Baghdad Business School by Heyrick Bond Gunning

Author:Heyrick Bond Gunning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eye Books
Published: 2004-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

12 TIME MANAGEMENT

Time is a precious and elusive commodity for senior managers. Efficiency requires an accurate account of every minute of the day and the ability to estimate precisely the length of time needed for each and every task. Proper appreciation of this truth can be epiphanous for even the most successful of managers.

(The Encyclopedia of Current Business Orthodoxy)

I was sitting in Sergei’s Antonov 12 on my way to Mosul and thought that I would try and answer the question I was often asked about the detail of my daily existence. So at risk of sounding a bit like Adrian Mole, I selected a typical day in October that went something like this:

I was woken up at 5.15am by the roar of the generator outside the hotel kicking into life, the aircon wheezing and the lights flicking back on. The generator was a huge diesel engine that belonged to a train before it found itself acting as an irritatingly reliable alarm clock. I got up in the hope that I would be able to get some emailing done but unsurprisingly the satellite was playing up. BBC World became a reliable second option and I caught a repeat of a program about the world’s greatest leaders with Mo Mowlem extolling the virtues of Winston Churchill.

By about 6.15am Sergei and the rest of the crew had eaten a boiled egg (chilled) or ‘omlette’ (fried egg) and eight of us then squeezed into the jeep and set off for the airport. The airport road was known as bomb or sniper alley but I found that the baddies liked a lie in, so the early mornings were incident free. On the way down, we’d drive past a few tired looking GIs lounging around on their tanks and some Iraqi policemen who were loitering around under a bridge which had been the location for previous attacks. Believe it or not there was a slight nip in the air. Daytime temperatures had only been reaching about 38 degrees.

On arrival at the airport there was the usual queue of trucks, their drivers and other traders drinking tea, praying or just watching the world go by whilst waiting to get in past the soldiers. We met up with our trucks and Iraqis and then escorted them through the checkpoint. This saved them a two hour wait as TCNs (third country nationals) had major difficulties getting through check points. The pilots were then dropped off at their Antonov where they began their routine safety checks - a quick kick of the tyres and a stroll around the plane to ensure that all the holes and leaks were present and correct prior to it being loaded. In the meantime I attempted to get onto the internet to see what the flight schedule was for the day but the CIA were up early and the signal was blocked. The CIA had started to use the same frequency as the DHL satellite, so we needed to buy another one if we wanted email access.

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