Join my tribe! It continues to amaze me how few suppliers of products and services bother to attend educational sessions at conferences. Rather, they restrict themselves to the associated trade show. Folks, you’re making a mistake! You need to join […]
1969 I am a nineteen-year-old college student, talking with friends in my 500-year-old room above the entrance to Merton College, Oxford. The world up to this point has been a fascinating place, full of interesting things to learn, and new experiences […]
What’s more important at a meeting: engagement or perfection? “To dance with customers in an act of co-creation: This is part of 37Signals’ secret. From their book to their blog to their clearly stated point of view about platforms and […]
Today, you need to produce for a micro conference market. Fifty years ago, producers and marketers got smart. They saw the miracle of mass marketing and they adopted it as their own. They amped up mass production and bet on […]
We can’t talk about how we could do things better around here We can’t talk about what isn’t working We can’t talk about the countless opportunities we ignore We can’t talk about what hurts We can’t talk about dignity We […]
RIP, Conference Curator! No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. —Albert Einstein In 2012 I challenged the concept of the conference curator: someone who somehow curates a conference program, like the curator […]
Libby O’Malley rocks. She read my 2012 post A letter to event technology companies trying to sell me stuff and—wow!—actually took the time to figure out how to introduce me to her new product Muster Me in a way I […]
Passive programs are past their prime. “Part of the art of making change happen is seeing which cultural tropes are past their prime and having the guts to invent new ones.” —Seth Godin, Skinny, sad and pale It took hundreds […]
“If you can’t sell it, you can’t build it.” When you’re trying to sell services in a capitalist society, this makes sense. (Yes, people often build material things before they try to sell them, but it’s often not a great idea. […]
Sometimes an experience is worth a million words. In 1982, Australian physicians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren proposed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori was the cause of most ulcers, challenging the established medical doctrine that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too […]