Talk badly but talk about me

Last week I was in Italy for the launch of Leader2Leader, the new association for third sector leaders in the country. Because I didn’t make the usual boring speech I was accused to behave like a facilitator in a Club Med. Another one compared me to an old rock star. If you really don’t have anything better to do and you have read my previous entry on the conference in Zagreb, you’ll know that a delegate publicly labelled me a brain washer.

Do you think this is the end? No. I’ve just come back from Gdansk, the home town of Solidarnosc. Naturally, I met Lech Walesa who looks a bit tired…. Anyway, this time I hadn’t scheduled any speech… fortunately. So, I spent 2 days of fierce networking with Polish third sector leaders and others form the rest of Europe. It was the largest conference for the sector in the country.

As I was free as I had the opportunity to provoke the locals with my performances. The best one was a question at the session on social economy – as third sector is called in Poland because of the Structural Funds – and financial institutions: “Is the third sector a business opportunity?”. A priest stood up immediately after to make clear that this wasn’t the right perspective to address the topic and delegates looked at each other wondering if I was a corporate spy.

At the party at the end of the conference – we were in a nice restaurant at the end of the longest pier in Europe – everybody knew me. An Italian fellow put it well: “He looks nice, with intellectual glasses and gentle manners. You relax and he shoots one of this jokes when you would never expect one”.

So, don’t worry if they don’t like you as long as they don’t ignore you. Actually, be provocative and challenge their bias if you want to be the main topic of the reception. They will talk about you because they are bored by themselves. The good guys only exist in American cartoons. At least you can always justify your behaviour  by explaining that you have done it in the name of  leadership development.