Photo by Ira Ostafiichuk on Unsplash
After a 15 hour Johannesburg to New York flight, I arrived at an extremely busy JFK airport on Saturday 31st August. It took an hour to clear immigration and another fifteen minutes to get to terminal 8 for my connecting flight to Boston on American airlines. With two hours between landing at JFK and departure time for Boston, needless to say, I missed my flight to Boston.
Given how tired I was, I was a little annoyed at missing my flight. It got worse when I discovered that after missing an 08h25 flight, the next flight I could be on was the 12h20 one and I was on standby! The little annoyance had become an irritation. I reminded myself that I always tell my daughters that our atitude to situations like this detemines how we feel about them. With this realisation, and a deep desire to lead by example, even when my daughters were not there, I told myself to ‘behave’ and that was the end of this short episode.
To avoid any chance of missing my 12h20 flight to Boston, I decided to check in very early. I was greeted by a very polite airport official who said “Sir, please take off your jacket, shoes, belt and cap.” I thought, wow, he called me sir, and then I wondered what else was he going to ask me to take off! I was relieved when he said “Step under the machine and come through” instead of “Take off….”
As soon as I got through the check-in, I had one mission in mind. And it was to find a Starbucks! I love Starbucks and after reading Onward by the Chairman and CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, I became a Starbucks fan. I found the Starbucks at terminal 8 and I indulged my love for coffee and reading. Given the amount of pre-reading material for the Harvard Business School AMP, I spent the next few hours, reading A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics, the Nike (A) case study and Analysis for Financial Management. On arrival in Boston, I took a cab to the lovely Sheraton Commander Hotel in Cambridge. This hotel is located adjacent to the site George Washington took command of the Continental Army. It embraces 
Cambridge’s rich culture and history. I found the hotel’s location to be a perfect vantage point from which I could experience the sights and sounds of Cambridge.
My next challenge was to find the famous Harvard Square. It is a world-renowned shopping, dining, cultural and historical destination. Harvard Square is described as “a home and a gathering place for authors, poets, publishers, printers, teachers students and booksellers.”