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Wow, I'm pretty exhausted. Tired from late nights. Tired from running across the cavernous McCormick Place. Tired from stuffing my brain with so much new knowledge and insight!

I started Tuesday in Jeff De Cagna's packed session on "ungovernance" (summarized in his Associations Now article). As I told Jeff, I'm already drinking the coolaid, now we just need to figure out how to implement this stuff! Will be interesting to hear of any dissenting feedback post conference...

For the final thought leader session I dove into Robyn Water's Hummer/Mini session. It was a slick lecture on leveraging paradoxes born from our increasingly complex world. It was a good session, but Robyn should have made the extra effort to better relate her body of work/research to the association world.

For the last learning lab, I jumped into the jam packed "60 marketing tips in 75 minutes" session. It was surprisingly entertaining and chock full of great tips. Though, after tip #4, I realized that the pace would not allow the presenters to do much more than read each tip verbatim from the slides. So I made a note to get the slides and bailed. Then I tried to get into the data driven session...

...which was standing room only, with folks peering in from the doors. Now sure why these two sessions were not slotted into bigger rooms. The "situation room" session barely had two dozen people and it was in a massive room. Anyway.

I finally settled into the demand-driven strategies session, which was quite valuable (hint, don't just study your members, look at your members' customers and anyone is benefits from your members' success).

Oh boy, here it comes... barf....

The closing general session with Chris Gardner was entertaining/colorful, and inspiring. Lots of personal/human takeaway - though, once again, zero professional value (other than meta lessons of perseverance and commitment).