David in Glasgow
David MacSeidl spent a weekend (as you’ll see, his) at his home turf ahead of his research seminars at the University of Glasgow Adam Smith Business School.
The biggest reveal of his visit though was that him and Prof. Donald MacLean are not only friends, colleagues and occasional co-authors - they’re distant cousins:
In 2014, when Robert MacIntosh, J. Ignacio Canales and Donald MacLean hosted The Strategic Management Society mini-conference on what would now be called Grand Challenges, David insisted that Robert and Donald wore their kilts to the conference dinner - in the magnificence of Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery.
He was particularly interested in my Maclean tartan. It transpired this was because it resembled a fragment held by his family as a mysterious and precious heirloom. The puzzle was how it came into the hands of the Seidl family….
… some of Donald's ancestors had been driven out of Argyll in 1690. Many of them settled in Uig in Lewis. However, what David had discovered through his painstaking research, is that one birlinn (longship) kept going, crossed the ocean, the crew landed in Norway and then travelled through Northern Europe, eventually settling in Bavaria.
One of the few survivors, and an ancestor of Donald himself, met and married a local women of the Seidl family. The locals could neither understand nor pronounce the name Mac Gille Eathain (now Maclean) so his ancestor (and David’s) became known simply as Seidl!