golf + signage + newt = my life

I can't link you to tyhis, because it's behind a firewall. so here's the blather in full. I think it doesn't really need much commentary......notice they use the word signage. Signage. That's a joke word, right? like the way my daughter always call wet "wetness," and dirt "dirtiness?"

From our marketing leader:

The lessons of golf are the lessons of life.
Connected Thinking is about living our values.
Stay focused on the shot in front of you... Think through your shot before you take it... Act with integrity and play fair. These are some of the lessons we learn from the game of golf. And, these same lessons and values apply to other aspects in life, including the world of business. That's why we're particularly proud of our long-standing relationship with the PGA TOUR, which exemplifies the values THE FIRM stands for: Excellence, Leadership, and Teamwork.This weekend, we will continue our ongoing affiliation with the PGA TOUR through our partnership with THE PLAYERS Championship golf tournament, which will be held in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida this Thursday through Sunday. The tournament is often considered the "fifth major" of golf and attracts many of the game’s top professionals. Our Firm will be prominently associated with the tournament through advertising in all tournament publications, as well as on-course signage. Approximately 50 senior executives from our top clients will be our guests at the tournament this weekend. In addition to networking with their business peers and enjoying the world-class golf experience, our clients will also participate in our 4th Annual Executive Forum to discuss issues facing Corporate America. A highlight of our Executive Forum will be our Keynote Speaker, Newt Gingrich. In conjunction with our partnership with THE PLAYERS Championship, the following advertisement about the life lessons golf teaches and our support of The First Tee will run in a special section in USA Today on Thursday, March 23:The First Tee is a World Golf Foundation initiative dedicated to providing young people of all backgrounds an opportunity to develop, through golf and character education, life-enhancing values such as honesty, integrity and sportsmanship. For a third year, we has invited The First Tee Scholars, who are students with outstanding academic performance, community involvement, and leadership qualities, to join us and our clients at our Executive Forum.During THE PLAYERS Championship on Saturday and Sunday, which will be broadcast on NBC television (check your local listings), we will also premiere our new series of television commercials, which also highlight our support of The First Tee. In addition to our PGA TOUR golf activities this weekend, we are also continuing our successful partnership with the Jane Blalock Company (JBC) in sponsoring the LPGA Golf Clinics for Women. Again this year, THE FIRM and JBC will sponsor clinics in 15 major markets around the country, which provide women with the opportunity to improve their golf skills and learn how to use the game of golf to enhance business relationships.We are proud of our association with all of these organizations, the values we share, and, in particular, the activities that use the life lessons that golf teaches to help empower so many people. As always, I look forward to your feedback.

how to make dorky friends in KM

I was put on a list serv that deals with value networks (link here if you actually want to know what that is - i'm alienated by most of the literature about it, mostly because the anthropologist in me HATES the assumptions and the methodologies....but I digress oh so boringly). Which means that I get even more distracting email. But what was proving increasingly frustrating about this list serv was the fact that a significant amount of the mail was personal or private messages being sent inappropriately to the entire list. Folks clearly didn't understand how to use the oh-so-complex "reply to" functionality. So some boring post about using the Zachman model to analyze networks would get response posts like "hey eric, are you going to brain trust? i'd love to catch up and here's what happening at datamine. i'm working on a paper for KM review - maybe you could take a look?" So I finally snarked out and send a note to the list registering my surprize at the fact that so many folks were broadcasting their social plans, and noting that it was hard to take folks seriously as KM professionals if they didn't understand how to use email correctly. I got one great response back - to the list, of course - suggesting that I reconfigure my list serve preferences to receive one summary a day. I wrote back to the dude - personally - and pointed out that the problem was not the number of emails, but the content within them, and of course got a note back saying basically "wow, i had no idea that i had even sent that configuration note to the whole list! thanks!"

But more to the point of this blog, I got two invitiations to join other virtual KM communities. Which demonstrates that if you simply make it known publicly that you are not a raving idiot, people will invite you to their parties. Dorky parties, I'll grant you. But the only parties out there in the KM zone.

international women's day day

every year, this day makes me more and more angry. today i felt like throwing a bomb.i looked at every woman in the subway and inferred that they all had shitty underpaid jobs where they were undervalued, and raged. the escalator at work was broken and the security drone insisted on fidgeting with the on/off key instead of letting us (we were all women) just walk down the stairs. I inferred he would have let men go if they had asked. i raged. i was ignored in a teleconference and KNEW it was because I'm a woman. And I raged. I figured every slight, injustice, denigration or other form of dismissal as gendered - and raged. intermittently I thought about how international women's day in russia had become an ultimately degrading expression of women's relegation to the margins of housework drudgery and unvalued labor, as men "celebrated" them by buying flowers. who the fuck needs flowers at a time like this - as the lithuanian women's party pointed out, give me a fucking cuisinart so i don't keep grating the ends of my fingers off making the national dish of grated potato (and finger) dumplings. that got me thinking about mother's day as well - what a farce. thank me every time i ovulate, lactate, menstruate and every other ate while working for my 72 cents, prick weed.
Gosh, am i feeling a little "you can have it all" backlash today. it's just that I don't have it all, i just have to do it all.

a day without metatags...

HR thought they could make me cave and use their retarded "skills" instead of my rockin metatags and taxonomies for industry, business process, and technical knowledge. HA! They should know better than to have a category they ADMIT is "the one that's everything that's not a rule or regulation." Or a category called "Process." It's like a category called "verb." But I was good. I innocently reviewed how we had validated the development process with leadership, and leveraged the practice to develop the taxonomies, and asked them how they had come up with their approach - what was their development strategy for stakeholder management, business buy-in and user requirements gathering? (Of course I knew the answer was "we reached up our ass and found a spread sheet.") I offered to help develop the deck that would demonstrate "synergy." And in the process, I heeded big texas boss' advice as best I could and made my slides, well, kinda stupid. I leveraged a lot, linked strategically, and proposed a governance model. I worked the back channel lieutenant network and got Learning to sign up, along with HR, to follow KM's metatags and taxonomies - both their development processes and their current vocabularies. And after it was all over, I was thanked for "my objective eye." HAHAHAHA.