Thank you, Catherine, Annemieke, Ina, Pierre, Jacques, Matoba-san!
You all have made my trip to France and Netherland very, very special.
Yes, being a Steelcase team member makes me biased toward our company, but we really do have great workplaces and worklife in so many parts of the world! I just love our facilities in Grand Rapids, Michigan, our Arena Station, Patterson Building, Steelcase University, <a href="http://www.dgunning.org/architecture/Meyer%20May/index.html">Meyer Mayhouse</a>, and our related company, IDEO's San Francisco and Palo Alto offices. But I fell in love with our Netherland office. Why, it's a cross between IDEO San Francisco and Palo Alto offices. Marlenheim may be out of way, but I love it's quaintness. Steelcase Paris. It was very impressive, practicing what we preach, and Jean-Marc Heme's worklife showroom tour touted same story I tell in Tokyo. I was really happy to hear that Steelcase Paris will move out of La Defense area into central Paris. Makes it even better. Talk about history, I thought Arena Station with 100 year-old building was impressive, the buildings in central Paris are REALLY old! Like the one <a href="http://www.avence.com">Avence</a> is housed. I think the building is over 200 years old, isn't it?
Real people doing real work. I thought it interesting that marketing and consultants I met of Steelcase Europe team were mostly women, most of them mothers like me. I couldn't meet George due to transportation problem in Paris due to general strike, so I missed meeting one man who consults.
Matoba-san and I met from sitting next to each other along with a lady from Romania, and had interesting talks during our long (loong) flight from Tokyo to Amsterdam. He's doing some great work in IT consulting, and when I asked him if he would give a little talk to my young group (yes, wyuki-san, Sakakida-san, Kubota-san, Sasaki-san!), he has kindly agreed. He's more genki than me!
Okay, if anybody wants to see my summaries of creating knowledge based workplace based on Europe examples, especially on using arts to create ba for interaction, and to maximize the use of colors and visuals, call me! E-mail me! We'll get together.