Last week I met Matt Moore visiting from Australia. I didn’t know Matt at all but he introduced himself as a reader of my blog (obviously an endangered species) and we took it from there. He’s a Director of Knowledge Management at Oracle.
We had an excellent time putting the world to rights. A big theme was challenging the mechanistic metaphor of organisations which sets us up to think change is driven/led by hero leaders. How organisations are talked about as nouns as if they are solid fixed things, instead of as verbs, as processes of change. That the notion of “making them change” is possibly misleading. I banged on about the net allowing people to organise around their real passions instead of trying to make them passionate about organsiations. Matt says he doesn’t keep a blog any more. I wish he did; he has lots of interesting thoughts I’d like to link to!
And yesterday Rob Paterson came over to Islington for tea, then beer, then dinner… it was that kind of meeting. We spent a lot of time talking about Borat, and how you could see that film as being highlighting the shadow side of politeness – which the character so ruthlessly exploits. Rob’s been blogging lovely stuff about his trip to England and all the chords it strikes from his upbringing.
