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 writ
e the book, you can listen to the podcast .

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

Whenever I tell people than my mentor was a city not a person, I get funny looks.

From now on, I will be able to use the speech Obama gave last weekend in Prague to prove that I am right.

I was amazed that the US president and his speechwriter understood it so well … that feeling that makes Prague a very special experience:

“For over 1,000 years Prague has set itself apart from any other city or any other place. You have known war and peace. You have seen empires rise and fall. Through it all, the people of Prague have persisted in pursuing their own path and defining their own destiny”.

That’s exactly how it is. I don’t know how it works.

But after you have lived in Prague for a number of years, you get this feeling that, no matter what comes at you, you will always make it.

It is like an aura surrounding you (I don’t know how else to describe it). And you know you will always be able to face any audience or any vicious committee meeting because of this certainty that has come down to you.

Does it happen by osmosis? Do you get it by walking through the streets of the Old Town at night as I loved to do?

I don’t know but I was certainly thrilled to hear Obama call Prague the “golden city which is both ancient and youthful and stands as a living monument to an unconquerable spirit”.