James M. Dubinsky
Dear ABC Colleagues,
Prepare to be motivated and challenged! This year’s conference in Seattle will be one of our largest, and we have made some important changes to the program. The first and most visible will be the fact that we’re moving the keynote address to Wednesday evening, October 28, right after our “Welcome to ABC’s 80thBirthday” 6:00 pm reception. I recommend that you arrive early because our keynote speaker should not be missed.
Keynote Speaker. Our keynote speaker is Skip Walter. His credentials are, in a word, impressive. Skip’s address, entitled “Narrative Matters: The Invisible Source of Business,” will motivate and challenge you. His ideas will seem both familiar and profoundly different.
Skip’s bio. For the past 45 years, Skip has been a serial innovator, entrepreneur, and mentor capitalist in the USA, United Kingdom, Russia, and Canada. After a solid grounding in large software project management for Fortune 100 corporations, he developed ALL-IN-1, Digital Equipment Corporation’s $1 billion a year integrated enterprise office automation system. After this success, he was selected as Vice President of Engineering for Aldus (now Adobe) Corporation. And that is just the first part. Fast forward to Skip’s current position: Director of Innovation for the New York-based leadership and performance consulting firm The TAI Group. His job is to produce research and products where interactive digital technology meets the transformation of corporate performance. Skip and TAI want to radically improve productivity, using visual analytics and virtual reality so leaders and teams can communicate and collaborate beyond current limitations of space and time.
ABC: Our Community and Our Challenge. This year we are continuing our silent auction in support of a local nonprofit. Our partner in Seattle is the Youth Voices Poetry Project. This non-profit organization empowers displaced youths from high conflict areas by providing an outlet through creative expression. They enact our conference theme daily, and the stories you will hear will motivate you in a very different way than Skip’s address. The students this organization serves were forced from their home country due to war, violence, lack of healthcare, education, or factors that jeopardize the children, and their family's survival.
Our challenge is to find it in our hearts to support the auction by (1) bringing items to donate and (2) participating in the bidding. We also will be supporting our own organization’s graduate students this year, so the auction has two groups of recipients, but both fall in the long-term ABC tradition of demonstrating the importance of community building by caring for others.
For more silent auction information please see:http://www.businesscommunication.org/page/2015-annual#SilentAuction. For donation questions, please contact Becky Morrison.
I hope to see you in Seattle.
Jim
Jim Dubinsky
ABC Executive Director
