News from the world of work - there seems to have been a change in thinking over the last week.

Firstly, my team is to get 5 new people to help us cope with the amount of work we have to do. These people are to take on the day-to-day work, freeing my existing guys up to get on with fixing the problems in the system, instead of just constantly fixing the symptoms with rubber bands and elastoplast.

This would be good enough, but it gets better. These five guys are not to come from Mr Happy it has been decreed. This is to make sure that the "wrong message" is not being sent to the guys in my team.

As a final confidence-vote, I was asked if I knew people who could fill this gap. Strangely enough, there are a couple of people I can think of - card-carrying Hockey Team members all of them. The work that I do needs a certain type of person.

I am not arrogant enough to think that all my manic activity last week is what caused this turnaround, although I would like to think that it helped in some way. Regardless, it seems that senior management have paid attention to what is going on in the trenches, and are making the right decision.

I can certainly say that the strategy advice of my ageing friend played a big big part. Sometimes you need to use the club (that's me). Sometimes, it's better to use the rapier (that's him).

Which means that I can stop having this steal cycles from my thinking, and get on with the job in hand. I can keep my guys cohesive instead of having to constantly talk them out of resigning. I really don't see who loses out of this situation at all.

Well, there's Mr Happy I suppose. I'm not sure exactly when this became a personal thing, but it didn't have to be there at all. Mr Happy, and his supporters, were absolutely not prepared for the robustness of the defence - and counter-attack - that was put up over the last couple of weeks. One of the great things about manic depression is if you can harness the mania to focus on something you really, really want and this is exactly what happened last week.

So I really, really want Dakar. A seemingly impossible task, me being a complete underdog. Two weeks ago, I faced the seemingly impossible task of getting the senior management of a huge global bank to change their mind and make a different decision from the Plan. I was up against a much larger opponent - themselves backed by one of the largest IT outsourcing companies in the world - and it looks like we may well have succeeded.

When you believe passionately in something, you have to be prepared to fight to the death for it. Dying in pursuit of something you really believe in is much much less painful than living with yourself because you didn't have the balls to stand up for your beliefs.

Tough conversation with The Missus about November and groats. I'll give you the details later, but The Missus and I are both off to Morocco in November. She is travelling in the support 4x4, with a Dakar-veteran support crew, and I am riding on the bikes with a bunch of guys doing Dakar in 2009. The tips, advice and experience we will both get could not be bought for any sum of money I don't think - there's a lot more to Dakar than just riding a bike.

So now I can concentrate on that, and take my eyes off Mr Happy a little. He, having licked his wounds, will be back - those who fight for the Status Quo always lose in the end - but, for now, there is a real smell of Napalm in the morning.

Smells like Victory.

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