5 Days of Great Conferences

I had two conferences to attend back-to-back. They were both excellent, but for different reasons.

The first was the WCA Leadership Conference. This is an annual Christian event and the speakers are truly amazing: Tony Blair, Bono, Tim Keller (pastor of a thriving church in the heart of Manhattan), Carly Fiorina, Wess Stafford (CEO of Compassion International, and my favorite), the founder of Kiva.com (Tara’s favorite), and many more.

This year was primarily pointed at poverty and notable because there were several successful models presented:

• The President of Good African Coffee had a model that was very focused on capitalism (and a full throated capitalism at that).
• The Kiva.com president presented a capitalistic model where the money was given as an interest free loan from the western world.
• Wess Stafford gave a moving account of his time in Africa (where he grew up as the child of missionaries). God took some of the tremendous evil that was done to him and used it to transform him into a minister to millions of children worldwide. His book “Too Small to Ignore” was given away, and it is fascinating. Compassions model is a charitable ‘teach a man to fish’ model.

All in all, it was an important conference for me. Re-grounded myself in walk with Christ, reminded me of my purpose and opened my mind to a lot of injustice in the world.

Then there was the WoLF conference. WoLF (Women’s Leadership Forum) is a remarkable organization and I’ve had the good fortune to be involved as a leader in the group in Tampa for six months. Best Buy believes in it enough that it is the ONLY national conference this year… and they flew 5,000 people from every segment and level of the company to Vegas for it.

The highlight for me was a 6:30 a.m. breakout session about work-life balance… and it highlights how fast the company moves. During an executive breakout session a frankly very junior store employee let our most senior executives have it. Where most of the world’s corporate officers would have quietly collected her name and ended her career, our CEO and his team not only asked for more from her, but got the SVP of HR for North America to organize this 6:30 breakout. We had a very frank discussion and a lot of people really opened up. It was neat to see the respect and honor that was paid to our store employees by our highest ranking staff, and the stories they told were shocking and moving. Even in a great company like this, there is some nasty sexism and I’m proud of these ladies for sharing so openly.

Second highlight was a lunch with our CEO. My group in Florida won and award and we got to eat with him as reward. Brian is an amazing leader, very honest, passionate, very humble, very, very smart. No question was off limits and several people tested the limit.



My flight home was a red-eye and I got to walk around for a few and take some pics. Here’s a few of my favorites.


Glass on the Ceiling at the Bellagio Hotel


"Why lie, I need a beer"


More Bellagio Glass


These guys stand on the Strip and hand out business card for hookers. He suddenly got shy when I started to take his picture.