"The best way to find creative solutions to your real-world problems is to listen to the wisdom of those who have already found them!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
You know you've been a real road-warrior speaker when you check into your Hilton hotel in San Jose and get a feeling that you've been here before! You look back in your email, and realize that it was once a Fairmont hotel and that you spoke in this exact hotel at an event in 2006! This happens a lot - I figure that I'm about 2,000 events in at this point, having been appearing on stage for close to 33 years - and so as they say, I've been here before! It's an odd job but someone has to do it!
I looked up the event that I spoke at in 2006 and realized that it was also for SAP - see yesterday's post for a reference to that other event. In this case, I was an opening keynote for existing and potential customers of SAP from throughout Silicon Valley, where I shared duties on the stage with the CEO, Bill McDermott.
What was more important than the keynote though was the additional panel discussion that I led right after my keynote - where customers of SAP were leading others through their strategies, methodologies, and structure for aligning to a faster future and dealing with disruptive trends. At that time, I was in the midst of a string of probably 30 such events for SAP, all of which came on the heels of my original keynote for them back in 2003 in Toronto.
What a ride that was - I ended up doing these panel discussions - letting customers tell the story - about 20 times or more throughout North America on behalf of SAP. And indeed, we were way ahead of our time, even doing one in a virtual online webcast format some 18 years ago.
Notice the tagline in the promo copy - "Creative solutions to real-world challenges." In this particular event, I was interviewing executives from companies such as Johnsonville Sausage, Abiomed, and Pressman Toy - not major global companies, but organizations who were learning how to deal with the disruptive change swirling around them. This came on the heels of similar panel discussions with Adobe, Lennox, Fossil Watches, Hunt Petroleum, Fossil Watches, and many more.
All of these panel discussions delved into the world of digital transformation - how could we align our organization to deal with volatility, complexity, and fast-moving change by developing more agility and flexibility? It was a powerful formula for success. The key strategy that the now-CEO of SAP North America hit upon by bringing me in for so many panel discussions? Lloyd Adams realized that one of the best ways to get across to potential and existing customers the transformative opportunities of digital transformation was to hear the stories of other customers who had already been down the path.
These were extremely content-rich discussions - so much so that many of the observations that I drew out from these CIOs and CTOs were powerful stories of innovation and leadership that became the foundation for my book of 2007. Ready, Set, Done - How to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast. That book covered the strategies of many of those I interviewed and became a guidebook for dealing with a faster world of transformative change,.
One of the individuals I interviewed on stage, for example, was with a video game company - an industry that changes at a crazy speed. That became an entire section in the book.
What was the key lesson from all of these events? Powerful insight on innovation, specifically - "the best way to find creative solutions to your real-world problems is to listen to the wisdom of those who have already found them!"
Futurist Jim Carroll figures he has spoken to over 2 million people at more than 2,000 events for the last 23 years.