2 March 2016, noon
The next highlight is the not-a-Council-meeting of Council members to talk about what CIPA needs from its new premises. This is supposed to be what is popularly referred to, in management bollocks, as “blue-sky thinking”. Listen, I have told people in my briefing notes, this is how it is going to happen. We are not going to talk about operational details. Mr Davies will do the operational details. What we are going to talk about is a wish-list of functions that CIPA needs its premises to fulfil. Wherever its premises are. Whatever they cost. However many rooms they have and whatever colour the carpets. At Council we do not do detail; we do Strategy and Policy and high-level stuff. We do blue-sky thinking. The EyePeePee takes charge of the flip chart. Mr Davies kicks off the discussions. And we start talking about broadband upload speeds. No!! I say. Too much detail! We decide that above all, CIPA has to have premises in London. After that, we get a bit lost. People who work in London get very precious about which street we are on. People like me, who have to travel in from the Back of Beyond, and for whom one London street looks pretty much like another, find this exasperating. Frankly, I am not worried if 100 patent attorneys have to walk for ten minutes instead of five to reach a CIPA Happy Hour because it is in Street X, which takes me four hours to get to, rather than Street Y, which takes me 3 hours 55 minutes to get to. We move on from the location debate by agreeing that CIPA needs to have premises in an “accessible” part of London. In management bollocks, this is called a “high-level” criterion. In real terms, it is called a Fudge. I will leave it to someone else to define whether “accessible” means Zone 1 or “inside the Circle Line” or “not far to walk from where my office is at the moment”. I suspect this will all be a little academic anyway, because it will cost three times as much to have premises where we want to be as it will to have premises ten minutes up the road. And anyway, the main limiting factor – and this is right at the top of the wish-list – is that there has to be a wall big enough to take the board of Past Presidents and another big enough to take the CIPA crest, and a third big enough to take the framed photograph of Mr Davies’s ego when he was President of the Chartered Institute of Hot & Cold Running Water Experts. Oh, and somewhere to put The Queen: a cupboard or a basement or something. Although if there is a Brexit, I suppose we might need The Queen more. These are some of the other blue-sky things we put on our premises wish-list:
By the end of the meeting, the flip chart is full of blue-sky thinking, plus one or two rain clouds, and I have eaten six bits of quiche, three inches of cucumber and enough cakey bits to last me till, er, later. Wherever we end up, we will have to be able to get cakey bits there.
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