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Why Running is Good for Business (Travel)
This is a presentation I used as the backdrop for a short internal talk I gave at Paramount in 2022 after a business trip to some of the company’s offices in Europe.
TL;DR: the original presentation where I argued that running/walking/exercising was great for business ⤵
The talk was part of an internal initiative called “Wellness Champs” which is not an official Employee Resources Group at Paramount, but rather a gathering of like-minded employees organized by the Total Rewards (Human Resources) team — great work led by Shaye McCoy!
I was training for the 2023 Life Time Miami Marathon around that time and didn’t want to interrupt my routine because of the business trip, but after I came back home, this idea that running/walking/exercising was good for business kept coming up in conversations with friends and colleagues.
I don’t think I’ve come up with the concept myself, but I argued that these unique travel opportunities were great to:
- Promote team building: movement brings people closer together and sparks creativity (works great with clients too).
- Break the airport-hotel-office cycle: great excuse to sightsee and get to know the region and its people better.
- Help fight jetlag and make you feel more energized (potentially increased productivity).
- Make business travel feel more like a reward rather than a personal sacrifice.
Special thanks to my colleague and friend Emanuele De Capitani for running with me on that warm Italian afternoon and showing me around Milan, local style – grazie!
Feel free to leverage anything you might find useful in the presentation, send me corrections, questions, etc.
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M&A Integration Framework
This was originally posted on my LinkedIn profile, but I’m reposting it here, now that I have a “permanent” home on the web again.
TL;DR: the original 2022 presentation I gave at Paramount ⤵
I’ve been involved in mergers, acquisitions and divestitures most of my career – from my early days at Turner during the doomed AOL-Time Warner merger to Paramount’s recent acquisition of Chilevisión and Fox TeleColombia.
In 2018 I attended INSEAD’s M&As and Corporate Strategy program in Fontainebleau, France where I had the privilege to meet professors Laurence Capron and Erin Meyer and was introduced to “Managing Acquisitions: Creating Value Through Corporate Renewal” by David B. Jemison and Philippe C. Haspeslagh which began to help me answer some of my existential M&A questions:
- Why are we doing this? (acquiring, merging or divesting an asset)
- How does this create value?
- How are we going to transfer these new capabilities?
- Is there a cultural fit?
The attached framework – a mashup of my personal experiences (both good and bad,) formal INSEAD education, Jemison & Haspeslagh and help from colleagues and partners – is my first attempt at creating a pragmatic, repeatable, scalable approach to answering some of these complex questions.
Special thanks to my colleague Maybea Aguilar Peña who made an insightful contribution to the cultural aspect of the framework by introducing me to Cameron & Quinn’s “Competing Values Culture Model” – ¡muchas gracias!
Feel free to leverage anything you might find useful in the framework, send me corrections, questions, etc.
