"An epic commitment to quality will always achieve epic results!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
I'm in Dublin again!
I've probably flown over Ireland at least 100 times to and from keynotes and family trips to Europe and the Middle East, and yet, until this year, I'd never found myself fortunate enough to visit the country. Now, I'm in the midst of my second visit this year!
Earlier in January, I was over for a keynote for a CEO-led strategic planning meeting for ICON plc - a company in the clinical pharmaceutical trial space. They led the 64,000 global patient trials of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and so they are major players in the global healthcare space. They needed a realistic overview of the role that AI might play for them in the short, medium, and longer term. Like many, they've heard the hype and hysteria but needed something beyond the hype - and so they organized a two-day corporate offsite meeting of all their key staff, about 300 people.
The marketing and event agency in Dublin, the Energy Group found me and thought that I might be a good fit to open this event. That led to an exploratory call with the Icon team - and for that, I did a lot of prep work, digging into my research service to get concise insight into the role of AI within the industry, and to enhance and update what I already knew about the industry.
Further heavy-duty research and customization led to an extremely well-received keynote, with this comment coming back from the key person who booked me: "You were phenomenal... wow the feedback on your session has been fantastic!"
The fact is, I put A LOT of work into customizing every keynote, with a heck of a lot of research and presentation going into it - so I don't mind celebrating such feedback. I detail my customization process on a little microsite at customization.jimcarroll.com.
When you put your effort into delivering an epic quality product - in this, my keynote - you often end up with epic! results. So what brings me to Dublin again? The folks at KPMG Ireland heard about my talk and arranged to bring me over this week, through the London Speakers Bureau, one the world's largest speakers agencies. And so with that, I'll find myself on stage this Thursday afternoon, speaking to 1,000+ staff from KPMG Ireland about the impact of AI on their industry and the clients that they serve. That was not the only epic result of the original Icon keynote - the Energy Group also spoke to their client HP, who became convinced that I could do an epic job on a film project that happened a few weeks ago in San Jose. That video project will be released in the next few weeks.
Why do I consider all of this to be EPIC (one of my favorite words?) The photo used in today's quote is from our visit to Ireland in January and was taken outside the EPIC Irish Immigration Museum - that's its actual name, and so it features an EPIC sign out front. The museum experience itself? Of course - it was EPIC!
Being of Irish heritage, with the family on my mom's side traced back to 1749, our earlier visit last January was EPIC! My wife and I made our way down to the town that my ancestors are from, Kilmacthomas in County Waterford, where we met up with some of our long-lost ancestors - and then spent some time in the museum to learn so much more about this island nation which has truly been defined by centuries of immigration.
Ireland? Epic!
Putting quality work into a project so that you achieve epic results?
Even more epic!
Futurist Jim Carroll considers every day to be epic!