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This weekend was spent back in Montpellier, catching up with friends. On Saturday morning I visited the Marché des Arceaux with Ed Ward (read his Montpellier blog here).

With up to 80 local farmers and producers turning up each week, this is Montpellier’s premier source of fresh food in Montpellier – always worth a stop if you’re in town on a Saturday or a Tuesday!

Well, I’ve arrived in Paris, and am coping with a 10 degree difference in daytime temperature (17C in Paris, 27C in Montpellier). Grey skies and rain are things that I really haven’t seen for 9 months. But overall, it’s going well, even if I haven’t been north of the Seine yet.

It’s good to know that reasonable price food and veg is still available, even here in Paris. I ran down to the marché Villemain (Wednesdays and Sundays on rue d’Alésia in the 14th arrondissement) and picked up the following for EUR4.70:

Red and green peppers, courgettes, muscat grapes, onions and mushrooms, all origine française according to the blackboards. The market can’t compete with the Marché des Arceaux in Montpellier, where you can buy direct from the producers, and one gets the impression that Parisian markets are a little more insulated from seasonality, but at least the marchands were all friendly. I just wish there had been a cheese stall – I could have done with a nice slice of cantal for sandwiches and dessert.

I’m also discovering some unique joys of apartment-hunting in Paris. This afternoon I arrived a little early at a property I was looking at. Hanging around outside, I noticed every few minutes a tourist would come past and take a photo of a rather run-down and graffiti-covered building across the street.

Eventually, the estate agent zoomed up on his scooter (it’s Paris, you really think he’d arrive by car?) and parked on the pavement. He pointed across the road at the colourful wall. “See that place? Don’t worry monsieur, it’s not a squat. It’s just Serge Gainsbourg’s house.”

Bienvenue à Paris.

It’s been an interesting few months to be a student at business school.  Our lecturers have been describing the recent series of bank collapses, credit tightening and government-funded bailouts as “unprecedented”.  Certainly none of them have seen anything like it in their lifetime.

Next year, half of the textbooks will  have to be rewritten. A lot of the companies used in their case studies have, quite literally, disappeared.

There’s been a lot of talk about whether business schools are to blame for the current crisis. At Kellogg, Wharton and INSEAD, future business leaders are taught powerful strategic and financial tools that may drive progress and prosperity for large numbers of people. But there is little instruction in the ethical or spiritual roots needed to wield these knowledge and skill with prudence and humanity.

The school I’m attending isn’t quite as high-powered as Harvard or HEC. But it still receives 1200 applications a year for 90 places on its MBA programe.  People are willing to pay large amounts of money for the skills and reputation an MBA can bring – whether their goal is personal enrichment, professional fulfilment or a desire to help society function better. I think for most of my classmates, our motivations are a  genuine mixture of all these factors.

Sao Paulo Stock Market. Image by rednuht

There is a danger however that business schools, (by their very nature of being “schools”), can turn management into a hard science – providing templates, techniques and tactics that forget that business is a very human enterprise. The apparently  immutable rules of Capitalism seem not to recognise that at the centre of the whole abstract system is the weakest link – Us. Humble humans with limited intellects driven by Greed and Fear, and perhaps occasionally by Compassion.

NPR’s Speaking of Faith is running a series of programmes called Repossessing Virtue, examining spiritual and ethical questions raised by the current economic downturn.  In this week’s show, an interview with Quaker educator and  writer Parker Palmer, the interviewer Krista Tippett puts her finger on what is so easily forgotten in the rush for self-enrichment.

- Krista Tippett

I finished with business school late next year. I hope that I and my classmates will remember that while business, industry and commerce can (and must) be a powerful force for good in the world, we must be careful not forget our own humility and frailty.