Acronym

Bruce Turkel’s opening session rocked, I thought, but it was my sort of thing – he’s a lively speaker, uses visual aids and music. His concept about great ideas is that just like all music is made of the same seven notes (do, re, mi…), “creativity and artistry, great ideas are NOT about creating something new from scratch, they are about taking old things and looking at them differently”. I dig it. Also, ideas don’t have to be used – the act of fishing is more important than catching fish (“otherwise it would be called catching”!). When they come – in the shower, while driving - embrace your ideas! Write them down. They never come when you want them, but when you least expect them.

He then gave each of us our own little black harmonica. I thought that was a stellar way to start a conference!

Some stats I learned – the Great Ideas Conference started in 2005. This year, there are 500 attendees from all 50 states plus London, Canada, Singapore, and China. 35% of attendees were there for the first one in 2005 – which I think says a lot!

After the general session, I attended a great session on wikis presented by Jeff De Cagna. I won’t summarize it here, I don’t think that’s what people necessarily want to read, but I may do a post later on about it on my own blog (sorry about the shameless plug – I am shameless!) because I really think my association would benefit from setting up a wiki and I think I’ll need to figure out the best way to do that. But, I have something totally unrelated to report, which is that we actually had all five “independent thinkers” in the room, of We have Always Done It That Way fame! Jeff let it slip that a second edition of their fabulous book is in the works. So look out for that in due course. And in the meantime, I was lucky enough to be the first person to get all five signatures in my copy of the book, which means that I won the chance to have dinner with the group tomorrow night! Score! But suffice it to say that they are all here at the conference, and the book is available to buy in the ASAE bookstore I believe, and it is a really awesome book so everyone should buy one and get their signatures.

So I am now off to the welcome reception, and signing off until tomorrow.