Spiders and a Smarter Workforce

I'm going out on a limb to say there's a spider problem in the UK. When you wake up in the morning, you can expect 1-2 new spiderwebs on your path. If you look around, there are spiderwebs in almost every possible corner. I'm not saying this is a problem we need to solve, just worth noting :) Oh, it might be worth noting that most people have a light cold in England right now. Lots of coughing and sneezing going on. Maybe it's the spiders fault? :)

Today I attended an event in London sponsored by IBM known as "Energising Life's Work". Nice event. There were over 800 people registered and I'd say about 5-600 showed up. It was a pretty standard approach (eg keynotes, breakouts), but of course the venue was London beautiful. 

The two main topics were analytics and collaboration. The twitter hashtag was #ibmswf if you want to see the back channel. The speakers and content were decent, they only fell into the IT trap a little bit. The final keynote was a national hero in rugby and British sports (Clive Woodward). He talked about knowledge management the whole time (without realizing it of course)!

Then we met visiting friends for dinner, had some great conversation and headed home. I was about 30 minutes early for dinner and I was holding a table for 9 people. The waitress and I chatted a bit while we waited. At one point I received a text that said they were 10 minutes away, so I mentioned that to the waitress. She came back 9 minutes later with a serious face and said "I'm sorry sir, it's been 10 minutes and you'll need to leave". I started to stand up, then when I saw her smile I realized she was kidding, so we had a good laugh. Continuing the joke, after dinner we asked for dessert and she said they don't have any. I was kidding and said "maybe there's some next door you could grab for us ", she didn't even smile and she walked away. I don't think I offended her, but it did make for a funny awkward moment :) We worked it all out as we left the restaurant, so all is well.

Great day, especially if I can now apply these new connections and learnings.