Meeting with Clive Woodward

I had a one on one meeting with a British national hero today. I spent just over an hour talking about knowledge management with Clive Woodward. It felt as lucky as if I were to meet with Tony Dungy or Phil Jackson. 

He's such a good guy. He started with a bit of chit chat, then he asked how I'd like to run the meeting. I stated one simple objective - to discuss our thoughts on knowledge management. Then I asked if he was interested in that or how he'd like to proceed. It turned out he was very interested in the topic and even knew a bit about it. 

I shared our knowledge sharing process. He not only listened intently, he asked great questions and he even took notes. He didn't leave the room, or take a phone call, or rush the conversation in any way. Two other people from his team came in to the conversation as well.

He demoed his knowledge sharing software package with me. He did it himself, not someone from his team, I thought that was so cool.

We talked about the similarities between his tool and our process. He especially appreciated when I shared concrete examples of how the process plays out in reality. He loved the differentiation I made between knowledge mgmt and information mgmt. He pointed out the similarities as he saw them, and he shared several examples of professional athletes and how they learn (and how he coaches). Just awesome.

At the end he said, that was great, let's do this again. I thought he was just being polite, but then we pulled out diaries and started talking about dates. We're going to meet again in just a few weeks! Wow.