I woke up late and rushed downtown to the Marriott to register for the conference, and I got there just in time for lunch. I enjoyed the strawberry parfait and talked to some of the other participants before the keynote speech, which was quite interesting.
The first keynote speaker was Ron Meyer, President of Universal Studios. Some interesting bits I took away from his speech were:
Never ever assume anything
“Sometimes I have staff say don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. Sometimes they don’t take care of it, people can forget, slip up, etc. If I assume that they took care of it, then bad things can happen. I need to know they took care of it, I have to make sure and to follow up, because if things go wrong it doesn’t reflect badly on them, it reflects badly on me. So I need people to do what they say they’ll do. If you say I’ll call you tomorrow, then you better call me tomorrow and not three days from now, even if it’s to say that you don’t have the answer for me yet but you’re still working on it. You can’t leave people in a black hole.”
So true. Every time something screwed up, it was because I assumed someone else would do what they’re supposed to do. You really have to do everything yourself in order to get anything done, or at least you have to be certain when you delegate responsibility. At the same time, I’ve committed the sin of not communicating as much as I should have with teammates.
I didn’t get my top choice for the seminar, but I did get to meet the CEO of an online education provider, who had a lot of insight into school choice/voucher issues. Unfortunately, the session was far too short and the interests of the seminar group too broad to really drill down into the heart of the issues – most people wanted to hear advice about working in finance/consulting, career changes and relocation, entrepreneurship. I guess I’m the only one who really cares about impact assessment.
The second keynote speaker was Paul Stebbins, CEO of World Fuel Services. He is a great speaker, but he had so much insight and advice to share that I simply couldn’t keep up with it all, and there isn’t one thing in particular I took away, other than that it is possible to be too good at public speaking, that one’s message gets lost along the way. It’s not that I wasn’t paying attention (maybe glancing around a bit to see if my friend from Colby had turned up) or have a short attention span because I take comprehensive notes of lectures on a daily basis, but its that even the best speakers need to help their audience compartmentalize information into an overall structure, or at least slow down enough to let people figure it out themselves. Pauses can be as important as sentences.
