Gordon Frazer: The new boss at Microsoft UK
Well the new boss at Microsoft UK has finally been announced. Gordon Frazer will be taking over the helm on 31st July. He seems like a really great regular guy. He's climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, which I've always wanted to do but never got around to, he's had a bash for his 40th birthday, has some lovely kids and is a true family man. What has amazed me about the announcement about the appointment is how little coverage this has received, both throughout the blogosphere in general. As far as I've discovered when I've been searching, no one has blogged any opinions, no one has commented on anything outside of the normal news posts from the UK press site. This is really strange. There's hardly anything written anywhere. So why was this announcement such a non-event news wise?
The UK subsidiary is the largest sub outside of main campus in Redmond. Most of the employees here work "in the field" and have considerable influence across corp. A lot of our work is implemented as "best practice" at corp., and we in the UK have the largest amount of "ex-pats" working over there. The topline director of my virtual (Evangelist) team is from the UK, and our departing General Manager is leaving the UK to move to Redmond too.
At the company meeting on Friday when the announcement was made, James asked whether Gordons appointment would make any difference to the way we work in Microsoft UK:
"I blogged about Lisa Brummel and how if you want to bring about big change, you put in an ousider. Coming from South Africa Gordon is obviously an outsider, so is this a move to bring about big change, and if so what is it?"
(This was based on his blog entry about Kuhn's idea that revolutions in thinking come from outsiders - people inside a community cling on to old assumptions").
So do we change an already sucessful model and way of working over here? or do we look for amazing new ways to innovate and come up with more new practices for corp. I'll be really interested to watch this evolve... But meanwhile I need to book that trip to Kilimanjaro...