I am at CIPA, ready to chair the scary meeting about
diversity in the IP professions. My
Brilliant-Idea-in-a-can is at my side.
The Lady Minister IP Baroness arrives with her aide in
tow. I offer them a drink. The Lady Minister’s coffee just about goes OK
but my nervousness, together with the wobbliness of the CIPA refreshments
table, leads to the aide’s tea ending up in a location almost totally unrelated
to that of his cup. Or indeed of any of
the cups. I engage in some hasty
Vice-Presidential mopping-up with quite a lot of kitchen towel and even more
embarrassment.
We begin. The
Baroness IP Minister Lady makes a speech about how lovely it is to be at CIPA
Hall, which she says has particularly red walls, and about how important it is
for the world to know about IP and for IP to be full of diversity. She tells us heartening stories from her own
career, and answers questions about inspirational role models, which let’s face
it we are sometimes a bit short of in IP.
This nicely fills half an hour or so, thus leaving me with half an hour
less in which to make a fool of myself.
Then the Minister IP Lady Baroness leaves, with her
tea-stained aide, and I am on my own. I
look fiercely at the delegates. I tell
them they must be constructive. And
concise. And we do not have time for
anecdotes, I say, glaring at them, because I know how patent attorneys love to
preface their comments with stories about things that happened to them in 1962
and that by the end of the story both they and their listeners have forgotten
what it is they were commenting on.
They tell anecdotes.
It is a heartening discussion, all the same. Everyone wants more diversity. Everyone has good ideas. We are going to have an Action Plan and I am
going to build another Task Force (da-da-da-DA!!) and we are all going to work
together to make stuff better. We are
even going to hold another meeting in a year’s time, to check that we are still
making stuff better.
I mention my Brilliant-Idea-in-a-can about university
sponsorship. Mr Davies says it is so
revolutionary that he might have to go and lie down. Not so fast, sunshine: you have a job to
do. Like, tweeting the world about our
Action Plan.
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