5 April 2016
Le Box de In est empty. J’ai moved tous les emails au Box de Procrastination. Je me feel beaucoup better. Mr Davies and I have had a high-level catch-up telecon, President-to-Chief-Eggsek. I said: only tell me about the really important stuff, where you need my urgent, Presidential input. This confused him, because the really important stuff doesn’t benefit from my input anyway, urgent or not. So instead he told me about some other stuff that doesn’t need my input, and some stuff we are going to talk about at Council tomorrow, and also some stuff that I must make sure we absolutely don’t talk about at Council tomorrow unless I fancy spending the rest of the week at 95 Chancery Lane. Then we got bored, and agreed to finish catching up another time.
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4 April 2016
I av être en France. Eating ze baguette and ze cheese and drinking ze cidre. Brittany is to France as the Wess Curntry is to England: not the most sophisticated of regions, but good at making hallucinogenic beverages out of windfalls. The Bretons have the edge over the Wess Curntry folk, however, in having also learned (a) to make an entire main meal out of a teaspoon of flour by spreading it very, very thinly and calling it a crêpe and (b) to fashion a hundred and one “produits régionaux” out of salt and seaweed. You have to admit it is clever, making things that tourists will pay good money for out of little more than can be scraped up at the tideline, although the occasional splinter of driftwood and a bouquet of marine oil mar the achievement somewhat. Anyway, je suis retournée quelques pounds heavier parce que even though crêpes are spread very thinly you can still eat too many of them. Mais sur le plus side, je suis très bien rested parce qu’il n’y avait pas de Wi-Fi dans ma maison. Donc, il y a now deux cents emails dans mon Box de In. Je spend le entire après-midi avec mon Box de In. Aussi je put quelques emails dans mon Box de Out. Mais je ne send pas ces emails, otherwise people will know que je suis back home. It is interesting to see how email conversations evolve if you ignore them. What begins as an urgent request either peters out in a barrage of “reply to all” messages or gets dealt with by some other suckers who couldn’t resist telling the world they were still working at 11 pm. I will bear this in mind in future email correspondence, and not just while I’m en vacances. There is a lot to be said for accidentally not being there when people need you, and letting them find out that in fact they don’t need you at all. There is also a lot to be said, when you are supposed to be in charge but not really up to the job, for allowing everyone else to have their say first, and then agreeing with the best-expressed and most popular views. In management bollocks, this is referred to as “drawing out a consensus”. Crucially, it prevents you spouting your own stupid view first and subsequently being denounced as a total idiot and/or ethically suspect, especially among patent attorneys, who are genetically programmed to argue with anything that emanates from a position of authority. Perhaps I should write a book of all these gems of management wisdom. Except, I am generally too busy dealing with mon Box de In and fending off denunciations. 23 March 2016
I am giving further thought, offline, to yesterday’s interviews. This is management bollocks for “I am day-dreaming, and the document I have open in front of me is about yesterday’s interviews.” It was humbling to hear from the candidates about how they chair large and diverse boards, drawing out consensus on complex issues, ensuring that everyone feels heard, bringing people onside and on board and on point but not on other people’s nerves. I think of my own futile attempts to get 25 CIPA Council members to agree so much as a set of minutes. And often only 12 of them turn up, although in my defence it is the 12 who think what I’m doing is rubbish, not the 13 who don’t much care either way. This chairing business, I think – maybe it is not for me. Then I remember that I only have to do it twice more (yay!), and that on one of those occasions I am going to do it dressed in nothing more than a tiara and an ermine collar. Oh yes, I forgot to say: I’ve updated the bucket list. 22 March 2016, 3 pm
The interviews are going swimmingly well. Even I can tell that. As I disappear gracefully under the table – or perhaps not so gracefully; it is hard to say from here. The ITMA Pee and I have been asking the questions about getting on with the regulated community. Will you be nice to patent and trade mark attorneys? we ask. Of course, they say. Do you think patent and trade mark attorneys are brilliant? we ask. Yes indeed, they say. I put some ticks in the highly organised table I have prepared beforehand. It is a kind of personal scoring system to determine which of the candidates will be nicest to patent and trade mark attorneys. This is called being Objective. Actually, I am quite proud of myself to have got this far. Most of what I needed to function was on my laptop, and only two-thirds of my laptop is now alive. This means that only two-thirds of me is operational, and two-thirds of very little is hardly enough to run an interview session. 22 March 2016, 4 pm We are on candidate number 3. I am on biscuit number 5. Lunch seems a long time ago. Dinner is not going to happen. The ITMA Pee and I are taking it in turns to ask the questions. Neither of us has yet managed to get the word “blancmange” into the proceedings, but there is still time. 22 March 2016, 6 pm We are on candidate number 5. I am on biscuit number 11 and Red Bull® number 3. Still no one has mentioned blancmange, but one of the candidates confesses to having read my blog so my credibility has been blown out of the water anyway. I may as well go the whole hog and mention trifle with all the trimmings. Outside, the sun is way below the London skyline and everyone in their right mind has gone for a drink. 22 March 2016, 7 pm The last candidate has left and now we are supposed to make a decision. I have no Red Bull® left. I am too tired even for biscuits. They were strong candidates. Except possibly the one who said that the important thing about chairing board meetings is to be well prepared, but had forgotten to be well prepared for the interview. We cannot agree on which of the three best candidates is the bestest. They have all promised to be nice to patent and trade mark attorneys. They have all promised to be nice to the IPReg Board and staff. They have all promised to be nice to the Legal Services Board and the Ministry of Justice. I say: we should have asked them their favourite gin, like I suggested, then I’d have known who was the bestest. The gin question always sorts them out. But we did not ask the gin question. Or the blancmange one. So, having spent a lot of the day asking candidates how they achieve consensus in meetings, we are unable to achieve it for ourselves. I suggest it is time we all went home, particularly me since my home is a long way away. I say, we should sleep on this and think about it some more and then tomorrow we will agree who’s actually the bestest. The others say: no, wait, let’s argue for a bit longer. No really, I say, it is time to go home. Blancmange, says the ITMA Pee. 22 March 2016, 10 am
But first, there is fruit toast to be eaten. One of the few good things about London, in my book, is the availability of fruit toast on every second street corner, and of parks full of benches and pigeons and angry bird noises, in which you can eat your fruit toast just when it is nice and hot-buttered. So I take my hot-buttered fruit toast and sit in the sun, surrounded by traffic jams, and enjoy a brief hiatus before hurling myself into the thrill that is a day full of interviews. 22 March 2016, 9 am
Today I am doing another endurance test. This test, like the one last Thursday, involves getting up at silly o’clock in the morning and not going to bed till gone midnight. In between the getting up and the going to bed I have to travel from deepest Zummerzet to central London, call at the flat I borrow to put the rubbish out, travel to somewhere else in central London and interview five IPReg Chair Hopefuls in quick succession, before travelling all the way back to deepest Zummerzet via a train that is as sleepy, as grubby and generally as bad-tempered as I am. The interviews have to be scheduled around the Hopefuls, because the Hopefuls are busy and important people and are having trouble fitting us into their diaries. This may indicate that they are not quite as Hopeful as we would like. One of them is not free to be interviewed until 6 pm, which means, I suspect, that he wants to watch Pointless first. We have been promised lunch in the middle of the gruelling interview schedule. I do not think lunch on its own will suffice. I have supplied details of my special dietary requirements, including the Red Bull® and the chocolate and the afternoon tea and the gin and tonic and the evening meal and the whisky chaser, but I think they assumed I was being flippant. In fact I was being deadly serious, as they will find out when I disappear gracefully under the table at 3 pm due to insufficient nourishment and an excess of sleepiness. Anyway, we have asked the Hopefuls, or rather the Not-Much-Fussed-Either-Wayfuls, to prepare a ten minute presentation for us about challenges and opportunities in the IP professions. If they come up with any good ideas, we can use them for the Regulatory Sandbox meeting I’m sponsoring. Or in our next Strategic Plan. 21 March 2016, 5 pm
I go to a parents’ evening. This is the type of thing that Good Parents do, apparently, so I do not do it very often. Of course, no one recognises me. This gives me a tactical advantage. By keeping quiet and looking like I know where I’m going (which is exactly what I do at CIPA), I learn a lot about other people’s children, not to mention their teachers’ emotional disorders. I also learn that my own twelve-year-old is extremely good at doing the minimum necessary to get by. It is possible, therefore, that he is not my son at all. Or that I have come to the wrong school. My older children have explained to me that once you become a teenager, your parents are no longer welcome at parents’ evenings. This is also the time when you stop getting school reports, have every other Friday off, become exempt from the uniform rules and can serve detentions online using a smartphone app. This makes life easier for parents, especially the ones who are not Good Parents. It therefore sounds very sensible to me. 21 March 2016, 3 pm
The person chairing the meeting says my questions are rubbish so how about using his instead? I have no problem with this, except I wish he’d told me his ideas in the first place; it would have saved me a lot of thinking. Meanwhile, I have been getting on with many other Important Things. Like, reading up about the scarily talented people we will be interviewing for the IPReg Chair position tomorrow. Like, negotiating over access to recordings of the namby-pamby unconscious bias webinars. Like, trying to reassure people who are cross about the arctic conditions at the EQEs the other week. Like, helping to decide the right price for the new administrators’ course. And finding a venue for our next diversity round table. And liaising with the Yorkshire regional rep about the next happy hour, this being an urgent issue because it is a full four days since the Yorkshire folk last got together for drinks at CIPA’s expense. There are also emails about a launch event for the latest Black Book edition, and CIPA’s official position on Brexit, and a Journal article on the Patent Box Nexus Fraction nightmare, and all manner of other stuff that has left me thoroughly muddled. It seems the CIPA Pee must be everybody’s friend but must teeter perpetually on the brink of being most people’s enemy. When it gets to the point where I am writing emails about a Black Book Nexus Fraction Brexit Interview Launch, under arctic conditions at a venue yet to be confirmed, I know it is time to log off. Perhaps I should have done so three hours ago. |
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