Atlanta

Several weeks have gone by since my last blog, in the mean time I have made several trips to Atlanta and 1 to Los Angeles in the US. With the project team we have conducted many interviews with the three NGO’s that participate in SUSTAIN GP.

Based on the interviews and a lot of datafiles we had a mid-point review in Atlanta with the whole team. Here we discussed the outcome of all the interviews and determined the way forward for the second phase. This second phase was called the Analysis phase. Together with the consultants from Accenture Development Partners (ADP) and people from UPS, TNT and Georgia Tech University we identified the quick-wins and made a final report. I was deeply impressed by the powerpoint skills of our consultants within the team, something we can learn a lot from. They told me that to become a consultant with ADP you start with a course Powerpoint.

Sofar the business side of things. In between all the work we did I found some time to walk around the City of Atlanta. I found out that there is basically one main street in the whole of Atlanta, this street is called Peachtree Street. There is also a road called West Peachtree Street and indeed this street is located WEST of Peachtree Street. Then you have a large shopping centre in a big skyscraper called: “Peachtree Centre”. I spent considerable time in finding peach tree’s, assuming there must be a relation between the naming of the streets and buildings and the presence of at least one peach tree in the whole city. To my disappointment I haven’t found one. Looking for more background to this I ended up on Wikipedia and learned there are 71 streets with a variant of Peachtree in their name and also learned that “Peach” might be related to “Pitch” or “Pine”. Unfortunately I can’t remember seeing Pine-trees either. I did see a lot of Squirrels by the way and intend to do some more research on the relation between Pine trees and squirrels in the near future.

I have made some photo’s of Atlanta, including the headoffices of Coca Cola, Bank of America and AT&T and I am sure somewhere you will see a glimpse of Peachtree Street somewhere.