The city is alive these days. She grasps at the sky with concrete fingers that seem to spring up at every corner. I see them rising from my window, illuminated from the east. The sun considers them steadily, and his gaze falls also on my black cat. He is as black as the night sky, which is to say not black at all, or perhaps all the colours of black.

He grasps for a touch, and I wonder what it would be to touch a city.

The work remains so hard. I am recruiting at pace, at such a pace that it reminds me of being a child on a train. When I was a boy – a mere slip of a creature, quite different to how I am now – trains had slam-doors, and they could be opened by pushing down the window and turning the handle on the outside.

When I was a boy, there was a game: to see how early you could open the door and step out onto the platform. It was an early and astonishing exposure to physics and relativity. While standing on the train chatting to friends or reading a book, there is no real sense that one is moving. And yet as you step off the train you know you have to be ready to sprint, because the concrete concourse will remind you that actually you’re travelling at a jolly lick if you’re not very careful.

That’s where I am. I am ensconsed in the work and I know I am travelling at pace, but I don’t know yet how pacy I am relative to anything else – and so there is a risk that if I step off I will, metaphorically speaking, smash myself into the platform.

Amongst that is the usual pile of things: commissions fired left right and centre that come to me at long last with no time at all because handoffs are expensive and queues are expensive and I could yell myself hoarse about how expensive it is to run everything at full tilt all the time and nobody would ever listen. I’m taking over a fair bit of governance, and that’s been interesting. I keep accidentally chairing things. No, hang on. That’s not right. I take charge of things and I chair them. I want to work harder at making sure other people chair things, because chairing is a very important skill and I think it’s fading. I think it’s fading because meetings are easier to organise, and the cost of people’s time isn’t reflected. Is that right? Back in the days of old, when getting people together for a meeting was difficult, there would always be an agenda, papers, a plan – because it was acknowledged that a meeting was a high-cost manoeuver. If you can have a meeting at a snap of your fingers, then the extra work that used to be associated with ‘having a meeting’ falls off, because it costs more than the meeting itself.

Hm. Perhaps. Maybe I need a freer market approach, or a willingness to be the weirdo who refuses all meetings without agenda. Agendas?

We’ve borrowed a product manager from a neighbouring division, and she’s been conducting a series of interviews to understand our space a bit better. I’m burningly curious to see what she comes back with. I have my own views, but it’s great to get an independent opinion.

Lastly: the next few months are likely to be incredibly busy, so I am taking the last week of this month as annual leave. I’ll tell you where I’ve been when I’m back.