A day of networking

Let me tell you about yesterday... the day I went to the conference focusing on Sports Event Management...

Its extremely exciting entering a foreign world... a world which many people have been working in for many many years... in some ways it feels as though you are trespassing in somebody elses party... in some ways it feels like coming to a new country, to a new city, to a new school... but its exciting and without doubt the day taught me a lot...

Attending the conference was well worth the financial sacrifice made, without a doubt... where else can you meet people who breathe the work that you want to do in the future. Where else can you listen to all the trends, all the hype, all the buzz words... what would have taken me weeks to research by myself on the internet, took me 10 hours during a conference... having met a lot of interesting people and observed how it all works, I'm pleased to say I feel I got my money's worth...

Did I get a job out of it yesterday? Not immediately but I'm quite confident that the experience and what I learned will pay itself off in the future... :-)

Sitting with the CEO of this and the CEO of that, people that on a regular basis meet the prime ministers and presidents of countries and are in senior positions, its interesting to see how they differ... they differ in their ability to talk, they differ in the messages they try to send out, they differ in age, they differ in cultural background... but what they all share is that in some way, they are successful... and are experts

It was interesting seeing a proper traditional old "Right Honorable" British minister speak ... all he does is speak for a living, talk is a politicians weapon... and there are few politicians in the world that can speak as eloquently as British politicians... incredible

It was interesting to see a Sheik offer his view... his perspective and way of speaking differed greatly to the ministers... his message and form of communication was far more in form of "teaching" the audience something... without doubt an experienced speaker but something tells me that he might have been a little out of his depths... in no way was it obvious as he was extremely talented and knowledgeable but there was something...

Or the Russian CEO who referenced to Vladimir Putin a great many times... his speech was powerful, I couldn't help but think many times throughout the speech that it had been written by some of Russias most intelligent speech writers. The Russians CEO's delivery was truly fabulous... but for some reason it seemed scripted ... something that could only be noticed in very brief moments...

Or the way with which different presenters used Powerpoint, and the strength of the powerpoints... some read every single word off of the powerpoint... obviously having not had time to prepare as much as others... others speaking for 40 minutes without so much as a piece of paper... there were 30 year olds who clearly have been able to speak their entire lives as the way they spoke could not be learned in 10 years, but must have been born with...

All in all the presentations were very well done... and extremely interesting... with laughs coming few and far between but when they did, they were extremely good.


These conferences are always interesting events, everyone spying the name tag to see who they are and who they are working for... everyone looking confused at my name tag as all it said was Richard Strom... and no Company... who was this guy?

A really striking image... Richard Strom followed by BLANK... that blank is clearly what I'm in the process of filling in... and the conferenc was a great step in the right direction!!!

No picture today... :-) I'll try to offer a good one tomorrow