Jan 23
Sunken Treasures
There is an exhibition in Paris right now titled “Egypt’s Sunken Treasures”. It showcases giant statues, jewelry, coins, ritual objects, etc, that offer a rare insight into the transition between the Pharaonic to the Hellenic to the Roman age, from a cultural and religious viewpoint. If you’re into ancient history like me, you’d like this exhibition. For me, it was particularly interesting to see how conquerors modified and assimilated religious elements of the conquered, in an attempt to legitimise their own rule. Some of the artifacts on display are marked by religious influences from all three ages!
Jan 20
Crimes and Misdemeanours in Athens
I’m sitting by my hotel window at the St George Lycabettus Hotel in Athens, with the most glorious view of the city, with the Acropolis at centre stage bathed in that flat morning sun, the mountains sloping down to the sea on the right, and Piraeus and the Aegean behind. The picture below taken with my poor mobile phone does scant justice to it, but is probably better than nothing. A crime and two misdemeanours have been committed.
Jan 18
How to be a KM Guru #1
Over the years I’ve had the good fortune to observe and interact with a number of KM thought leaders and influencers, whether through online forums, workshops, conferences or collaboration. Fresh out of a round of conferences recently I found myself reflecting on the qualities of these strangely attractive figures. What raises them to godlike status, and how hard do they have to work at it? What are the different levels of godhood, and how can they be distinguished from ambitious con artists selling an empty dream?
Although I’m writing these tips with my tongue tucked halfway into my cheek, there’s also a serious side to this. In an immature domain of practice such as KM, with many relative novices embarking on initiatives with big ambitions and big implications for budgets and organisation effectiveness, the marketplace needs to learn how to distinguish authoritative voices selling genuine medicine from the rowdy purveyors of “MY Theory Is...” snake oil.
Dec 30
Arcehtypes Online: Flame Warriors Unveiled
A while back we did an exercise to derive the archetypes of an online community. Mike Reed is compiling an exhaustive and supremely entertaining inventory of online “flame warriors” – caricatures of bad behaviours online.
The list, with descriptions and brilliant artwork to match, now stands at around 89 personas. While these characters are not emergent from a whole community’s experience as ours were, Mike’s experience is so extensive, and his eye so sharp, that many of these characters have strong archetypal resonances. And Mike seems to have used them in one of the ways negative cultural archetypes can be used: to describe and diminish bad behaviours using humour, without engaging in personal attacks or attacking specific individuals. My personal favourites? Evil Clown, Bliss Nanny and Ideologue!
Thanks to Stephen Thorpe of the onlinefacilitation group for this link.
Dec 23
A KM Christmas
Eric Tsui sent me a bunch of photos from the KMAP conference in Hong Kong last week, and there was this one with me casting murderous looks towards an expostulating Dave Snowden during a panel discussion. It was too good an opportunity, so I decided to use the Flickr captioning tool (thanks Joitske).
Would you like to caption this photo differently? Well you can! Just follow the simple instructions below:
1. Go to the Flickr captioning tool here (you might want to open this in a new window to be able to follow the instructions)
2. Select the tab for “URL” and enter the URL of a clean version of the photo without captions – here it is:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/136/329968417_75b536c25a_o.jpg
3. Enter text for up to four speech or thought bubbles and click “create captions”!
4. Position the captions in the photo where you want them
5. If you’d like to share your newly captioned photo, upload it to a website or to Flickr (you will need to create an account in advance) and give it the tag “KMChristmas” ... let us know in the comments box below that you’ve done so giving the URL
A very merry Christmas from Green Chameleon!
Dec 22
The Exploding Whale: Why AARs Are Important
There I was, browsing through Joitske’s weblog looking for a link I spotted there some months ago, when I came across this link to an Exploding Whale video. In Oregon, AARs are now taken very seriously.
Dec 22
Universities and KM Practice
Back in September I wrote a post called Of Conferences, Chatauquas and Boundary Objects, suggesting that the old commercial KM conference model shows signs of fracturing, and that universities were playing an increasing role in bringing together thought leaders, researchers and practitioners in KM.
Just recently, two events appear to confirm that. Yesterday a little bird told me that KM conference and event heavyweight Ark Group is shutting down its Asian operations. If that’s true then it bears out my suspicion that the “charge ‘em high, fly in gurus, preach to novices, and pander to vendors” business model is indeed starting to crack, at least in the smaller more fragmented markets.
Dec 22
Blog-Tag - An Internet Party Game
There’s a pre-Christmas party game going on among netizens of a certain ilk – the strand that I’ve encountered was started as far as I can tell by Jeff Pulver earlier this month. As Jeff puts it, people know each other through the blogosphere, but do they really know each other? So the game is the old dinner party game of sharing five things about yourself that your blogomates might not know – and then you tag five other people to be it!
Dave Snowden has just tagged me, so here are my five things:
1. In primary school I was once denounced in school assembly by my elder sister when I was praised in public for being “such a good little boy”. My sister, outraged, leapt to her feet and cried out “But he’s not a bit like that at home!”. She’s my favourite sister.
2. For a long time I planned to be a (Roman Catholic) priest. Then I went to university, studied philosophy and theology, and changed my mind.
3. I have, like Thomas de Quincey, built and abandoned several personal libraries of books (roughly one for each of my careers). My third library is presently in boxes in an attic in Ireland, while I build my fourth, courtesy of Amazon, in Singapore.
4. I once played a bit part in a situation comedy show here in Singapore called Phua Chu Kang. I was then looking after marketing and business development for the British Council’s English teaching courses. I played the part of a scone-addicted English teacher… for free, in exchange for credits to the British Council.
5. I was once arrested by the Indonesian secret police for “holding an illegal gathering” in Jakarta and interrogated for 12 hours. It took that long to negotiate them down from a US$12,000 bribe to a US$5,000 bribe to secure my release. They were so sloppy, they left my file on the desk while they went for coffee. Turned out they’d planned the sting for months with the hotel where we were holding some presentations – they had agreed to get a police permit, and had failed to do so. The cash was provided by the aunt of a student of mine, delivered at 1am in a brown paper bag at the main police station.
And here are the five people I’d like to know more about:
1. Nancy White
2. Joitske Hulsebosch
3. Valdis Krebs
4. Denham Grey
5. Emmanuele Quintarelli
Dec 19
Trusting Your Instincts in the Face of Expert Knowledge
Have you ever trusted your judgement over that of an expert only to find that you were right?
Dec 11
Empowering Your Network
At a recent seminar, the networking style of one particular person came up in conversations with people I knew. I found it intriguing what they had to say. The person had left a not so pleasant impression, came on too strong and left them questioning the real motives. I was thus inspired to pick up this book titled Power Networking by Donna Fisher and Sandy Villas - well for this reason and ...
