August 16th, 2011
I am a fortunate one.
Fortunate, blessed, lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky.
Period.
I am married to a wonderful, wonderful human being and she usually enjoys my company. My children speak to me, sometimes they will not stop speaking to me in fact. I do work that I love…madly. I have not had a “boss” in four years, and plan to keep it that way. That is some pretty wonderful stuff. Sometimes I even get to do cool work with my best friend.
Jason and I started building the Talent Anarchy brand a few years ago for our collaborative work. We each have an individual body of work, but in addition to that there is this work that we do together and we can also bring a different energy to something as a team. Jason gets to be the smart guy and I get to be the inappropriate guy…it works. We hit the road to spread our message, we keynoted a couple of SHRM state conferences and did a few corporate gigs. Then we decided to write a book about social capital. We spent about a year pushing through that, sending draft after draft back and forth and came to rest on an almost final draft earlier this year. We had a couple of publishing houses that were immediately interested, but both of those deals ended up falling through. Silliness. We have a good book, with battle tested content that is 95% written and a pretty robust platform for promoting it and we have not found a publisher. Pure silliness.
So, maybe we will self publish. We are figuring that out now. It will see the light of day one way or another.
It has been really good to work through that process together and I look forward to writing more books with Jason, but it has also been good for us to get back out on the road this year and get in front of people. That is the sweet spot for us.
We had a great audience in Las Vegas at the 2011 SHRM Annual Conference, and that has led to additional gigs. We are also really excited about bringing a new interactive session (Hack Lab) to HRevolution later this year. But up next for us is Chicago for the 2011 Illinois SHRM State Conference, and we are pretty jazzed about it. The planning folks have put together a pretty interesting lineup and I think that this show is going to have great energy.
Usually when Jason and I roll into a conference we can just get by on our good looks…but the other keynotes are Ryan Estis and China Gorman, which makes us the ugly kids on this agenda. So we are really going to have to work.
In all seriousness, we are really looking forward to this event. We are appreciative of the event planners and we are appreciative of the folks that will show up to hear what we have to say. We do not take ourselves too seriously, but we do take our work seriously. If you come out for us you can expect us to work hard, you can expect to laugh, to think and to take some new information and ideas back to work. We come to set talent free.
The Talent Anarchy keynote is Monday, August 22nd 12:30pm – 1:45pm, and I have a session on Tuesday the 23rd at 10:45am focused on resetting the diversity and inclusion conversation. Hope to see you there.
Be good to each other.