(PARIS, FRA) Clearly I don’t have enough free time on my hands that I should spend any time thinking of this, but since this particular trip is completely subsumed by everything intranet (on behalf of clients and conferences), here is a randomly generated metaphor that springs to mind as I sit in a brasserie downing a quick and unremarkable verre de Merlot before my harried return to London on the Eurostar….

Paris is like a corporate intranet:

• Large and sprawling;
• Busy and bewildering;
• Noisy and vibrant;
• Culturally rich;
• Confusing and inconsistent navigation schemas (signs);
• Highly political; and
• Its citizens are highly demanding and passionate with extraordinarily diverse needs and interests.

There really is no other city like Paris (of course, Nice has always struck me as just a smaller, richer, sunnier version…) but the same could be said of some of the other great cities I’ve spent time in the past week: New York, London and Vancouver.

Landmark spectacles that Paris has that should be present on the average intranet:

• Fine museums (detailed historical and photographical archives);
• Large pointy towers that serve no particular purpose but to attract flocks of cash wielding people;
• Brasseries avec Kronenburg et Bordeaux;
• Sprawling artistic cemeteries with rotting, famous musicians, poets and actors; and
• A massively ornate, excessively expensive shrine to a formerly disgraced megalomaniac and war mongering dictator.

Oh wait, actually the intranet could do without the last two… but the Bordeaux would be nice.