what excites me about Manging Experiences

Over the past months, I’ve had the chance to put together with Henning Fischer the conference that I’d love to attend. It’s called Managing Experiences through Creative Leadership, and it’s about what it takes to be successful in getting great experiences out into the world.

We’ve assembled a group of thought leaders that can share a diverse set of input from many different fields:

• People who’ve been successful at doing it. People like Cordell Ratzlaff, who lead the UX design of Mac OSX, and has more recently been hired at Cisco to help turn their focus towards creating great experiences. We’ve also got Peter Coughlan, lead of IDEO’s Tranformation Practice (wow!) will be sharing his thoughts as well as Secil Watson, SVP of Internet Channel Strategy from Wells Fargo. Secil’s fascinating, as she comes to the management of experiences from a business background, but still has the mindset of a designer (listen to her interview with Jesse James). And we have Julie Peters of Virgin sharing with us how they plan and develop new experiences across Virgin’s many brands. Oh, and we have our keynote Chip Conley of Joie de Vivre has based his entire hotel business on creating and managing great experiences!
• People who are experts in specific skills you need to be successful at delivering great experience. Folks like Margaret Gould Stewart of Google has a fascinating talk planed on what it takes to build and lead a strong team, Stephen P. Anderson has a very entertaining presentation on leading a revolution within your organization, and Ryan Armbruster will help us all think twice about how we incorporate emotions into our design process (one of the big things that sets design and design research apart from other development methods).
• People who can help us think about future experiences that we’ll all need to plan ahead for in our organizations and in our careers. The incredibly smart and witty Matt Jones from Dopplr will help us think ahead about social media, and fabulous Rachel Hinman will introduce us to the future world of mobile in which she lives. Björn Hartmann will reveal an new realm of interactions that will make up future interactions.
• And OMG there’s so much more. People from neighboring fields that we should get inspired by and steal creative leadership ideas from. People that train and teach design leaders (Nathan Shedroff chair of CCA’s MBA in Design Strategy) and people who coach organizational leaders on how and where to apply UX strategically (Scott Hirsch of Management Innovation Group).

And beyond the content and speakers, we have many things planned to make the event itself an incredible experience. Emerging from the conversations and presentations, I expect we’ll all find that creative leadership of UX is itself a discipline–something we need serious talk about and a new skillset to make successful.

If you’re interested in joining us at the MX Conference, you can register and get 15% off with the discount code FOBS. Also, today’s the last day before the price jumps!