I attended the opening keynote at the HRPAO 2005 Conference. The speaker was Tim Sanders, a VP at Yahoo! and the author of Love is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends. His session was titled "The Compassionate Leader". It was a very, very interesting discussion about the power of intangible skills, particularly in leaders, that can help companies (organizations) succeed.
Tim is a fantastic speaker, in his bio he mentions this aptitude and it is well deserved. He is one of the most entertaining speakers (specially at an HR conference) that I’ve ever had the pleasure of listening to).His talk was structured around the ideas presented in "Love is the Killer App".
- Knowledge
- Network
- Compassion
This had me thinking about the Toronto User Experience community and my conversation last weekend with Jess McMullin. The community feels fragmented, andcompetitive. I used to go to "network" which was nothing more than a uphamism for handing out business cards and hoping to find work. They wasn’t a lot of value for me. But I look at the success of new communities: Boxes and Arrows; AIfIA; Open Usability; UXNet; FLOSS Usability and others. Is there a need to create a Canadian community focused around the user experience that is not being served by the forementioned communities or by an existing community (UPA, SIGCHI, HFES, ASIS&T, etc.)?