Chillin'Competition

Last Thursday I participated in the announcement of the first “30 in their 30s list” made by W@Competition, of which I was also happy to be a juror. Seen from the inside, this really was a neutral, independent exercise, and the women who made it onto the lists (available here) all very much deserved it (as also did many of those who did not), so congratulations!

Interestingly, however, this is an exception in many ways. Anyone familiar with awards, prizes and recognitions in our field realises that they are not always given on the merits; sometimes they are priced prizes, other times they are sponsored-for and in other cases they are simply a bit random. Pablo and I have typically been quite well treated by some of the organizers of some of these things so we think we are in a position to say these things.

Although, again, there certainly are a number of serious, well researched rankings and awards, others that don’t necessarily meet this criteria are mushrooming. People within the industry can distinguish the serious from the non serious, but other people can’t.

One example, a couple of weeks ago, we saw this  LinkedIn post by Damien Geradin explaining that he had been offered an “Internet Law Firm of the year” award which only required a payment of 2795 pounds. Apparently Damien responded that for that price he’d like to be named “Master of the Universe”.

So that gave us an idea. With a view to lowering barriers to entry in the awards market, and in order to serve the competition community, we have decided to create our very own awards, the Chillin’Competition “True Best of the Best, Really” awards.

The idea behind it is that anyone interested in a prize will get one;  you simply need to tell us what prize you would like to receive (the only restriction is that Pablo will keep the “True Best of the Best Academic Star of the Century” award, and that I  will compete with Damien for the “Best of the Best Master of the  Universe Award” (which I will win -because I created it- and will include in my cv and on business cards) 😉

Alternatively, you can also tell us something about yourself and then we will craft an award that suits you. For example, if you wrote part of a 1 page newsletter piece on, let’s say, the truck cartel, then we can give you  an award for the “True Best of the Best Contribution to a Professional Publication in the Automobile Sector”.

We could then give ourselves the award at a dinner ceremony (i.e. a pretext to have some laughts at a tax deductible dinner).  We are only partially kidding; if we have enough applications we will do a dinner, trust us.