The Czech media have a special place in my heart.

I have been following their evolution ever since I left Prague in the mid-1990s.

That’s why I was delighted to see an article in the weekend magazine of Hospodarske Noviny about children with disabilities… a topic which used to be taboo in Czech society… an ugly hangover from the previous regime and its tacky iconography of proletarian heroes with perfect bodies.

Unfortunately, my delight did not last for very long…

My jaw dropped as soon as I began reading the subheading:”…Jaké to je, když se do normální rodiny narodí někdo nenormální (What happens, when someone not normal is born to a normal family).

I couldn’t believe the language. The fact that it is still being used is a slap in the face of people like my friend Milena Černà, who since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been campaigning for the acceptance of the rights of disabled children and adults.

Milena manages Vybor dobrè vůle, a foundation originally set up by Olga Havlova (Vaclav Havel’s first wife) and has been doing heroic work for the integration of the disadvantaged.

The article I read is a sign that something is moving… but we are clearly not there yet.

May be we should drop the word “normal” altogether…

I can highly recommend “The Four Walls of My Freedom”, a book in which Donna Thomson offers us a new perspective on being human… one that goes beyond “normality”.

Harvey Nichols is the last place on earth where you would expect to run into the conversation you have been trying to avoid for the past 20 years.

But I managed to do just that a few weeks ago.

I was about to bite into a spring roll at a fundraiser organised by my favourite charity when I ran into an American lady.  She was leaving for Prague the next day to attend a conference and… to my horror… she gave me the standard spiel about Westerners bringing democracy to Eastern Europe.

I have heard this a million times before…. I find it not only extremely boring, but also patronising, offensive, colonial… (at this point I always run out of adjectives).

However this encounter got me thinking. Did my work in Prague have an impact on anybody’s life?

As I said before, I feel I learned more from my Czech friends and colleagues than they did from me.
But I would be extremely proud to know that the articles I wrote for the German business press during those years contributed to attract investment to the country and made a place I love so much more prosperous.
Every time I walk through the streets of Prague - which now look so different - I ask myself if I really did. And then one day… something happened that felt like an answer.
Remember how in the old days people would sit in the Prague Metro with long faces and not look at you….
I had this image in my mind when I boarded a train at Vysehrad. I was standing near the doors when I noticed a schoolgirl looking at me. She kept staring as if she knew me and all of a sudden… she gave me this enormous smile.

“China knocks the ego out of you.”

I love this quote by Christine Lu.

Her talk last week was very inspiring. Christine is not only the founder of The China Business Show. She is also involved in a number of exciting internet ventures in China.

Recently she took a group of venture capitalists and internet entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to China to meet their local counterparts. She named the tour Geeks on a Plane.

Although she worked in Shanghai and has travelled many times to China, Christine doesn’t want to be called a “China expert”.

She believes that “the more you deal with China, the humbler you become”. She says that the longer you stay in China, the more you begin to recognise just how huge and diverse the country is.

Christine gets a charge out of those people who spend a couple of years in the country and call themselves China experts. She calls it the “Marco Polo complex”.

I can certainly relate to this phenomenon from my days in Eastern Europe. And something else Christine mentioned made me laugh and took me back to my first months in Prague. She said that she doesn’t do second-tier cities in China because she doesn’t “thrive by carrying around her own toilet paper”.

There was a time in the autumn of 1990, when shops in Prague were out of toilet paper. So… (and here I have a confession to make…) we would go to international hotels…and stock up on toilet paper!

Amazing … how adventures seem to be about the smallest things!

My co-author Yang-May and I talked to podcasting guru Neville Hobson on Friday about the story behind our book.

I was asked how I came up with the original idea behind International Communications Strategy. To answer that, I had to dig quite deep into my memory.

It all happened when I was living in Prague 20 years ago. What they used to call the Golden City was such a great cultural centre before WWII thanks of the different ethnic groups represented there. The war and the madness that followed did away with all that.

I could never understand this terrible loss. When I left Prague in the mid 1990s, I embarked on a quest. I wanted to find a way that would help people from different cultural backgrounds to communicate and bond.

After that came my passion for understanding emerging economies and their communication models.

If you’d like to find out more about how Yang-May and I got to write the book, you can listen to the podcast .

Thanks, Neville. And we hope we’ll get to meet your cat some day…

I believe that if you live long enough in a place, it becomes part of you.

This is why I was really excited to hear about an interesting experiment with citizen journalism in the Czech Republic.

I spent the first half of the 1990s in Prague working as a reporter. What made the job so interesting was not only the historic time (only two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall) but also the stories ordinary people would tell me when I was researching my articles.

Czechs have a unique way to relay facts. A fascinating mixture of magical realism and sobering analysis.

These are ideal components for the new venture launched by PPF Media. The group has set up a network of cafés in a number of Czech towns where people can go to surf the web, drink coffee and chat about local events with journalists who work there. The product is new type of reporting, which mixes the skills of professional journalists with those of the readers.

The network is coordinated by the “Futuroom” based in Prague, where seasoned editors work, adding national and international content to the local stories. The “Futuroom” also serves as a multi-media training centre and has already attracted the support of partners like Google and the World Association of Newspapers.

If I close my eyes and think back of the days when I was working at the English desk of a Czech news agency, I can see myself typing on a keyboard in the early morning in a semi-dark room with the snow silently falling outside.

Were we all working at an experiment? Did we contribute a least a little to the amazing progress that Czech journalism has made in the past 20 years?

I am humbly hoping for the answer to be “yes”….

Like most writers, I get inspired by the people I observe and the stories I hear. Nothing strange there. This is what most writers do.

What spooks me is the way in which I seem to attract the people who tell me these stories.

I was at a social gathering the other day sitting next to a gentleman I had never met before. We were chatting and after a few minutes he began telling me about his childhood in post-war Vienna.

I could not believe my ears. How could he have known about my obsession with what went on in Vienna during that time?

I know this might have been nothing more than civilised pre-theatre chit-chat. But you have to admit…it is a little strange.

The gentleman kept talking and I began seeing him in my mind…I was there… following him through the streets of what looked like an endless repetition of a scene from The Third Man.

This English boy in short pants (were boys still wearing short pants in those days..?) was not afraid of the horrible destruction surrounding him… Every house in ruins contained unlimited potential for adventure (as a young girl, I was insanely drawn to deserted buildings).

The house in the centre of Vienna where the boy lived had a concierge whose husband had been badly traumatised by the war. At night, the poor man would run out and disappear into the night. The wife would run upstairs and beg the boy’s father (“the only can-do person in the building”) to help her look for him.

I could picture some of the horrible memories that were chasing the concierge’s husband though the darkness of gutted Vienna.
The gentleman sitting next to me read my mind: “Everybody had a story in those days…”.

Would I have had the courage to listen to those stories? I know from my years in Czechoslovakia just how difficult it is. You have to be able to marshal strength and compassion from the deepest corners of your character.

And would I have had the courage to write them down? For what purpose? I cannot stand war voyeurism. I would only have done it to help heal memories. But how do you heal memories?

I was back in the foyer of a London theatre…and could not wait for the performance to start….

Photo: thanks to criterioncollection.blogspot.com

When I worked as a journalist, I used to hate press conferences.

All you usually got was the party line. If you wanted real news that would give an edge to your article, you had the corner the person at the end…and sometimes risk to be thrown out of a window.

It happened to me at the press conference of a Czech bank…it was a beautiful summer day in Prague and the CEO and I were standing next to a window. He happened not to like my question.

But watching this video has restored my faith in press conferences. Seeing George Bush dodging the shoe…was real action.

This is what I would call a real press conference.

Have you ever been so fascinated by an expression that you have become totally obsessed by it?

A combination of words has been growing in my brain like an inflated balloon.

I was reading a book by J.M. Coetzee. and came across the expression ‘body of journalism’.

I know it means all the articles a person has written throughout their career/lifetime. But to a writer, it means so much more.

It has something so physical to it.

Are my articles really an extension of my physical body?

Even if we use computers these days, writing is still such a physical act. You sit down in front of your screen and your entire body is concentrated on what is coming out of your mind.

When I worked in Prague, I used to write in the bedroom of my tiny apartment. In the winter, I would wear different layers of clothes to beat the cold my gas heater was too weak to fight. My entire body was struggling to stay warm and produce words.

Or I would write in the enormous news room of the Czech agency. Early in the morning, the darkness would embrace my body like a cocoon that helped me to go into my mind and dig for words.

I had a dream the other night after reading Coetzee.

Someone had given me a present: a silver broach in the shape of a bee. The bee’s body was a fountain pen made of glass, full of velvety blue ink.

It was so Kafkesk.

I was watching ‘Das Leben der Anderen’ (The lives of others) over the weekend.

This story set in former GDR is a masterpiece of German cinema. So powerful that it brought me back to my first years in Czechoslovakia.

The film is permeated by a feeling of fear and lingering mistrust that I can remember from the early 90s in Prague. The Berlin Wall had come down but trust remained a rare commodity.

I remember how I spent innumerable hours drinking Turkish coffee (the only kind you would get in Prague in those days) and talking to people off the record before I could conduct a real interview with them. They needed to figure out who I really was before they could decide whether to trust me or not.

I know this must sound like the most time-consuming form of journalism you’ve ever come across. But those very different times. And it really was the best school if you wanted to learn how to relate to people from another culture.

Watching “Das Leben der Anderen” got me thinking again about the issue of trust.

The problem is that trust means different things to different people. Your relationship with trust as a value depends on the experiences you have had over the years, on the way you have been treated by other people.

My years in Eastern Europe have made me very aware of the traumas societies and groups of individuals go through. And this awareness keeps coming in handy every time I have to conduct seminars in situations connected with corporate restructurings, mergers and other traumatic corporate experiences.

I do believe that learning how to gain trust is an important starting point in cross-cultural communications.

It was a survivor of the Bosnian war who taught me this. It is a lesson I will never forget. I have shared this story with my listeners at the Brand New World Telesummit.

I struggled for years with Slavic languages (Czech in my case) and I can really feel for Tony Henry.

The British opera singer opened the Euro 2008 qualifier (England against Croatia) by singing the Croat national anthem ‘Lijepa Nasa Domovino’ (Our beautiful homeland).

However, instead of singing ‘Mila kuda si planina’ (You know my dear how we love your mountains), he sang ‘Mila kura si planina’ translated as ‘My dear, my penis is a mountain’.

The Croat footballers were grinning of course. And poor Tony Henry is now being blamed by British fans for helping the enemy to relax and win the game!

Slavic languages aren’t easy, Tony. Believe me. I know how you feel.

And so does Jimmy Carter.

On one of his visit to Poland, the former US president was assigned an interpreter who spoke fluent Russian but little Polish. He promptly turned Carter’s ‘I am happy to be back in Poland’ into something a bit too warm even for the Slavic soul: ‘I have great lust for the Polish people’.

On her visits to Prague in the 90s, former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright always made a point of correcting her Czech interpreters (she spoke Czech as a child).

I used to find this a bit extreme, but hey, who can blame her?