Adrian Trenholm Coda del gruppo

Face to face with Dwayne Melancon and James Governor

Last week I met up with Dwayne Melancon and Chris Morgan from IT firm Tripwire and James Governor from analyst firm RedMonk. I am afraid that the more technical parts of the discussion went over my head, but I was delighted that my hunch to put James together with the Tripwire guys was a good one. We talked about IBM, VMware, the theory of constraints and the name RedMonk, among other things. Chris gave James a good natured grilling about analyst ethics and marketing. And there was some drinking.

To my mind, the story behind the meeting is nearly as interesting as the conversation we shared. Dwayne told Hawaiian business coach Rosa Say that he would be travelling to London. Rosa replied to Dwayne and emailed me to say “why don’t you two meet up?” Dwayne and I duly emailed one another and started to work out a date. Dwayne also invited me to join him on LinkedIn. When I saw all the enterprise IT guys in Dwayne’s network, I realised that it would be good to introduce James, so we set that up. Dwayne brought Chris along and that was the final team sheet.

Rosa, Dwayne and I had never met face to face. We communicate by a mixture of email, blogs, LinkedIn and telephone - no one element would have been enough to fix this up. A few days later when I read this quote from Adrian McEwen, reporting on Ben Hammersley at Our Social World, I had to smile:

We have new concepts of friendship, of how to work together, of relationships…

This is how we can get people all over the world to connect to each other, and although it seems ridiculously far-fetched at the minute, it will change the world in huge ways.

Now we have to ‘link-in’ a generous philanthropist and savvy travel agent, because I’m starting to ache for that personal connection myself! Adrian I am thrilled that you and Dwayne took me up on my suggestion, yet I wish Hawaii wasn’t two oceans away from you…
Impatiently waiting my turn, and content to send you my virtual aloha hugs — for now,
Rosa

Nice story Adrian and an excellent example of how people can use the tools you mentioned to connect in the real world. Pleased to hear that some drinking was involved too. Wouldn’t be a proper social meet-up without a drink.

Behold the power of community!

Glad you two were able to meet face-to-face. My offer stands for anyone able to make it to the midwest. My long-term mission is to get my blogging community to a central location so we can have an idea swap…and other people will pay to attend it because of the incredible content.

Captured Clickables

Lately the blogosphere has kept me up late at night … a lot of good reading out there. Here are some links you may want to consider clicking through for a kick-start to your own lust for learning: Captured Clickables.