I’m gutted to say that I’d never heard of JP Rangaswami before July, but then there was Euan Semple up on stage interviewing him at 2gether08 so he clearly must be someone pretty special.
Funnily enough, I’d never heard of The Cluetrain Manifesto either until June (and me going to business school and everything), so seeing JP up on stage being asked about the Cluetrain Manifesto was a kind of double whammy. Needless to say, I took copious notes, which I then managed to delete. I did keep hold of the snaps though.
JP is Managing Director, Service Design for BT Design at BT. I agree, that title is a little scary and not immediately descriptive. Probably the three most important things you need to know about JP is that (1) Silicon.com named him one of the world’s top ten CIOs in 2007, that (2) he loves to blog and that (3) he had nouse enough to get out of investment banking (he was CIO, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein) at a Very Good Time.
JP’s blog has been running for two and a half years and just this week features topics as diverse as sleeping out with the homeless for a night in London and the progress of a 26 year old Colombian, Camilo Villegas, in international golf.
I’m hoping to catch JP speak again in a couple of weeks, this time at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe (I’ll be sure to use autosave). His theme is Web 2.0 versus the Watercooler and he’ll be looking at how the ways in which we communicate at work are changing.
The strand is strategy and business models, so I imagine JP will focus more on cultural and managerial approaches than allow himself to get too bogged down in specific (BT branded) technologies. Let’s hope so. I’ll be there on the sidelines cheering him on.
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Hello Jemima,
We didn’t meet when you came down to see Matthew earlier in the year. But I saw that you’re in The Canaries and that you had recently learnt of Chris Locke and Cluetrain. I loved that book and wrote about it in Inside Project Red Stripe – the chronicle of The Economist’s 2007 innovation project – that we’re publishing next week. Would you like a copy?
If so, can you let me know the best address to send it to.
Welcome home, whenever you get this.