I took my Audi car in to have its panoramic sunshine roof serviced this week. My local Audi garage (unlike other makes in my experience) tries to give you an excellent alternative as a courtesy car.

Instead of a modest or older car I was allocated an Audi A5 Convertible with a current year registration and very few miles on the clock. This is a great way to retain customers and build up loyalty as well as allowing customers to try new cars.

And it was a wonderful experience to drive around with the car on a sunny day taking in the open road and the open air from a completely different driving perspective.

Sure a convertible does not look so good a proposition in the winter and may make taking the dog for his walk more challenging - though I do have this image of our (large) dog sitting in the back seat with his ears flying out enjoying the ride.

However driving a convertible in the summer is great fun. And by analogy our professional lives should not all be about weary commuting on overcrowded trains and tedious unnecessary meetings or long email chains. It's exciting to be a consultant or a lawyer in these changing times and we should bring a sense of enjoyment to our work.

So my thought for the end of July is "Life has more possibilities in a convertible". Approached in the right way work can and should have an element of fun as well as its more serious side.

Everything in the office is changing. Those of us who have been around and seen the prior evolution of working practices can perhaps appreciate this, but as working professionals we still need to understand and react to these continuing developments.

We have in a relatively short space of time seen some of the greatest changes in offices in history. Telexes have been replaced by fax machines and they in turn have given way to the ubiquitous email which is being challenged or at least supplemented by instant messaging. Fibre optics and PC's and the Internet mean we can work anywhere and at any time.

Every day, herd like, over half a million people commute into the city of London. Over 3 million people in the UK spend more than two hours travelling to work On average we use up a year of our lives getting to offices.  But we don't have to for the most part and the next generation brought up with smart phones won't want to.

Everything is delivered to them as a web link or an app on their phones. In 2009 worldwide mobile app downloads amounted to around 2.52 billion but are expected to reach 268.69 billion in 2017.

This "app generation" is not going to be content with the existing way of office life. They will want and demand flexibility and will not accept traveling for three hours a day on a non air conditioned, overcrowded  train to sit at a desk in an office in the city.

Another office revolution is on the way. Because technology means you can work at home or in coffee shops offices have to be more attractive. I read that Google's offices in Switzerland have an aquarium, a massage room and a slide to deliver engineers to the canteen. In LinkedIn's headquarters in California there is a music room with guitars, drums and keyboards. Deloitte has an office in Amsterdam where there is an empty room on every floor for employees to put what they wanted - a lot go for table football.

Roll on the office and working practices of the future - I'll take flexible working, music rooms and table football over commuting, crummy coffee machines and tea trolleys (remember those!) any day.

There are many qualities required to be a successful professional person and to make your way in a challenging and ever changing business environment.

Recruiting trainees in one of the law firms I worked in we took the time to identify some of these attributes. A good mind and education were almost a given. We then looked for articulate but well rounded individuals who were intellectually able but also emotionally stable.

We also wanted people who would fit in; if in doubt our ultimate test (in the days before open plan offices - remember those?) was "could you share a room with the person concerned for six months". This was amazingly effective in helping us make our minds up.

However over recent years I have come to consider that there is another attribute which is absolutely necessary and a huge asset, and is not often recognised as such.  

This is resilience, the ability to encounter a set back and not only to bounce back but even to learn from the situation and turn it into a positive. Not everything in professional life is plain sailing and it is inevitable there will be highs and lows.

As it says above the entrance to Wimbledon's Centre Court in Rudyard Kipling's immortal words "If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same."

This week I was speaking to an experienced lawyer on the subject of clients asking for solutions to seemingly impossible intractable legal issues.

How, for example, to terminate a contract when there are no rights to do so or to claimer a loss when the contract concerned seems to exclude the ability to do so.

As a first reaction the immediate answer is "sorry thanks for asking but there is no way to do this". However before going back and reducing your client's faith in your abilities as some kind of miracle worker it is always worth stopping and trying to look at the problem in a different way.

I hate the expression "thinking out of the box" but in this situation that is exactly what is called for. Instead of reading just the clauses that are obviously applicable look at the rest of the contract. Sometimes the boilerplate clauses and detailed schedules can contain surprisingly helpful provisions if looked at in the right way.

And maybe just maybe the parties have ceased to work under the contract at all and have created some collateral way of operating that isn't governed by the contract or have by their conduct or some unintended exchange of emails changed the contract.

So before throwing in the towel as a professional it's always worth seeing if there is a way of looking at the problem from a different angle or perspective and coming up with a creative solution which provides at least a reasonable argument that may enable a negotiated resolution from a position of strength rather than apparent weakness.

I was privileged to attend my youngest son's graduation this week. The ceremony was held in the spectacular setting of Durham Cathedral which is part of a World Heritage site in the centre of Durham.

The introductory speech was by the Vice Chancellor who as well as setting the scene and welcoming the graduands and their guests said what was for me one of the most telling things I have heard in this week of political and economic turmoil.

He was talking about Durham being an international centre for study and learning and as part of this said "we are global citizens" and are all a part of "the global community".

We have heard so much in the past few days about national and regional interests whereas really as individuals and as businesses we are like it or not part of a global world with global opportunities and challenges.

Bill Clinton said "Let's create an integrated global community where we have shared benefits and responsibilities, and we don't fight because of our differences." 

This for me matters more and is of far greater importance than some regional issues. We live in an interconnected "world platform" created by a continuing explosion of technologies as Thomas Friedman explains so clearly in the World is Flat.

We should in my view recognise in our work and private lives that we are truly global citizens whatever nationality appears on our passports.