My multifaceted week: the life of a governance researcher

Please excuse my silence over the last ten days or so. I have been concentrating on several important research tasks and some family matters, and this has precluded me writing any musings. To give you an idea, here's a list of some of my activities from the last week:

• Prepared for and observed the February meeting of the Company Alpha(*) board, to collect more research data.
• Prepared for the next observation of the Company Beta board, to occur in a few days' time. 
• Attended a PhD forum, a new initiative run by Massey University School of Management to bring its doctoral candidates together from the three campuses for support, encouragement and technical assistance with the process of research.
• Reviewed feedback provided by my supervisors, of the first substantive draft of the research methodology chapter that I sent them a couple of weeks ago.
• Continued the refinement process of the methodology chapter, ahead of reforming it into a standalone paper suitable for submission to the BAM conference.
• Hosted guests visiting from Belgium. Our daughter's host parents from her twelve-month student exchange to Flanders are on holiday in New Zealand at present.
• Drove our daughter and her gear to Massey University (90-100 minutes drive north of our home), to start her tertiary career. (She's enrolled in the Business Studies programme, and will be living on-campus in one of the hostels.)

I'm hoping things will settle down a little next week, so I can finalise the BAM paper; spend some more time on data analysis; start thinking about the slidedeck for my presentation to the International Conference on Management, Leadership and Governance in Boston, Mass. on 20–21 March; and, resume normal transmission on Musings. 

(*) Companies Alpha and Beta are the two companies who have provided me with access to observe their boards in action and collect governance data. Both are quasi-public, high-growth organisations of substance domiciled in New Zealand. Anonymity is a condition of research so all other information that may enable the companies to be identified is withheld.