I had my first ever speaking gig last week, when I spoke at the Digital Interactive Gaming conference on the subject of inspiring teams through innovation. I was incredibly well prepared, well practiced, had kick assed slides, and had what I thought was a pretty killer interactive idea.
My talk, called “Innovation Days for Small Teams”, was really about fostering autonomy, mastery, and purpose in software development teams. It’s something that I’m passionate about, and I believe that Innovation Days are one of the key things that changed the IT Department at Info-Tech.
The talk went amazingly well, I managed to get some audience interaction going on, asked a few questions, and did a fun little Innovation Day pitch idea where the room got to create an innovation day pitch and present it to the room. It turned out to be a lot of fun, and worked way better than I figured it would, with five minutes being about the right amount.
Afterwards I got to talk to a few of the people in the room, and really enjoyed the one-on-one time with people who wanted to go back to their offices and implement Innovation Days. If I inspired even one person to make their work place better, I think that’s a pretty cool accomplishment.
My slide deck is available on my SpeakerDeck page, and there’s a full blog post on the Info-Tech IT Blog called Innovation Days for Small Teams.
I also got to meet Jonathan Snook, who was one of the people who inspired me, and really helped me out with some simple CSS stuff back in 2002, when I was pushing TSN into table-less design. Being able to finally shake his hand and have a one-on-one chat with him was pretty cool.
Here’s my “best of” for this week (since I missed last week)
Comic of the Week: The Walking Dead #104 – The “Something to Fear” storyline has been really interesting, and it just got ratcheted up several notches this week with Carl doing something incredibly stupid.
TV Show of the Week: Walking Dead has been consistently great every week this year. This year is about external conflict – with the tagline “Fight the Dead, Fear the Living” really living up to its potential.
Movie of the Week: Skyfall, the latest James Bond film is one of the best ones ever with a great villain, a solid story, and a nice tie-in to the later Bond films as we leave prequel territory and head into the regular canon.
Magazine of the Week: Wired Magazine has an amazing article on John McAfee’s Last Stand as a Wired Single and a Kindle Single.
Website of the Week: Who is John McAfee is written by the man himself, and is a pretty great recounting of some truly scary and crazy stuff.