Writing is a solitary business. And I might add, writing a book is a super-solitary business.

I have been spending so much time in my mind lately that I am not sure where my body has been.

A friend of mine was walking in the centre of Munich on Tuesday and saw somebody who looked like me.

He e-mailed me to let me know. I read his message and had to think for a minute…was that really me? …Had my body been wandering across the Channel and towards the Alps?

Although I have been feeling kind of lonely today (the bird outside my window is still in its nest… which is reassuring), I am very excited about my book.

I particularly like the part in which I explore new leadership styles and their impact on communications.

And I got a lot of great content at the Arab Internal Women’s Forum conference in Washington last week.

Thirteen per cent of the companies in the Middle East are owned by women. They are usually bigger than male-owned businesses and employ between 10 and 50 people. Research found that they use technology and on-line communication more than male-owned companies. It also discovered that female managers treat employees like family and have a much more democratic and participative leadership style than their male counterparts in the region.

This is one of the new leadership phenomena I will be exploring in my book.

Widad Ibrahim grew up in Sudan on a farm owned by her grandmother.

She used to sell eggs on the side of the road. This is how she developed her business sense and how she got the idea to start selling apartments in Khartoum.

One business led to another and Widad now owns one of the largest industrial groups in Sudan with 800 employees. Her Bee Group includes gas stations, an oil company, an aviation business and a property development company.

I was sitting in a conference room at the World Bank with tears in my eyes. Something in that story sounded close to home. My grandmother, who used to manage a farm in post-war Italy, would have been very proud of Widad.

What an incredible story!

And there is more.

In 2002, Widad asked the male-only Businessmen Union in Khartoum to give her a room where women entrepreneurs could meet. In 2006, for the first time in the history of Sudan, a woman was elected to join the Union.

Widad visited Grameen Bank and got the idea to start the first micro-credit bank in Sudan. Her Family Bank, set up with other Sudanese business women, has more than 35 million US$ in its accounts.

During the train ride back to New York, I couldn’t shake Widad’s face from my mind. Her colourful hijab and the beautiful henna drawings on her hands and feet. Such an inspiring presence.

I am so fortunate to have heard her story. It is one that I will continue telling, again and again.

I am really looking forward to flying to New York tomorrow for a meeting. I don’t mind if it is going to be super hot there. I just need a change of scenery.

I have been working hard on my book this month.

I surfaced early this week to have a lunch meeting. When one of the people at the lunch asked me what I was writing about, I realised that I had to condense all the thoughts I had had over the past weeks in one sentence.

I did some more quick thinking while chewing my French fries and then I started telling the story of my book.

I am writing about new approaches to business communications.

Multinationals from emerging economies have been extremely active in acquiring businesses all over the world. The ownership structure of many industries is changing. If you have been doing communication for a German company in Denmark, you might wake up one of these days and realise that you have been bought by a Chinese group. Starting from Monday, you will be arranging communication between the new owners in Shanghai and their Danish employees.

This is the backdrop to my story.

One of the main messages of the book is that multicultural intelligence is going to be the most important skill for the communicator of the future. I talk about how to develop a mindset that enables you to tune into other cultures and understand their communication patterns.

People say that writing is a lonely business. And in part it is.

But for me, one of the most exciting aspect of this experience has been meeting new people. I am so happy to have made new friends from China and the Middle East, and I am so grateful for their support and all the good ideas they have been giving me.

This makes me feel less lonely when I am stuck in my study writing and contemplating the bird who has made a nest on a tree right outside my window (that also has been keeping me company…).

It is going to be 27 degrees in New York on Saturday and I can’t wait!

Photo: thanks to pierrecotton.files.wordpress.com

I felt like crying when I read the stories of relief workers and survivors on the English sites of Chinese newspapers.

I was feeling more and more depressed until I came across a story entitled “Rebuilding their spiritual homes”.

I was intrigued. So I started reading. The story talks about the efforts that are being made to help the children who have lost their parents.

Wang is a ten-year-old girl from Beihuan County. Although she has been reunited with her father, she is still suffering from amnesia and insists that he is still away.

“By putting toys in a sandbox, she would gradually restore her memories. Each toy… a house, a tiger, a cup, an adult, a child were all marked with their names”, explains Zhang Mingliang, a counsellor. Wang chose an ox to put in the sandbox because she was born in the year of the ox.

The Shiyan high school in Mianyang has become a refuge for victims. I love the sentence they have written on the timetable for classes:

“If the picture is broken, we can glue the pieces together; if our homes were ruined, we can rebuild new ones”

This story made me feel better and I suddenly remembered a prayer I have heard at an event I attended in London for the victims of the earthquake:

“When your hearth is full of love and kindness you will give others help a thousand times and you will be helped a thousand times in return”.

Photo: thanks to english.gov.cn/images

I found the speech J.K. Rowling gave yesterday at Harvard University incredibly inspirational.

I particularly love this quote:

“Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity; it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”

A large part of my work as a communicator is about trying to understand the mindset of people I have never met. And I do believe imagination is the key. Just sit there before you start writing and try to imagine where your audience lives, how they commute to work, what they love and what they hate, what their hopes are etc. etc.

Imagination can also do wonders for peace. A friend of mine believes that only by empathising with those who have harmed you and by feeling their pain, you can grow over the need for revenge and develop compassion.

Rowling also spoke about knowledge. And this part of her speech is something I will try to remember:

“[Knowledge is] a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned. The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are ever after secure in your ability to survive.”

It has been raining on and off since I got back to London. So I decided to go the gym and work myself into a trance while listening to my favourite Arab singer, George Wasouf.

While doing this, my mind took off and began thinking of my post of last week about languages (I really enjoyed Daneeta’s and Maria’s comments).

I was thinking of all the reasons why I am glad I learned other languages:

• Another language adds a new dimension to your life. It makes you realise that there are many different ways to interpret reality. An example I like to use is the verb “to take a walk”, spazieren in German. In Czech, it is reflexive: prochazet se. The fact that it is reflexive turns the experience of taking a walk into something you do for yourself, something that is good for you. I love to use the verb prochazet se when I am about to take a walk.

• Going through the pains of learning another language is a humbling experience. I remember when I learned to write in German and had to have friends check my texts. I wrote very well in Italian and would have never needed this. Languages are great destroyers of egos.

• I can think of those situations when you encounter people who look down at you because you have an accent that they consider “foreign” or because you use expressions different from theirs. Remaining polite in their presence is a great exercise if you are trying to develop compassion for your fellow human beings. Believe me! It is more powerful than 10 hours spent in meditation.

• Learning other languages brings new people into your life. I can’t even begin to think of all the people who would not be in my life if I only spoke Italian. And this has always been the strongest motivation factor for me. What is yours?

I landed in Doha the other night and getting out of the plane felt like being embraced by a giant warm force. It went right through the essence of my being, warming up not only my London-weather-battered bones but also my soul. Deserts are such spiritual places.

And the spell continued on my connecting flight to Dubai. I watched a fellow passenger in the row next to me reciting his prayers. The small light above his seat shining on the beautiful Arabic characters of his book and the sleeves of his djellaba forming a snow-white aura around it.

I imagined his prayers merging in the air with those my 100-year-old grandmother in Italy recites every time I fly. Words in two very different languages travelling to the same place.

I have to admit the shopping spree I embarked on yesterday afternoon at Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates was somewhat less spiritual.

So I thought I would buy myself a book likely to make me think: Creating a World Without Poverty by Muhammad Yunus. My readers know how fond I am of Prof. Yunus and will understand that I could not wait to be back to the hotel to open the book.

I sat down in a corner of the mall and began reading….

As expected, I did find something that made me think. In the list of things he would like to see emerge by 2050, Yunus writes:

“Everybody will read and hear everything in his own language. Technology will make it possible for a person to speak, read, and write in his own language while the listener will hear and the reader will read the message in his own language. Software and gadgets will translate simultaneously as one speaks or downloads any text….”

I don’t doubt this is likely to happen. I am only thinking of all the hours I spent learning the languages I speak and how much the experience has become part of who I am.

Will people stop learning languages in the future? Will technology replace the effort to understand other cultures? Or will it make it easier?

I sit there utterly miserable… wishing I had brought my anorak. My mind wanders off to something unexciting. Yesterday morning, it was contemplating the amount of laundry I have to do before my next business trip…when a ray of light in the form of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, shook it from its hopeless daydreaming.

Berners-Lee is such an incredible speaker. And it is not the fact that he invented the web, didn’t patent it and donated it to humanity. He is also extremely humble. He has the aura of someone who has looked into the secrets of eternity and knows how much we still have to discover.

He calls blogs “social machines” and says that “we ain’t seen anything yet”, meaning that there are much more machines to come.

The web, according to him, is a way for humanity to interact. It is about connections between people, not between sites (click here to watch an amazing video about this).

It is also about bringing together half-baked ideas and producing results through collaboration.

He gave the example of life science projects. People working on them deal with huge amounts of information. They are too big for a person to store them in their heads.

This is where the web comes in. It connects information and ideas and leads to breakthroughs….similarly to when we get great ideas by walking in a park or taking a shower…. Something happens, we just don’ t know what.

The fascinating thing about Berners-Lee is that he does not stop at the gadgets. He goes much deeper. He thinks about what the World Wide Web means for mankind and its next stage of evolution.

“Will the internet be a force for good?” he asked at the end of his address.

It is a spooky question. Let’s continue to blog and not answer it for the moment.

Photo: thanks to opte.org

The purpose of a network is to provide their members with examples of inspiring women at the top.

I have been having a lot of fun serving as regional director for Europe of The International Alliance for Women (TIAW). And yesterday we launched our Global Cities program, an initiative meant to bring together senior women from the region to discuss topical issues.

Ruth Sealy, Doctoral Researcher from the International Centre for Women Leaders at Cranfield University’s School of Management, spoke about the work she has been doing to highlight the importance of female role models.

According to her research, organisations need to develop much deeper levels of cultural, emotional and relational awareness, in order to encourage women to aspire to leadership positions.

Ruth interviewed a series of top female executives. This is what a female managing director from a global investment bank told her (I love this quote!):

“In a group of 10, if you have at least 3 people that are the same, then you actually have a platform to speak from and be heard …for most of us, literally we’re the only woman in a group of 40 (men).
….So if you are agitated you’re being an emotional female, if you’re angry you’re being a bitch, if you cry you’re being weak. But if there were 3 or 4 of you, then you actually get heard.”

Our keynote speaker was one of the women interviewed by Ruth.

Andrea Sullivan is Head of Corporate Philanthropy and Cultural Partnerships for Europe and the Middle East at Lehman Brothers.

She spoke about her career journey both professionally and personally. Andrea mentioned the fact that women tend not to have linear careers and are sometimes needlessly ashamed about it.

I am so glad she did this. Linear careers are a myth that needs to be dismantled. I am sure Generation Y will help to do away with this.

My favourite quote from Andrea’s speech: “Sometimes you have to get right to the edge to know what you want.”

This is what a Chinese friend of mine told me recently after she found out the number of languages I speak.

I had never looked at it this way. But may be she has a point.

You do have to pull yourself through some crazy stuff if you want to learn a language.

Then, there are times when you are tired or sick, and you happen to mispronounce a word. Your friends give you that look. You are no longer the person they used to know. You have just morphed into a monster from the lagoon and are regurgitating gibberish mixed with greenish foam at their feet.

That’s why I was so intrigued to find out about Crazy English.

The Chinese entrepreneur/motivational speaker Li Yang came up with this method to teach English. He encourages his students to shout English sentences at the top of their lungs.

He draws enormous crowds from all over China. The 2008 Summer Olympics’s Organising Committee has hired him to help make sure that visitors will be taken care of by people with sufficient English language skills.

He uses motivational sentences like: “I can totally conquer English. I am no longer a slave to English. I am its master. I believe English will become my faithful servant…”.

Li Yang’s technique taps into the dreams of millions of Chinese who see English as a passport to professional success and wealth.

I have to admit it…. it is a little creepy, but the psychology behind Crazy English is fascinating.

Li Yang has been able to turn learning a language into a life-changing experience.

He is selling hope packaged in exercise books. And he has managed to turn the anxiety that everybody experiences, when uttering new sounds, into an outlandishly joyous experience to be shared with thousands of people.

All this reminds me of how learning a language has always been about much more than learning grammar and new words.

A Czech friend of mine has never been able to learn English. During the cold war, she had learned French and Italian, two languages considered “neutral” by the regime. English continued to have that “capitalistic” connotation in her mind. She knew that learning it would have helped her a great deal in her work. She just could not overcome the mental barrier.

I am beginning to wonder whether it wouldn’t be more effective to deal first with the emotions we attach to a language.

Wouldn’t grammar and vocabulary follow much more easily once we have taken care of that?

Photo: thanks to newyorker.com