In October of 2000, we received a panicked call from a consultant in the United Kingdom, wanting to know if we would share what we knew about e-commerce with him so he could close a deal with the CIO of the chemical giant ICI. ICI had already hosted an event where leading thinkers in the field of e-commerce from Cisco, IBM and others had gathered to educate ICI executives on the power of e-commerce. ICI had learned about the power of the medium, but they didn’t know how to actually use that power. A big problem, we discovered, was that ICI had no common, simple language with which to talk about e-commerce.
So PencilBox developed a four-day educational seminar for ICI, bringing together various business units within ICI to build that common language about e-commerce.