotted was all used to store my books. The crate would arrive 3 months after I did.

Nor do I remember the days before I left. That probably explained what motivated me to leave in the first place.

I do remember however that I just could not wait to go. The drastic move would make me a creature of habit for the rest of my life-at least in the small things of life-like what time I eat, or what I eat.

Dad took me to the Orange Julip on the way to the airport. I ate a triple cheeseburger, poutine and a cherry coke. Dad told me that triple cheeseburgers “are going to be a thing of the past”. In retrospect. I just cannot imagine the pain he felt as his first-born son left home forever. Dad knew I would never return.

No one else really believed that I’d be away for a long time, albeit my declarations.

I met Franky on the Montreal-Idlewild leg of the trip, and he said, “ya ya-see you in a few months”. Franky had been a tutorial lead (professors assistant) in the honours seminar in the” Sociology of Ethnicity”. Albeit the huge amount of ethnic groups Franky could have discussed in class, he focused on the Italians and the Jews-especially the languages they chose to speak in Quebec.

I do remember landing in Israel at Lod Airport. The heat was overpowering. When I arrived in Tiberias a few weeks later for total Hebrew immersion, I thought that the heat would kill me, literally. We studied from 06.30 AM till noon; then from 16.00 till 19.00. Evening studies were often marked with bombings near the border near Kibbutz Ashdod Yaakov, close to my language school Ohalo, very near Tiberias.

I learnt more than Hebrew from Ilanit.

Three years fast forward. It’s 3.00 AM and rain is pouring down on our squadron as we patrol the Jordanian border near Ashdod Yaakov. Rain whips me hard and fierce, fogging the green night-vision glasses I am wearing. My patrol partner is Avi, who himself emigrated from Lebanon. Avi and I speak in Hebrew which we both know well, and French. Luckily, I don’t have my thesis with me, which I had finally completed. I would have had to type it again on my old Hermes typewriter, the one I had also stuffed into my duffle bag when I left Canada for good.