Next week I will start publishing some “what if” segments derived from my previous Maximizing costs, minimizing ROI article.
As today is Sunday, before starting with the first what-if in this series, I wanted just to share some writing ideas.
The what-if stories appearing next week are not the first that I published online: check Brussels, United Europe, 2065 on my “travelogue” website, that I created before creating my own blog, or search in this blog.
Last year, I started to register once in a while stories or script ideas with the WGA, with a simple purpose: not really protecting my copyright, but getting a “stamp” on my first date of publication, so that I could free to share concepts however I see fit without incurring in the risk of getting somebody sending me a nice letter stating that I am infringing on their copyright or patent- as it happened before more than a couple of times, over the years 
Why the title, “writing-tank”? It does not take a really smart person to hear the assonance with “think-tank”.
I think that experience is a social waste if it is unused- and albeit I would have preferred to be a direct beneficiary of my experience and self-financed research and studies, I prefer to expand a little bit the scope of this blog.
The blog itself was planned (as I said in September 2008 to somebody in Schuman) to defend my experience from some denials and challenges I had received to what was written in my CV, and went online in February 2009 (but I reposted here also articles from 2007 that I had posted elsewhere).
And my experience was mainly in management consulting, change management, negotiation, introduction of new technologies and processes, business&marketing planning for startups or SMEs- exciting, if you like it; boring, if you are outside.
Enter the “writing-tank”.
A one-man think-tank would be an act of hubris- and I see already way too many “soap box gurus” around, sometimes also able to find financial supporters or publishers.
Unfortunately, while most of the people speaking in the “Speakers’ corner” in London at least did research before building their fairy tales (doing nothing more than twisting here and there), the newscycle “forces” often our XXI gurus to refrain from something too futile for their superior minds.
I mean- something called “unbiased, multi-source researching”, “reading”, “number crunching”.
So, I call my modest expansion of the blog scope “writing-tank”: continuing to share my scribblings, with more what-if (as I did in the past using something that I called the “United Hamster Front” as a practical joke- see on my travelogue).
Updating the skills and knowledgebase are expensive activities- at least, they consume a significant part of your spare time.
How do you combine avoiding wasting experience with doing research for a reason?
Simple: write. And as it is boring to write strategies or business plans when a) you are unpaid b) everybody seems to be willing to do the same stuff…
…creative writing is the way to go.
But if you spent most of you life analyzing organizations and processes, or designing both, or changing both, you write logically coherent documents as entertaining as… a telephone directory 
Therefore, as I was used to work in multiple industries, countries, etc… I decided to pile up as many “links” (books, websites, electronic books, articles) as possible that sound interesting for a future “connecting the dots” story.
Anyway- this was the way I built my network before: skim through knowledge, get a grasp of the basics, identify real experts (who keep updating their focused knowledge) to call on when needed, and build a “knowledge exchange” approach (i.e. give them knowledge or support that they need, so that when needed you can call and ask a rapid feed-back).
I did last Summer a last serious attempt to end up where I could use cross-industry, but the recruitment agent told in my face that she assumed I was in to pick up the connections, and then build my own competing company, therefore… online and non-profit are the XXI century way to “market test” my idea, and keep my skills while I develop my writing skills.
Eventually, I should be able to find a way to evolve my business-research writing skills into something more interesting
The only limit: I will post here my what if stories on my travelogue, or my personal profile in Facebook or Frype.
Why? Because this blog is free-ranging enough, but I would like to keep it to the basics- proposals, review, analysis
Some of the “formats” and “concepts” that I created so far?
2009-03 Memories from the cloud
