I was recently staying at a hotel in Paris for two weeks, and with a stay this long, am forced to use the hotel laundry service. Like hotels all over the world, this service consists of a plastic bag you fill with dirty clothes and a form of varying complexity. From Boston to Beijing, I've filled the bag, completed the form, and left it in an obvious position in my hotel room, never once failing to return after a day's labors to find the bag replaced with clean, folded clothes, and an outrageously expensive charge added to my hotel bill.

Most hotels outsource this function, and clearly there is a cost associated with transporting, tracking and managing small loads of laundry, but despite these challenges I can only imagine the profit margin on this service is quite impressive. With little thought and approaching my last reserve set of clothing, I loaded the bag a couple nights ago in my Paris hotel room, and left it literally in the middle of the entryway to the room. When I returned, the bag had been carefully moved to the side of the hallway. Somewhat disgusted I dialed the service number on the telephone, and the lady who answered explained rater impatiently that I should have called in the morning to inform service that I would have laundry waiting. I asked if she could note somewhere that I would have laundry waiting tomorrow and, as if explaining the obvious to a toddler, she said "of course not, you must call tomorrow morning."

Whoever cleaned the room had literally tripped over a bag of revenue, due to policies and procedures put in place by the hotel's management. Most of us have experienced similar scenarios, from calling a company with cash in hand, ready to buy a product only to be pointed to a convoluted distributor or "channel partner" network. We have all tried to get basic information from a company's website or phone representative, only to be subjected to a battery of questions that would make an intelligence officer blush, and I am personally more likely to abandon such antics and even consider a competitor who does not make it so darn hard to buy from them.

It is worth occasionally approaching your company's policies from a customer's standpoint, whether through an open-minded assessment or more formal investigation by an outside entity. What may have seemed like a great policy or practice in reality may have your employees tripping over bags of revenue left right in their path.

While at this point I am giving a third-hand interpretation of the concept, and there are likely martial artists rolling over in their graves, it is a neat analogy and one that I am very fond of. The concept suggests that our mind should be like a body of water. I personally like picturing a cool woodland pond; and that new ideas will impact the water like a tossed stone, causing it to flow and ripple. After a brief period of time, however, the ripples subside, and the pond is once again serene and ready to react to the next pebble, fish or falling leaf that might cast about another ripple. Occasionally a strong wind or storm might create waves, but again, the body of water reacts, and eventually returns to a steady state.

Allen suggests this be a model for managing tasks, where a particular item becomes the stone tossed into the pond. Once you log the task and develop a plan of action, the ripples are forgotten and once again the mind is serene. I personally like this metaphor for life as a whole. Often against our will we must put up with the rocks, logs and occasionally asteroid that falls into the pond, but if we accept the momentary chaos and face the waves head on, we will soon return to the calm pond that is awaiting the next challenge.

It seems "Travels with Patrick" has been stuck in a bit of a food rut these past few months, but with a new baby at home, and most of my French language skills revolving around attempting to find and order food, it has been a frequent topic in my life as of late.

I'm sitting in a small café on a sidewalk in Paris, finishing some coffee while working on this newsletter, and my eyes wandered over to the bottle of sparking water on the table. If my French is correct, the bottle claims in a rather regal script that "Since 1778 [the brand of the water] has been helping digestion and encouraging good health."

I am fascinated by the different perception of "healthy" foods outside the US, where our focus is limited mainly to calories and fat. Perhaps we solved our digestive issues years ago, as I rarely see a product in the US that claims to aid digestion, let alone extending that sort of claim to bottled water (although if it has been around as long as the United States itself, they must be doing something right).

The French on the other hand encourage an aperitif (usually alcoholic) at the beginning of the meal to stimulate your appetite, and then have a special round of end-of-meal drinks to encourage digestion, the "digestif." The aperitif and digestif serve as bookends to your meal, which of course should include a few glasses of wine. Now this is "health" food that I can get into, and not having encountered any digestive problems that I can recall, clearly a "healthy" alternative!