14 July 2015
The Onssek, Mr Mercer, picks me up from Oxford station and we go for a drive round the Oxford Science Park. Of course we are not supposed to be driving round the park, we are supposed to be going to meetings on it. But we are not getting on very well with Mr Mercer’s satnav. It is of Germanic construction and it is rather dictatorial. Disobedience is not an option. Dithering gets short shrift. When we are ten minutes late we finally take charge of our own destinies, and ring up the folk we are meant to be visiting. Only to find that we are in fact right outside their front door. People should label their front doors better. 15 July 2015, 7 pm Yesterday and today, the Onssek and I have visited CIPA members in six different firms. Some of them say they do not need CIPA. Some of them say they do need CIPA, but CIPA needs to get its finger out, for instance over being too much in London or not being rude enough to IPReg, or not making sure that the whole wide world understands how brilliant chartered patent attorneys are. Most people, though, are just content to let CIPA get on with Good Stuff behind the scenes. They do not really know what this Good Stuff is; they are just happy someone else is doing it. They understand vaguely that the Good Stuff is related to what Mr Lampert writes about in his whizzy e-newsletter and Mr Davies writes about in the Journal. They are not sure it is particularly related to me, though they are prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt because I’ve made the effort to venture into the wilderness to visit them, and no one in the history of the Institute has done that before. Personally, I am unconvinced that Oxfordshire is a wilderness. The journey from here to London is not much longer than the journey from my home in the Wess Curntry to the nearest place in the Wess Curntry where there is an actual functioning cash point. I am staying the night with friends in the wilderness in Berkshire. I am not convinced that Berkshire is a wilderness either, although the inhabitants of the village in question are doing their best to pretend it is, by installing chickens and pigs and duck ponds. I think it is cheating to install chickens and pigs and duck ponds without also installing farmers and track’urs and kerb-to-kerb cow pats. And the charade breaks down completely when the Waitrose® home delivery van turns up with emergency supplies of baby shallots to eat with your recently-installed chickens. My friends are impressed by the fact that I am a President of something. They ask if I have a Presidential escort and should they have rolled out the red carpet for me? I say, really, it’s not that big a deal. I might be a big fish, I say, but in a very, very small pond. Kind of like that duck pond over there, next to the pigs and the Waitrose van.
0 Comments
10 July 2015, 10 am
I am on the phone to the UK’s IP attaché in China. An IP attaché is a person, not an item of luggage, and in this case he is the fantastic Mr Tom Duke, so I am more than happy to spend my morning talking to him about how the IPO and CIPA can work together to strengthen Anglo-Chinese relations. I say, We must make sure it is the Brits who get the Chinese-originating EPC work, not the Germans. Mr Duke says Absolutely, but there are certain diplomatic protocols and I am here to make sure we don’t end up going to war again. He tells me and some other CIPA folk about a trade delegation that is going to China next week. Apparently I am to write a letter to my counterpart over there, ie to the Pee of the Chinese equivalent of CIPA. But someone else is going to write the letter for me because it is easy to offend people from other countries when you write like I do. Mr Duke does not want to take any risks. 10 July 2015, 12.30 pm Right now, I am supposed to be at a lunch for the President of the IP Federation. But I have bottled out of travelling to London. The UK’s rail network, which we have established is not run by either red people or green people, has organised a strike in order to reduce its usual services by half. Since the trains normally have only half the number of seats for the people who want to sit on them, I figure that if there are only half the number of trains, that’s, er, well, a lot fewer seats to go round. Even for a lunch that has a reputation for being a thumping good event and one that you would not normally want to miss for the world, there are some types of commute I would rather not indulge in. On the plus side, because I am at home I get to watch Andy Murray, live, in yet another of his Wimbledon triumphs. Which is also only half what I would have liked it to be. 9 July 2015
At the day job, we have some coaching in time and stress management. I ask the coach what I should do about my exploding inbox. He tells us he knows someone whose approach to this is simply to delete everything. This has its attractions. But I suspect you would only get away with it for so long. After that, people would assume you’d been fired. No, wait, that might be a Good Thing anyway… We also have some coaching in conflict management, by which I mean conflict with other human beings and not with your senior partner’s opposition files. I learn that people are either red, yellow, green or blue. This is not something I had noticed before so I am obviously not very observant, and that may be why I am such a rubbish manager. Red people are aggressive and task-orientated and often their tasks are quite ambitious, like, for example, taking over the world. Blue people are task-orientated but more passive; they would quite like to take over the world but they don’t mind if someone else does it for them, so long as it is done to the detailed, careful plans they made beforehand. Yellows are aggressive but they care more about people than tasks. They must spend a lot of their time exasperated, because there is nothing more certain than the fact that if you are trying to get on with something – taking over the world, say – Other People will make it awkward for you. Finally, greens are passive and people-orientated. They are happy for other people to take over the world, and then they will go for a drink to celebrate it, or they might go for a drink anyway, just in case. Green people and red people wind each other up enormously, because the greens don’t mind who runs the world so long as everyone is happy, and the reds don’t care whether anyone is happy they just want the world to run efficiently. Clearly the UK’s rail networks are not run by either reds or greens. 8 July 2015
I listen to a webcast about the Bye-laws. At CIPA HQ, the Bye-laws rewrite has been a major issue over the last twelve months. It appears, however, that ordinary Institute members are not quite so interested. Bye-laws are about quorums and casting votes, they think, and casual vacancies and annual general meetings and paperwork and official seals and blah blah blah. People are just fundamentally not very excited about this sort of stuff. The webcast features a lively debate among the four people in the front row seats at CIPA Hall. The three panellists gamely join in with the liveliness. Eventually, it becomes clear that the front row seats are the only occupied ones. Also that the questions which are supposedly streaming in through the interweb are only streaming in from four people, some of whom are related to the people in the front row anyway, and that Mr Davies is having to make up some extra questions just to make it look as though the subject is not the most tedious thing that people have forgotten to tune into since the last sheep dog trials qualifier. I am disappointed to say the least. I think people should care more about their Bye-laws. Because actually the rewrite could change major things like who we allow in to CIPA and what they can call themselves. And who gets to be President. And what to do when it goes wrong and the President starts shedding straw all over the place. And maybe there is a new Bye-law hidden somewhere that allows Council to be voted in at the Battle of the Bands every year: people ought to check these things. If nothing else, someone should be looking out for typos. And lack of antecedent basis. And mutually inconsistent cross-references. You cannot leave all of this to Council. I think it may be time for me to make another of my famous speeches in which I say very little about the Bye-laws but sound enthusiastic about them. It’s certainly worth a try. 7 July 2015
The VeePee and I are meeting each of the CIPA staff, one by one, to make us feel important. We ask them how they are getting on and whether we can do anything to help, or whether they would prefer us to leave them alone. Most of them say they think it is great that CIPA is changing so much and becoming so almost-modern. But they also think it is maybe time now for a period of consolidation. “Consolidation” is a euphemism, in this context, so, yes, they would prefer us to leave them alone. They want time to get used to having been in the 20th Century before we hurtle timidly into the 21st. Some of the staff have worked at CIPA for more than a decade. The Institute has changed so much in that time that they must wonder if they’ve come to the wrong place some mornings. Their loyalty and flexibility are awesome. We offer them biscuits as a thank you, or perhaps by way of compensation, depending on how you look at it. They say they can remember the time when biscuits were banned, as an Austerity Measure, because it didn’t seem right for chartered patent attorneys to be dining out on custard creams when the country was in recession. I am glad to be presiding over a time of comparative plenty. |
Archives
July 2019
Categories |