By Anne Armstrong
I’ve been struggling with what to call this contribution since “Insider” has been so well used. There are at least three in our market.
John Monroe suggested Anagrams, which I considered. But hope I am not that hard to decipher. Decided to call the blog Alinea.
The foodies in the market will recognize that as the name of a restaurant in Chicago owned by chef Grant Achatz. But more to this point, alinea is the Latin term for the paragraph sign, sometimes called a pilcrow.
In Latin it means “off the line,” but a paragraph signals a new thought. It also echoes the idea of liner notes, which is in many ways what blogs do — commenting on the work being done by others. Anyway, insert new graph here.
ACT-IAC CXO dinner
Very interesting experiment in getting government and industry working together to bring new ideas to the table. Lots of folks have tried versions of this, including the early workshop days at the Executive Leadership Conference (ELC).
The task at hand was to look at the five pillars of transparent government being proposed by CTO Aneesh Chopra and CIO Vivek Kundra. Each table took one of the pillars and was asked to come up with a succinct definition, describe what success would look like, identify barriers to success and come up with three to five actions to accomplish the purpose.
It’s a lot harder than it sounds. In the limited time, scribes wrote down dozens of ideas. It will now be a harder task to pull that together into a coherent document. At least, there is still a need for editors in some endeavors.
Kim Taylor Thompson, CEO of Duke Corporate Education, facilitated the work. Teresa Carlson of Microsoft worked with Martha Dorris, out-going president of ACT to get this pulled together. There are several more planned.
Once the wisdom has been distilled, it will be passed on to Chopra and Kundra.
There are lots of ideas about how to improve on the first effort, but hats off to those involved for getting it off the ground.
Posted on Jun 19, 2009 at 12:10 PM0 comments
I used to write for a living. Then, 10 years ago, I took one of those Frostian forks in the road and I now manage for a living. Some people would say I sell. But in the eyes of many editorial people, I went over to the dark side. Speaking from the dark side, it doesn’t seem that different from what I did in editorial, but never mind.
I am every editor’s and art director’s worst nightmare because I think I have done that job and therefore I can comment on what he should have done or what were they thinking about that cover?
So, this is put up or shut up time. The edit folks asked me to do a blog. I think the idea is to make me get out from behind the comfortable curtain of criticizing without actually having to create anything.
I know that every reporter is only as good as his or her sources. Burn one and you are done in this town. Many of my sources have now sold their companies and retired to wonderful warm spots around the globe.
So if you have news, call me. Email me at aarmstrong@1105govinfo.com. I will be calling many old friends. Standby.
I welcome your suggestions and criticisms about what we are covering and what we are not.
I think this is a remarkable community that is not completely covered by pics at parties. I know networking is important, but there is a lot of substance that industry provides that is not currently seeing the light of day.
The toughest part is that whenever you write anything of value, someone is likely to disagree. I have to think if we are ready for transparency, we are ready for conversation.
Let the conversation begin.
Posted on Jun 18, 2009 at 12:10 PM0 comments