18 Speakers in a Single Day - The i.e.* Launch

June 23, 2011, I went to two events and heard 18 speakers. That’s a lot of information to take in on one day.  Most of it was intended to be inspirational and motivating, and the last four were just a good way to end the day with some laughs about how the media and our culture have changed so much through the computer age.

The first event was the launch of the project i.e.*, which stands for Innovative Excellence. It is funded by the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce, whose chairman is currently the president and publisher of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. That cleared up my initial objection as to why he was co-hosting when you don’t think of the daily paper when you think of innovation and excellence. The city’s innovators were invited at a ticket price of $125, including lunch and free parking at Mayo Island. My employer purchased a block of tickets and I was told the day before the event that I was going, so that’s how I came to be there. From talking to others, that’s how many people came to be there, and then some were local artists and activists who had purchased their own tickets. (I saw some online grumbling that the ticket price was prohibitive for others.)

The speakers, called “provocateurs” in the program, were primarily self-employed in business or artistic ventures. We heard from a mural artist, an ad agency kingpin, a writing coach, a portrait artist, a bio-diesel taxi company, a leadership preschool founder, a marketing agency founder, a musician who had branched out into commercials, an event artist, a child prodigy, a college think tank organizer, and a photo booth self-expression artist. In a session of break-out sessions, there were more entrepreneurs to choose from, including people who had started their own businesses or acquired grants to do innovative work.

I can’t find fault with anyone’s success story because their success speaks for itself. And yes, we all can be inspired by it. It would take much space to recount the stories I heard, so I will reference a couple. Both had to do with the nude female form. Being proud of your body, and thus yourself, even if you do not conform to what society considers beautiful, was the theme of the morning nudity. A painter and her subject both were generous enough to display huge, almost photo-realistic, paintings of themselves naked, with strategic parts not at all concealed. The point, I gather, was through this, you can become comfortable with yourself. Still, the crowd chatter during the breaks indicated some people were uncomfortable by the paintings. The models were very brave to do this outside an art gallery setting.

But when an artist in the afternoon session showed a slide of her nude self-portrait, I wondered what kind of double-standard we had here. The nude female form, fat or thin, Barbie doll or Rubenesque, has always been art, so we can get away with displaying ourselves as artistic. But if you’re a man, you have to resign your congressional seat.

During the event, the audience was urged to shout out the common British kudo “Brilliant!” whenever they heard anything that deserved an amen.  Let me list what I thought was brilliant about this event.

Staging it at the furniture store, La Dif. There was adequate parking available two blocks away on Mayo Island. The furniture store had plenty of chairs and sofas. For one break-out session, we sat on beds in the bed area. The store’s loading dock, where they also stage patio furniture, was our lunch location. The chair I sat in had a $3,000 price tag on it, marked down to $1,299. I would not pay that much for that chair. It was not $1,299 worth of comfortable. Still, I saw a lot of furniture and decorative items that dazzled me. If I had money, I would shop here. Score for La Dif.

Each speaker was limited to 15 minutes, and each introduced the next one. That kept the program moving. You didn’t have the host returning repeatedly to introduce the next speaker. If you were uninterested in a speaker, you didn’t have long to wait for a change. The audio-visuals were top notch. I didn’t see one slide presentation that looked like a Powerpoint.

Lunch was brilliantly served family style. Instead of waiting in a slow-moving buffet line like so many cattle, you just picked a seat and served yourself from bowls of food on the table. Brilliant! And we had roaming entertainers during lunch including a belly dancer and a really annoying duo of masked men pushing baby carriages and playing loud baby crying noise. I assume this was performance art.

Our ice breaking activity, which also served as a leg-stretching break, was to find other people in the audience who had been issued the same color pencil at registration that we had. Then your little group took a walk around the building to chat and find interesting things to look at. During our walk, we were instructed to email a photo back to the mothership of an interesting find. This was an amusing break, even though at first it was chaotic.

Each group was embedded with someone from the organizing committee to ensure we stayed focused. Being on the peach colored pencil team gave me an investment in the program from the onset. In the afternoon activity, we did the opposite. We had to form a group with all different colored pencils, and then crowdsource the answers to three problems posed to us.

We were snacked like preschoolers throughout the day. There was the traditional bread products, coffees and sodas in the morning, but in the afternoon, we had more beverages, bowls of candy, and sherbet cups to fight off the after lunch drowsies. Thanks! Seconds before the closing, staff ran through the audience with cans of ice cold Switch beverages, another great promotional opportunity, and we all gave a closing toast to the day, which forced you to open the drink right then and sample it. No sneaking it home and giving it away or forgetting about it. Brilliant!

So if I didn’t come away with any new resolves to liberate myself through artistic nudity or start my own shoe store, I did get some great ideas for how to organize and pace a conference.

A couple of hours later, I was in a seat at the Barksdale Theater for the monthly Social Media Club of Richmond meeting, which I will also not go into detail about. It was an amusing, delightful, funny look at the wonderful, Internet-connected world we all live in now, the wealth of information at our fingertips, the memes, the crowd-sharing, the opportunities to make our mark in the world of public opinion, presented by young people who are doing jobs that 20 years ago did not exist. I could see real effort and thought went into their presentations, and it was a relaxing and comforting way to end the day.