August 9th, 2011
Wow. The last month and a half has just flown by. I had several short business trips in July followed by a short family trip, followed by another short business trip, followed by a big family vacation followed by a few days in St Louis for ASAE 2011 which just wrapped up.
And I have not posted anything here since July 29th…just shameful.
But it has been good stuff. Our big family trip was a week in the Rockies, and we all love Colorado and we all love to do different stuff when we are there. I got to climb another Fourteener with my father in law…this time we did the Grays/Torreys tandem. It was awesome and horrible and the view from the top of a Fourteener is just hard to beat. Good, good stuff. My wife loves white water rafting, and we got to do some of that, our girls love to swim and they got to do a bunch of that. And I think that our son might have found his calling in a drawer in the kitchen.
The day after returning from our busy, busy vacation I was off to St. Louis where I greatly enjoyed my first ASAE General Meeting. I believe there were about 5500 people in attendance, and I got to see a lot of folks that I have gotten to know on-line, as well as some good association friends.
I had the privilege of presenting an Ignite session on Monday afternoon, and I love it when things like this are integrated into a larger conference. There were a bunch of great presenters, great audience and great energy in the room. My session was “Why Profanity Kicks @$$!” and the video should be available in a couple of weeks.
I also presented a full session Tuesday morning on “How to Fly Your Freak Flag.” If you visit this blog often you know that the freak flag is something that I talk about on a regular basis and it always seemed to resonate with folks when I talked about it on my blog or on Twitter. I decided to get a little bit more serious about the message and my very first Ignite presentation was Flying Your Freak Flag (at the 2011 ASAE Great Ideas Conference)…that session also seemed to really resonate with folks, so I decided that I should make it a full 60-90 minute session. I submitted it for consideration at this years ASAE Annual Meeting, and they went for it. Again it resonated. The feedback that I got was pretty strong…I am going to keep talking about this topic.
One of the highlights of this trip was that I was able to sit in on a conversation with Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant about their soon to be released book, Humanize! I am big fans of Jamie and Maddie, and I am really excited about their book…their message is very timely. I am pretty serious about books, and words and ideas, so I am not saying this just because they are my friends…I truly, truly think that this is a book that you should order…I believe that this is an important book.
We live in serious times and something becoming increasingly clear to me is that we are trying to fix 21st century problems with 20th century tools. I do not think that we have even begun to have conversations about what the real problem with our economy is…but I think that much of that conversation is actually in this book.
Home for a little bit now, and glad to be here…but very much looking forward to hitting the road in a few weeks for the Illinois SHRM Conference.
Be good to each other.