Mopsos

At last I am back to my blog, and I see hundreds of spam trackbacks there. I really hate spammers. They are really evil people.

Anyway, I was really tied up for the past three months organizing the Sales Managers' Forum, a great knowledge sharing event in my company that took place between June 22. and June 24. at the Novotel Tour Eiffel, on the banks of the Seine River in Paris. We had between 200 and 300 people around, coming from 57 countries.

The scenario of the event was complex. It involved case studies, round table discussions, keynote speakers, entertainment, etc. It also involved a big knowledge fair, dubbed "Marketplace", where corporate staff were "selling" their services to country organizations and country organizations were presenting their "good practices" for other countries to copy.

Overall it was a big success. Participants were enthusiastic and the feedback was really excellent.

I come to think that we made a big mistake in the dot-com age, when we thought that web-based collaboration tools could change a corporate culture. Cultural change is a gradual process that starts from the realities of today, altering them slightly toward the expected change. Projects aimed at introducing new collaboration behaviors through intranet tools can be cancelled any time by the decision of a company top brass. It's much more difficult to cancel a management seminar project, even if it is built on new knowledge management practices. Corporate seminars have been out there for ages, and nobody questions their legitimacy.

Next year, we should add an online collaboration component to this Sales Forum. This is how we will introduce the cultural change of "network-centric business". Step by step.

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