1 post tagged “oprah”
A few months ago, I was asked by some of the staff of Santa Clara University to give a talk that would be appropriate to the students (and friends) of the Masters in IT Management program. As this is the closest to a commencement speech as I'll probably ever get, I was a bit mystified as to what to write... I'm pretty good at writing technical talks, but I instead wanted to share the things I've found that have worked over the years to produce all the goodies that I've gotten.
So, I sat down in the week before delivering the talk, and just kept thinking about all the the things that have worked, consistently, and wrote them up. The title is a bit arrogant, but I think I manage to justify it by the end of the talk. And I back up most of my points with anecdotes from my life so far.
I didn't know if I had produced 30 minutes or two hours of materials, but I was pretty happy when it clocked in at about 80 minutes, including taking time to answer questions throughout. The questions were good, and the crowd seemed very interested as I gave the talk. A number of people (including the coordinators) came up to me to thank me for the presentation, often citing specific things that I had said and how it had cleared up something they were struggling with. In fact, I was actually quite pleased with that feedback. One person even asked when I was going to write this up as a book, and appear on Oprah as the next "Dr Phil". Yeah, like I need another career. :)
The group videotaped me, and promised to give me a link once the editing is finished, so I'll pass that along here. But at least you can see the slides for now.
