schneiderism

In February of last year I and a co-worker had an excellent time at Adaptive Path’s MX Conference held in San Francisco. The speakers were solid. The cool, smart and interesting people-to-meet quotient was quite high (including Adam Richardson of frog and Brooks Protzmann of Dell). I immediately became an advocate, have blogged about some of the speakers here, and continue to relate back to the experience and what I learned. The theme of the conference, “Managing Experience through Creative Leadership,” is one that is clearly industry agnostic, focused on creating successful and engaging audience experiences, and stands to benefit a multitude of businesses and teams regardless of their proximity to or intersection with a stereotypically “creative” business. This stuff should matter to all of us.

I’m going back again this year, and those that know me have already heard this about a thousand times. I have sent out invitations to join me at the conference. I am attending with a co-worker and friend, who also is a participant in our yearly “Innovation Tours.” This year’s tour begins with the MX Conference, and then we are scheduling tours and information sessions with a number of companies and organizations in and around the Bay Area. This should be an inspiring and invaluable trip, and an opportunity to make some great connections.

I received a confirmation email from Adaptive Path, and in that was something that I thought to be incredibly cool. They are paying a lot of attention to the time we are not at the sessions, and creating opportunities for all of the attendees to cross paths. There are the obligatory end of day cocktail receptions, and daily lunches scheduled as part of the conference, but it is the reservations for tables of eight made at restaurants around San Francisco that struck me as especially cool. As an attendee, just decide where you want to eat and show up. The reservation is already made and you have no idea who you will be dining with, which presents all kinds of happy accidents. It’s a dining/conference mashup, and a service for those not familiar with the city to get them out and meeting others.

So, yeah, I’m looking forward to this conference. I’m planning on live tweeting (inspired by David Armano’s tweets from the AdAge event a few weeks ago) the interesting things that I learn, and will try to recap at the end of each day here on schneiderism. You can follow the conference on twitter by following me.