A strong sense of disengagement prevailed on the ninetilfive front today which started with a discussion with John who is notionally my boss. We made a little progress when I got him to understand that I know something about some of the management challenges he faces - not with me - but with getting some attitude changes amongst the team of people who apparentlty better fitted for Ms H's new world than I. Anyway it was not the most motivating of experiences. This wasn't helped by the realisation that my Plan A seems to be swamped some balls-aching bureaucracy.

The perspective shifted in the evening - Vita and I went to a private view of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition courtesy of a leading consultancy firm. We were chatting politely with their autorep when Alan suddenly appeared. He is the newly appointed chairman of the board of the firm that is on my route 1 - Graham's boss.

I introduced Vita to him and he introduced his wife and the conversation went very well indeed. The combination of art&auto enabled me to launch into the Cz experience as a great place to do both. The issue of educating "finished" engineers is high on Alan's agenda. A definite and much needed piece of good fortune.

Also a reason to get a decent quality two page report on Cz down on paper for Alan and Graham. Actually I have already done OK with Graham with my e-ms from last week on how to approach the Vice Chancellor of Skoda Auto College via her research on supply chain management.

A few moments later we bumped into Dan - the man who made his name explaining lean to the western world. He was with his daughter too who is studying print-making as a postgraduate at Camberwell school of art. Dan and I haven't always seen eye to eye in the last year but the conversation flowed OK - I was able to be genuinely interested in his daughter's career and the book he is just finishing off on the nature of value (especially in value stream analysis).

Vita and I really enjoyed drifting round the exhibition. Lots of Peter Blake including a small portrait of Ian Drury, the Stanley Road cover and a large Ophelia. A whole room of Allen Jones who seems to have come out from under a cloud of political incorrectness. I thought you could see how mostly the UK stood taller in sculpture than painting on the world scale. I loved the small Richard Long - very conceptual - short phrases about walking peaks and rivers in Oregon - but very poetic too. V liked a large water sculpture which exploited the changing impact of water flow on the reflective properties of a metal surface.

The backing track was mostly Blue Note classics - Herbie Hancock's Watermelon Man, Horace Silver's Song For My Father. We played the latter at the White Hart the week Steve's father died.

Towards the end we started a talk with a woman from the host's executive search side. I gave her one of my cards before we drifted into a conversation about historical features of suburban Surrey. You never know.

Vita was well behaved and just had one glass of champagne. I said that one had to be careful at these events where the stuff just flowed like water. She said she could do that as she never paid for her drinks anyway. I tried to explain that in a good year there would be one of two of these events where you could float into a bygone age and spend a few hours in some kind of nether world of sybaritic fantasy.

When we had had enough art food and drink we floated down Picadilly to see if Tower Records was open. Vita chose the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. I got the last Miles-Gil Evans collaboration and a Blue Note of Wayne Shorter and pno bass and drms from one incarnation of the great Trane 4tet. In fact those two together cost less than the Chillis. I have the WS on now and he sounds a lot like his mentor - I think it must be from the first half of the 60s.

We tried to find some Frank Sinatra but didnt manage it and gave up. Vita explained that she liked the songs that he chose. There is a theory that standards are songs which have been recorded by either or both FS or Miles.