29 November 2017
Over a hot chocolate (hers) and an orange juice (mine), I meet the new IPReg Chief Eggsek for a nice little chat. She is very friendly. She knows I am only the EyeEyePeePee now and that even Mr Davies has stopped worrying about the amount of trouble I can cause. She is, however, quite interested in my wicked plan to gather benchmarking data about diversity in the IP professions. She says that diversity is not her highest priority at the moment, there being other important things to do such as regulating patent and trade mark attorneys and keeping a Register thereof. So she is more than happy to let IP Inclusive get on with the namby-pamby stuff instead. If I want to gather diversity data, wickedly or unwickedly, I am welcome to get on with it. After the orange juice, I have lunch with an old college friend, and then hot-foot it to a namby-pamby IP Inclusive workshop. The workshop is about the business case for diversity. In other words, it is supposed to establish that diversity is not namby-pamby at all, but crucial to economic success. There are many arguments in favour of this view, and our speakers put them across well. All I have to do is act as though none of this would have happened without me (the event I mean, not the economics). It is a role I am accustomed to playing. The workshop is what you might call an intimate gathering, due to the non-attendance of a lot of the people who had registered. But it is extremely productive, as are most meetings with fewer people than you had initially feared. There are elevator pitches, guided group discussions, flip charts and plenary sessions: all the accoutrements, in other words, of a damned fine conference. At the end there are some excellent ideas on the flip charts, which I photograph so as to turn them into something useful later. There is of course no guarantee that this will work, but I will give it a go. The “drinks and networking” session that follows is similarly intimate (ie small), if not more so. Very little gets drunk, and very small but intimate networks are formed between people who largely knew each other beforehand anyway. At least we are going to get home in good time. And tomorrow I will feel fresh enough to start work on the flip charts.
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