The Design Symphony Experience

The Seth Godin Experience

Last month I had the chance to meet the infamous Seth Godin - business writer, presenter, and marketer extraordinaire when he came to the University of Maryland business school.

Seth's writing is fantastic and his presenting lived up to his written word reputation. Here's my mindmap of notes from the meeting:

Download 3.4mb Mindmap PDF

The #1 takeaway for me from Seth's presentation?

Don't be afraid to risk.

And then risk some more.

Seth told a great story about one of his son's bathtub toys and a red circle that perfectly illustrates the point. Give me a call (two-zero-two -- 834-0111) or send me an email and I'd be happy to tell you the whole story (it's too long for a blog post).

My Personal IPO

Earlier this summer I had the chance to deliver a presentation at the CFUNITED 2006 Conference. This conference is organized by a client of mine, TeraTech Inc. and I've had the pleasure of speaking there for the last three years. In 2005, I received the great honor of being selected as the conference's top speaker.

This summer's presentation was entitled, "My Personal IPO: Taking Yourself Public to the World."

The presentation went very well and the audience feedback was great. About three weeks later I received an email from the Executive Editor of Cold Fusion Developer's Journal - the national magazine and leading industry publication for Cold Fusion programming. She said that she had heard about my presentation and was wondering if I could turn it into an article for their magazine.

Needless to say I was excited by this opportunity.

I wrote the article and sent it off to be published. You can imagine my surprise when three weeks later I received the issue and my article had turned into the cover story!

You can read the entire article here.

Now I am excited to be working on a book that will expand on this concept of personal branding and a personal IPO. I will definitely keep you posted as this project develops and look forward to big announcements in 2007!