Facebook is an odd space.  I’m learning new ways of communicating and new definitions of old words.  Such as “friend”.  I have a friend on Facebook who was never a friend in the usual sense, we were students in the same engineering school 1967 and haven’t seen each other since.

Lorraine, another Facebook friend, definitely does fit the usual definition.  I was her boss for quite a while, at Cawthron Institute where she rose from a lab technician to manager of an analytical department of almost 100 people.  She was superb, responsible for creating a customer driven culture that differentiated us from nearly all of our competitors.  I watched her leadership skills and network grow as she joined Toastmasters, the Chamber of Commerce (where she became president) and various professional bodies.  Then she was gone!  She had fallen in love with a Spanish sailor (a sailmaker for one of the America’s Cup challengers), married him and moved to Valencia. What a disaster! (for Cawthron)

But not for Lorraine, who has a new and exciting life.  She is now media correspondent, international consultant and sailmaker’s assistant and has started a PhD in environmental management at an Australian (?) university.  She is my insider for the 2010 America’s Cup Deed of Gift challenge, posting regular reports from Valencia.  See this one, for example, on the Sailing World website.

Isn’t that a romantic story?