11 December 2015, 11.30 am
I am having coffee with my counterpart at the Licensing Executives Society. We exchange notes about what it is like being a Presidentess of an organisation full of volunteers, some of whom were men at the time when being a man was all it took and everything else went without saying. It is an immensely comforting conversation. It turns out we both have the same problem with volunteers, ie that not all of them are Good Volunteers. For example, there are people who volunteer to be on committees and governing bodies but don’t appear to want to do anything except meetings. There are those who volunteer to be on such bodies and don’t even want to do meetings; the thrill of being on a list of members seems sufficient. There are those who volunteer to do things and then never quite get round to it, and those who do get round to it but you wish they hadn’t. And there are those who don’t volunteer to do things but are always happy to criticise someone who does. Not to mention the people who think that doing things is dangerous, full stop, and therefore devote themselves selflessly to the task of ensuring that the doing of things doesn’t happen: these people attend meetings solely to pick holes in proposals and refuse requests and generally to cast a cloud over anything that hasn’t first been documented, spell-checked, risk-assessed, independently verified and stuffed into spreadsheet cells. But we are Presidentesses and we are not easily cowed. We resolve that we will organise some joint training events. We will only tell the Good Volunteers about these events, until, that is, the events fall safely into the category of Things That Have Already Been Done, Sorry rather than Things We Would Like To Do Please. We decide that the joint training events can be about IP exploitation strategies, because all IP professionals should be able to take a strategic approach to the work they do. It is no good these days saying to your client: “Here is an exquisitely crafted patent application,” unless you can also answer the question “Yes but what will it be costing me in ten years’ time?” It is of course risky organising any kind of project with the word “strategy” in its title, so we will have to be careful who we let into our plans.
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