Monthly Archives: October 2004

What I've Been Doing

Lloyds TSB New Web Site – uh oh.

I bank with Lloyds TSB – both as a personal customer and as a business customer. I’m also a Mozilla user. One of the big reasons for me switching to Mozilla is that I believe it’s more secure than that Microsoft thing and particularly when dealing with my bank over the interwebnet, security is important to me.

They’ve just changed their website. When I went in this morning it says, in a page entitled “Lloyds TSB You First – Browser compatability” (my bold):

“Welcome to Lloyds TSB

Sorry, but at the moment our site does not fully support your browser. This may mean that some pages within the site may not display correctly.

We are working towards ensuring that most up to date browsers are supported in the near future.

This will not affect your ability to log on to Internet banking, and you can continue to browse most areas of the site. Click here to continue through to the homepage.

We’ve revamped the entire site and added new tools and calculators – making it even easier for you to make the most of your money.”

but not to get at it – when I clicked on Business Banking, I had a long wait and then a login page into which I put my details then an error and an 0845 number to call, if this problem persists. For me, this problem doesn’t need to persist for me to call. But first I thought I’d have a go with IE – got as far as handing over my memorable details and then 404.

Danny, the friendly and helpful chap on the Glasgow Helpdesk told me this was because the server was down and that they are working on it and please come back in an hour.

I will, but I’m blogging it first.

I then asked Danny if he could point me in the right direction for complaining about the browser compatability problem. He took a while to check with his supervisor about Mozillo (sic) and then came back to me to say that he would pass my comments on to the “Concerns Team” and that they would call me, but I might not get a call for up to 5 working days. I could not surpress my mirth – I’m sorry I giggled.

Sooo…. what do you think the rest of my day is going on? That’s right, my friends, generating enough revenue to avoid going into my overdraft this month so that I can close this account and find someone else who really puts me first.

What I've Been Doing

Sales, sales and more sales

Sat and listened to the rock-and-roll sales training spectacular that is Mike Southon‘s Sales on a Beermat. Well worth the time and effort to get to Ludgate Circus for 08:45. Great fun and extremely useful – if you have to do sales and you haven’t had this experience then get onto ecademy and do it, as soon as you can.

Luckily, I already had a coffee booked in with my favourite customer, Stuart Dickenson of DfES. The time in Victoria St *$s flew by, catching up on how the rest of the 5-year-strategy launch went and what’s going on now.

On the way back I jumped off the bus in Trafalgar Sq and walked up to the office – snapping for the photoblog as I went.

What I think

Perfect Path Creed Redux

Thinking about elevator pitches this morning – of which more later.

OK – I sell knowledge management consulting. That means I do workshops, awaydays, mentoring, interim management, public speaking and some poor clients occasionally commission me to write them a report.

But what differentiates me from other KM consultants who do those things? Well I am a bit different, personally – I don’t know how to describe it but you get a flavour of that from reading what I write here. And I think a bit differently (I swing wildly along the techno-fetishist fluffy bunny spectrum).

I also mainly help public sector clients – and the things they need are sometimes very different from commercial folk (though often frighteningly similar).

The creed is getting refined and this is how I wrote it today as the elevator doors squeak to a close behind me:

I believe that much of the pain we feel as managers in modern organisations comes from trying to apply management thinking and methods that are 100 years out of date and which were developed to solve a very different set of problems.

My understanding is that nobody has worked out a one-size-fits-all set of techniques for managing people in knowledge-based organisations and that it’s possible (probable?) that no such o-s-f-a set exists.

What I do is help people work out what are the right techniques for them and their colleagues to use today and to see how they can really use them for organisational benefit – however they may perceive that.

My experience has been that this usually requires them to find ways of being comfortable with their own creativity, and to nurture the creativity of others around them, while at the same time coming to feel at home with technology that is evolving very very quickly.

“ding”

What I've Been Doing

interactiveknowhow

A sunny trip on the No 19 to Upper Street to meet with Jemima Gibbons of Interactive KnowHow (or however it is, or isn’t capitalised). We sat and chatted in Tinderbox, which has a weird retro-modern feel with natural (bright day in London in October)light at the back from skylights.

We chatted about workshops, conversation spaces, training and awayday styles, the difficulty of making money from ideas and the greying of copyright (interestingly after the Creative Commons session earlier) and intellectual property rights. We also strayed into nurturing personal creativity (for business types) and the future of broadcasting – the effect that lowering of barriers to entry might have. V pleasant.

What I've Been Doing

Creative Commons UK-style

Just back from the “launch” (well a great opportunity to listen to Larry Lessig in the flesh for an hour anyway) of Creative Commons licences for the UK at UCL. Thanks to Louise for publicising the event.

Interesting to hear the various reactions to Remix Culture and what to do about it.

Useful fact: The licences will be released on the website for use on 1st November 2004, but in the meantime feel free to comment and contribute however you can.

Most persuasive argument: actually it was when asked what was the most persuasive argument. Larry said “People aren’t persuaded by arguments. They’re persuaded by examples.” So go give examples.

Biggest Laugh: the atmo lip-synch of George & Tony – when Tony starts singing.