Recently I saw myself in print and copied into digital form, how things change.
Remember when back in the late 90s and early 2000s how exciting it was when you got an online mention, you could even print it out to put in your media clippings file or to add it to your promotion and performance review evidence, these were the days before personal branding. For me printing out the online mention and sending (faxing and posting) it to the owner of the company in Dubai was an actual thing, a good use of a leaders time!
In 2018 I passed the Australian Company Directors course exam and seeing myself in print on a governance issue was great, so I whipped out the smart phone and copied it into digital form to store as part of my portfolio of record that I have set up to establish my emerging Director credentials. Doing the course and taking the very difficult exam have not been as hard as becoming a Director. It is more like slow food for the brain, it can't be rushed. The process reminded me how much things have changed in practice and tempo but how some things can't be meaningfully rushed. Back in 1999 or 2009 I would have been clipping the article for my career in this case as an aspiring Director but here I was photographing the clip to put it online.
Things have changed since I started out in that incorporated Not for Profit group in the Press clipping, a group where we had a manila folder of press mentions. While in the corporate world the pursuit of online mentions, eyeballs, shares, interactions is relentless and ever growing in complexity it is in stark contrast to peoples personal lives. Now we are trying to get young people and employees off social media as it lowers productivity, it seems to foster social harm in the form of mental ill health and it is plain annoying to stand up in front of a team/ group / conference to talk and see their faces lit up or looking at screens. Conversely I have family members who ask you not to publish pictures of their kids on social media, friends who are deleting Google accounts and Facebook, we are becoming all about privacy, young people spend hours untagging themselves, we are on a cusp of change but to what, we don't know.
When I saw myself, "in print", it was, ooh how exciting, for some reason it reminded me of the days when you had a geocities website for you, your family snaps and hobby, you had an email address that was not your name and hopefully funny, chilli_topping or [email protected], yes, I was born in 1966 and a Rolling Stones fan, how lame and not really job application worthy. I won't mention myspace, like .mobi URLS that was never cool despite what some may say.
The print article was about the winding up of an incorporated community group I was a founder member of and on which I sat on the committee for years. It was a long read, who we were, what we did, who did it and why we are moving on, it was hard not slip into scanning it, which we do at work but you can't do on governance matters.
I learned a lot about NFPs, Governance, Directors and process, as well as how to run a campaign with out too much confrontation and protest, how to engage with the Police over an issue rather than engaging the Police over a social/environmental issue at an outdoor fault line. It took a lot of time and some of it was frustrating but it was the anthesis of the online world and online learning. There does not seem to be a fast track to learning Governance. I have just done a Data Governance course via Linkedin which was excellent but now I have to wait, wait, wait to use it. Governance seems to be changing like media but to what no one seems clear, the disconnect between the Govt of the Day and Companies on climate change is the most stark example that may run a few ships on to the rocks in the coming years. In the mean time learning about governance seems to be about time and contacts.