I followed the conference on Twitter but your recap is definitely more complete. I really like René Vezina and I am glad he gave great insights that did not get as much coverage as Seth’s stuff.

Take Care!

A +

Yasha

Forgive me, I wish I could have come, but I handed out my final paper last night at midnight to complete my winter semester. Not only that, my summer intensive course already started since Monday. So yeah, while you were giving your speech, I was at HEC Montréal.

I’m sure that you did well. Btw, do you mind sending me your PPT?

Obrigada :)

@Alex: merci pour ton radar de fautes d’orthographe. As-tu des commentaires à propos du contenu de mon billet?

@nicolask7: Actually, it was the first hypothesis that my friends and I came out with when we saw Seth leaving that quickly. In an empathic way, we could imagine that it must not be that easy for his family to always see him traveling to every corner of the planet (unless he finds a purple cow :P)

I beg your pardon for my delay of response. I was polishing my final paper and applying for a teaching position at my university. Moreover, I believed that I should take some time to research around the blogosphere to gather other persons’ opinions who have also attended your conference.

Now that I have reflected on it, I admit that I should have tried to go say hi to you. The reason why I waited is that I am used to tennis stars who never give out autographs until they complete their match. It was in respect of this mindset that I remained that patient, a bad habit I got from taking part in too many tennis rituals.

As for the content of your presentation, I agree that it must be a tremendous challenge to adapt a speech to a heterogeneous audience. It is indeed impossible to please everybody. Collating ideas seems to be the optimal solution. Nevertheless, I believe that it would have given the crowd a greater impact if the images and pictures were a bit more updated. To be honest with you, I was expecting more ‘emotional pictures’ from your keynote.

Concerning the Q&A, I am entirely disheartened with that journalist who asked an out of topic question that she ALREADY knew the answer. I am simply ashamed of the fact that this incident happened with your public of Montreal. I am in fact speechless.

Notwithstanding, I hope you enjoyed anyway your stay in our beautiful city and that you will come back one day. In this way, we will have another chance to ask you more constructive and interesting questions.

Lastly, I thank you for taking your precious time to answer my concerns.

À la prochaine j’espère,

Isabelle

In MY experience, anyone willing to drop half a G to go hear Seth Godin speak is decidedly NOT interested in hearing anything rehashed from his books or blog.

Conferences like this offer a tremendous opportunity to reinforce your fanbase’s perception of you, as a generator of fresh, valuable ideas. If you waste one of these opportunities by presenting recycled content, those who have read it (your most important fans) will walk away feeling not just shortchanged but lied to, which in my opinion is a much less desirable outcome than the risk of not educating the unfamiliar listeners about your past body of work. (Besides, if your presentation piques their interest enough, they’ll go on Amazon and look up your old stuff anyway, without any explicit encouragement from you.)

Feel free to drop me an email directly, Isabelle.

I’m really sorry I didn’t get to talk with you in Montreal. If you had said hi to me during the seven hours I was at the venue, I would have loved to talk with you.

It sounds as though you were very disappointed, and I’d like to answer your concerns.

First, I’m sorry that you were offended that I didn’t stay and eat lunch at the table next to yours. In fact, I did spend a lot of time on my Mac before the presentation.

Second, I’m sorry that you weren’t moved by my presentation. The question a speaker faces, of course, is how much to assume about the audience. Should I assume that everyone has read all my books and my blog and start from there? In my experience, the best benefit to the largest number of people seems to be in collating the ideas so far, and presenting them in an actionable way. It can’t possibly work for everyone, which is painful.

As for the Q&A, the question really bothered me, and I’ll tell you why: the journalist who asked me had spend thirty minutes sitting with me and interviewing me before the speech. She KNEW the answer already because she had asked me. Also, and this is the bigger issue, I had just spent an hour talking about the audience, about what the audience could do, how the audience could move forward. And this, the only question, wasn’t about anyone in the audience, it was about me. Deliberately sandbagging me at the expense of the audience. What’s the point of that, exactly? I found it distracting and I felt she was disrespecting the people who came to hear me by not asking something relevant to them.

And finally, I didn’t stick around afterwards because I had to catch a plane to get back to my family. In my experience, the after-speech scrum really satisfies anyone very much.

No disrespect was intended.