Comments

Tom:

Walking is my #1 test of a city as well.I'll add Santiago to my list!

Posted by Scott Segal at October 3, 2005 9:43 AM

I love Santiago, Chile and Chileans...lived there for 5 years. But air quality is a major problem, particularly in the winter months, and walkers and runners beware. More pressure needs to be put for efforts to move to cleaner fleets and fuels, and pavement of dirt roads on the city's periphery. Having said that, there are fewer cityscapes more spectacular than Santiago after a rain storm clears the air and leaves the Andes resplendent with snow.

Posted by Ramiro at October 3, 2005 10:53 AM

Walking or jogging is fabulous for the physical and mental well being of all of us. Isn't it just fabulous if you can enjoy the scenery too? I just love the mutual acknowledgements to and from fellow walkers and joggers. Just a smile or one word - that is enough to make you feel like you belong to a community somehow. There is much to learn there methinks. Creativity is getting to me now .... Maybe we should hold meetings while walking and jogging ... come to think of it that is what we do isn't it when we walk or jog with someone else? Maybe we are on to something here - the new world of meetings - don't know about delivering Powerpoint Presentations whilst jogging though. I must go and have a lie down, that is enough creative thought for one day :-)

Posted by Trevor Gay at October 3, 2005 11:39 AM

Tom:

We have the honor to receive your visit here in Santiago of Chile.

I love Santiago, it is my actual place and I really think that it is a very good place to do business.

Today I couldn't assist to your event. It was too expensive to mee. Anyway, I check your slices and actually your free pdf (project 05) And I firmly beleave that you are going add new ideas that could remove a little bit more the actual cinism of our chilean managers. I also think that we need to develop more our design as a real competitive base of our international business grow (the base of the chilean economic development model).

Now I'm triying to implement my PSF (about knowledge management and supply chain management consulting). This dream began with your book "The Brand You 50" this book inspired myself to do it.

By by,

Juan Felipe

Posted by Juan Felipe Espinosa Cristià at October 3, 2005 5:40 PM

It's great to have like minded people on the subject of walking. During my consultancy days I always rated a city on whether I could walk or use easy public transport from the Hotel to the office.

Posted by PaulH at October 4, 2005 2:23 AM

Hey Paul - great to hear from you again. How about we widen this discussion (if Tom doesn't mind of course) to healthy lifestyle issues. This is what I wrote today on my own Blog after hearing the latest research about excercise and life expectancy. Any thoughts?

Exercise and Live Longer?

In the news today is research from Sweden suggesting exercise in middle age significantly reduces the chances of people suffering dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. The study also suggests exercise prevents high blood pressure and the reduced likelihood of Diabetes.

We all know it makes sense to keep physically fit throughout our lives.

Both Annie and I were smokers until early 2004. We decided to make a big effort to keep fit and do regular exercise. The money we spent on cigarettes was far in excess of our combined monthly subscriptions fees for our gym.

Of course there is never an absolute guarantee of long life and all we can do is to work to improve the odds of living a long and relatively healthy life. We both feel exercise has now become such an integral part of our lives – without being obsessive about it – that we now cannot imagine a week going by when we do not visit our gym at least twice as well as running 5 km at least twice a week.

Unless you are blind or in denial, you can see an increasing incidence of obesity in our population, particularly among the younger generation. You rarely see very old people who are obese or smokers – my own, perhaps cynical view, is that the obese and the smokers have already died!

It surely makes sense to place more emphasis on promoting exercise to our young people to prevent problems that otherwise await them in middle and older age.

Yes it may sound boring and yes it may sound a little bit like ‘nanny state’ but the great news is that exercise can be fun; something you look forward to; and something you miss when you do not do it. Everyone of course has an individual choice about this and the freedom to make choices is something I advocate strongly and defend strongly.

We have made a conscious decision to work to improve the odds.

Posted by Trevor Gay at October 4, 2005 5:01 AM

Trevor - lets take it up a notch and go all the way to the organic lifestyle - with plenty of cleansing diet perks thrown in for variety. Vigorous exercise, colonics, hot baths, cleansing herbs-foods-supplements - makes sense to me to rid our divine bodies of decades of toxins. Example - organic meat has no additives, whereas regular meat grows 5 times as fast due to estrogen based additives - fatten up cattle and humans!

Dr. T - I agree on the power walk lifestyle [may want to try the Nike Shox TL3 $150 shoes] - I've been moderate running [20-30 miles/week] since falling in love with it in the early '80's Oregon state running craze. Love viewing new cities and sites while on the early morning run - 1st time in Manhattan I ran for 2.5 hours somehow due to the high energy of that incredible place perhaps ...

Posted by Sean at October 4, 2005 9:15 AM