I've blogged before about the special gifts that come uninvited to speakers. People, strangers, all perfect in their own ways, say outrageously nice things, tell you their stories, say they know you from some chapter in your life where their characters may not have been as well-portrayed to you.
So it was that when Jeffrey Walker introduced himself at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this past June, said he knew us from when we consulted to Index Systems, a long-gone but then high-end consultancy based in Cambridge, Mass, I, reading his nametag, exuberantly replied, "We have to talk!"
Jeffrey is President of Atlassian Software, the Australian company that makes Confluence, a sleek wiki product that simplifies collaboration. We were introduced to Confluence through a client using our virtual team methodology; within days, that company's clever engineers had adapted our People-Purpose-Links-Time model to their wiki.
As things worked out, it took a few months before we scheduled our call but, during that time, Jeffrey sent an insightful note about his views of the conference with a good list of +/- (I was on the Advisory Board), invited me to be "LinkedIn" to him, and observed that I hadn't joined Facebook (corrected as of 48 hours ago). This morning I received his acknowledgment as his "friend" on Facebook (if you haven't joined, this could sound ridiculously hokey but there is something very compelling here, still to be understood by moi)...and so I checked out his "wall." There I noticed a number of notes where people were wishing him a speedy recovery and such...which caused me to click through to his blog where I discovered that Jeffrey has been blogging about his cancer, an arcane form, his recent surgery following what appeared to be a recurrence (fortunately benign), and the tremendous energy he has brought to recovery, i.e. just post-op, he asked the nurses where the hospital gym was, they looked at him as if he were mad, and long-short, he ended up with a treadmill in his hospital room.
Jeffrey is also a painter and a jazz musician. He lists Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" as his fave all-time album, which gives us common cause right there, and, business interests aside, I am very happy to have made his acquaintance. You will be too.
PS: His blog, radiowalker, is must-reading for those interested in Web 2.0.
