Well… it’s finally time for me to take another look at my future and my career plans. This article comes just at the right time when I’m (finally?) formalising my management 2.0 (and you’re welcome to work with me on this definition). In fact, all I’m doing is putting back in order the ideas that came to me as I experimented a year ago, and which I’m structuring in the light of my activity over the last 12 months. So all this is the fruit of a long process that should be savoured by starting at the beginning…
So a year ago I was at this point. Ideas, a concept, but I was missing something… the virtual support of the practices to adopt. I left the Gironde to take a trip to the capital, where the young blogger that I was met Jacques Froissant. We exchanged a few ideas and I found myself candidate of the month for the man who a few weeks before had been the inaccessible poster boy of my blogroll. That was at the end of September 2005.
A few weeks later, he introduced me to Carlos Diaz, the director of a web agency. He showed me a few slides of a project he had. The ‘tech’ part of management 2.0 I don’t need to invent or ask anyone to design… it’s there. Each of us had a fragmented vision of his project but the exchange was fruitful enough for us to decide to keep in touch… you never know.
In the meantime, I continue to work on my idea… until Carlos tells me that I could talk a little (but not too much) about his project. So I put a few words about it in a note that I published in December, a few hours before going out to celebrate New Year’s Eve… it was the 24th.
If you read the note in question, you’ll see that someone called Arnaud wasted no time in leaving me a comment. He called me back the following week and we made an appointment. Ah… the anecdote wouldn’t be so amusing if Arnaud had only come to see me because he was reading Jacques Froissant’s Blog and if he didn’t manage a Dassault Systèmes entity.
An appointment was made… we talked, we agreed, all that remained was to warn Carlos that, of course, Dassault having understood my thinking, they were not only interested in me but also in the little tool that I thought was so good… A week later everything was settled and blueKiwi (that’s its name) would be deployed at Dassault within the quarter. The fact remains that we were all caught short…the blueKiwi activity was barely in its implementation phase. However, Reflect was working flat out on the product and Jacques Froissant offered me the chance to join Moovement, an emerging HR 2.0 structure focused, like me, on new ways of looking at HR and Management. From there I worked on Moovement’s assignments, of course, but I was also an ‘official service provider’ for blueKiwi, whose roll-out I supported.
In short, exactly what I was looking for in terms of an ideal job and environment.
As time went by, I devoted myself completely to KM and intranets, which took up all my brainpower. I need time, more and more time for this, and after a while I find it difficult to reconcile this with my multidisciplinary activity at Moovement. I had a little chat with Jacques about this and he understands me completely. We’re at the beginning of September and I’ll be ending my Moovement adventure at the end of the month (tonight to be exact). All I had to do was find a place that would allow me to devote 100% of my time to my chosen fields.
This kind of information obviously comes very quickly, so it only took a few days for me to be offered the chance to join a young, high-potential structure that is now being set up, organised and structured. I’m talking about….blueKiwi, which is leaving the Reflect Group to become an independent business run by…Carlos Diaz. So, in a way, we’ve come full circle, haven’t we?
When I think of all the ground we’ve covered since I took my first steps in this part of the blogosphere a year ago, give or take a few days… sometimes it’s hard to believe. All the people I saw at that first party (who I only knew through their blogs) who have become friends, colleagues and partners, and many of whom form the network of people close to me today, both inside and outside work. All the things we’ve done together, all the information we’ve exchanged, all the help we’ve given each other has enabled us to make giant strides in 52 weeks.
I can’t name everyone, but the first ones that come to mind are Patrice and David from Jobmeeters (Patrice and I met because we were looking for jobs and – more importantly – new ideas via our blogs), Julien and Laurent from CarriereOnline, Marie (my involuntary blogging godmother who gave me the idea to land myself), Charles and Adrien with whom we’re still very close.
And a special mention to my ‘father in carreer’, aka Jacques Froissant. Of course, we don’t know what would have happened if I’d tried a little (a lot?) to provoke fate… but I have to admit that he’s been behind everything good that’s happened to me this year. And even when I’ve capitalised on various successes, I can’t help thinking that without his little helping hand, a link in a blogroll, I’d never have met anyone (so Carlos), that Dassault would never have read me, that I’d never… well, you get the idea…
So thanks to him and Richard for this year at Moovement. And best wishes for success in all your projects (I’m looking forward to the release of what you know…).
I’m a bit sad to be leaving all this, but I’m also so happy to be joining Carlos and Christophe at blueKiwi, and running into Thomas who won’t be far away either…
By the way, what am I going to do there? We’ll have time to talk about it again, but basically, exactly what I was talking about in my previous articles: helping to put in place new practices, helping to use blueKiwi in a way that’s consistent with the needs and context of the company (when I was talking about a flexible tool…), in short working on people and systems to put in place a win/win collective dynamic in the company based on collective practices and optimising the use of dynamic information.
But we’ll have time to talk about all that again.
