12 January 2016, 5.30 pm
And then it is time to meet the Chief Eggseks, and tell them about the pain and frustration of being a President. They do not seem overly sympathetic. Apparently it is quite painful and frustrating being a Chief Eggsek too, because of having to work with Presidents. The discussions become quite competitive: my President was worse than your President; my Council was the most frustrating in the world; well mine was the most frustrating in the universe so there; my Board met once a month for a whole day; well mine met once a month for three days at a time, THREE DAYS, can you imagine that??! For all my explanations about the character traits of a patent attorney, however, even I have to concede that the Chief Eggsek who works with psychologists wins the prize for the hardest job of all. For whilst a Council of patent attorneys will spend half an hour punctuating a set of minutes or construing a strategic objective, a Council of psychologists will be so busy analysing one another’s motives that they will not even realise there is a document to punctuate. I imagine that instead of working through an agenda, they share their feelings about it, and that in many contexts, this might not facilitate progress. The Chief Eggseks then exchange ideas about how to cope with amateur Presidents and meddling volunteers and people who try to govern by taking an obsessive interest in the selection of a new photocopier. I think their ideas are rubbish, largely. It does not sound right to lock your President in a stationery cupboard with an instruction to count the number of staples left. I will explain to Mr Davies that should this happen at CIPA any time soon, there will be Trouble. And possibly a shortage of paper clips. One of the ideas I put on the table, to make Presidents less rubbish, is to pay them a salary. The Chief Eggseks snort in derision at this. You would never get that past your governing Council, they say. Well no, obviously, because I cannot even get a thrice-updated Strategic Plan past CIPA’s governing Council. But perhaps, in a parallel universe somewhere, there might be a governing Council in a membership body that might be prepared to consider the idea. Because if you paid someone, you could require them to put in a decent performance, and not just bumble around getting in the way. But the Chief Eggseks would prefer salaries to be for Chief Eggseks, not Pees. And I guess that is understandable.
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