Oregon Arts Summit: Mighty Toy Cannon Report #1

Culture Jock took the bold step of live blogging during the Oregon Arts Summit at Nike's Tiger Woods Center today. While he was being all tweety and Web 2.0, I was madly scribbling notes on an old-fashioned pad of paper. I took a lot of notes, so it may take me awhile to absorb what I learned about "The Art of Collaboration" -- the theme of the day.

While you're waiting for my thoughtful commentary and analysis, I'll warm up by sharing my shallowest and most irrelevant observation:

Nike's Tiger Woods Center has someone on its catering staff who looks a lot like Phil Knight. During one of the breaks between sessions (they were called "movement breaks," which I suppose could mean either stretching or running to the bathroom), I was chatting with a colleague when out of the corner of my eye I thought I spotted Phil Knight! Except that he was carrying a tray loaded with dirty coffee cups.

A short time later, I met White Bird's new general manager, Phil Busse, for the first time. He asked, "Did you see that catering guy who looks like Phil Knight?" so I knew I wasn't crazy. We agreed that pretending to be a catering guy would be a cool thing to do if you owned a mega-billion dollar multinational corporation.

I'll write more about Phil Knight later. Just to warn you, it's going to be an argument for convincing Mr. Knight to invest $100 million to turn Memorial Coliseum into a sports and recreation complex with a Nike museum.

2 comments:

culturejock said...

Although I missed the Phil Knight look-alike, and don't care to hear much more about THAT, I am seriously looking forward to your other thoughts. However I must inform you that apparently the term "web 2.0" is now obsolete. I'll let you know if and when I figure out what we're calling "it" these days.

MightyToyCannon said...

I was pretty sure that I was demonstrating a lack of tech savvy in using the term "Web 2.0," but I couldn't think of what to call it. I'm sure in a few years, all this "social networking" will seem quaint and passe. I'll get to my deeper thoughts on the Summit after I catch up on the work I didn't get done by spending the day there yesterday.

As for the Nike angle, I just heard that they've laid off 500 people from headquarters. I hope the Phil Knight look-alike survived the cut.