Alright! Woo Hoo! I am still coming off of the high of giving my presentation “Reducing Turnover: Keeping Teams Intact Through Strong Leadership”. That was by far the best presentation that I have ever given in my career. I’ve had public speaking training, but that was a very long time ago and I was completely out of practice. I am really looking forward to getting a copy of the video and seeing how I actually did.
Well I learned something. It really DOES make a difference if you are speaking about a topic that you are passionate about. I had a great time. I also can’t tell you how many people came up to me yesterday afterwards, stopping me in the hallway, grabbing me at the bar to tell me how much they enjoyed my talk. It felt GREAT! I even had one of our competitors come up to me and he started off by saying that he went to my talk to “see what we are up to”. He really enjoyed the presentation and then he proceeded to ask me if I wanted to come work for them. <snort!> That was awesome, it never hurts to have supporters and friends at the competition.
One thing has become pretty clear to me, people in the game industry are still struggling with how to incorporate professional management into their companies. This is a group of very unique and creative individuals and a lot of them have some serious quirks. Take those people and promote them to management positions without training and it becomes a very difficult situation. I was lucky, I had management training . I had conflict management training. I went through personality type analysis. Looking back at it, I didn’t think a whole lot about it at the time, but geeesh it made a huge difference. There are some things that are good about working for big companies.
