I knew it had to be too good to last.  I’ve been gloating over the past few weeks about how quite my travel schedule is.  No sooner had I thought about taking a week of vacation than I learned that I need to be in Mumbai for a few days, then straight to Sydney for a two-day workshop. 

Flight times mean that I lose two weekends away from home.  And Aude will have to add Valentine’s Day to the long list of events I’ve missed due to business travel (her birthday and my birthday being the other two events, recently).  And let’s face it, 21’099 miles in a week is a lot, even for a backside as calloused and travel-weary as mine.

Still, we’re headed out to the slopes for a week as soon as I get back from Sydney – hopefully without too much jetlag.  We’re just finalizing our plans for the trip, booking our apartment, and buying our skis!

As soon as we’re back from skiing, it’s straight onto a plane again — this time, headed for Beijing.  Yep, February is turning into a pretty brutal travel month.  Plenty of frequent flyer miles, though!

The more I work with my colleagues in India and China, the more I come to realize what economic powerhouses these countries are going to become.  And I’m putting my money where my mouth is: a few days ago, we bought our first shares in a few Chinese companies, hoping to tap into the extraordinary growth that is going on there.

I often think about the intellectual firepower that is developing in these countries, in their universities and technical schools, and think about the possibilities it has to completely change the business landscape over the next thirty years.

I was reading an interesting article in the New York Times this morning, entitled Is China the Next Enron?  It was written by Thomas Friedman, who also wrote The World Is Flat (which, incidentally, is a great read).  He had this to say:

Now take all this infrastructure and mix it together with 27 million students in technical colleges and universities — the most in the world. With just the normal distribution of brains, that’s going to bring a lot of brainpower to the market, or, as Bill Gates once said to me: “In China, when you’re one-in-a-million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.”

I’m headed out to Beijing in two weeks to run a series of workshops.  It’s my first trip to mainland China, and I’m excited about it.  Visiting India and seeing the transformation there, firsthand, changed my outlook.  I suspect seeing China first-hand will do the same.