Daily Inspiration: "The best way to find creative solutions to your real-world problems is to listen to the wisdom of those who have already found them!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
You know you've been a real road-warrior speaker when you check into your Hilton hotel in San Jose and get a feeling that you've been here before! You look back in your email, and realize that it was once a Fairmont hotel and that you spoke in this exact hotel at an event in 2006!
I looked up the event that I spoke at in 2006 and realized that it was also for SAP - see yesterday's post for a reference to that other event. In this case, I was an opening keynote for existing and potential customers of SAP from throughout Silicon Valley, where I shared duties on the stage with the CEO, Bill McDermott.
What was more important than the keynote though was the additional panel discussion that I led right after my keynote - where customers of SAP were leading others through their strategies, methodologies, and structure for aligning to a faster future and dealing with disruptive trends. I ended up doing these panel discussions - letting customers tell the story - about 20 times or more throughout North America on behalf of SAP.
Notice the tagline in the promo copy - "Creative solutions to real-world challenges." In this particular event, I was interviewing executives from companies such as Johnsonville Sausage, Abiomed, and Pressman Toy - not major global companies, but organizations who were learning how to deal with the disruptive change swirling around them. This came on the heels of similar panel discussions with Adobe, Lennox, Fossil Watches, Hunt Petroleum, Fossil Watches, and many more.
All of these panel discussions delved into the world of digital transformation - how could we align our organization to deal with volatility, complexity, and fast-moving change by developing more agility and flexibility?
