Leadership Training

This past week, Neilson Business Media hosted their 2nd annual Training Leadership Summit in San Diego, and I attended on behalf of 451 Press. This four day event (adeptly hosted by Training Magazine Group publisher Joyceann Cooney-Carippa), was filled with insightful presentations, interactive workshops, and provided a unique networking opportunity for all of the attendees.

Here are some of the moments as captured by yours truly. Based on some of my conversations with keynote presenters, we should have additional profiles and follow-up discussions posted on the site within the next couple of weeks.

The summit was held at the beautiful Rancho Bernardo Inn, a golf resort and spa located just north of downtown San Diego. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to golf on the grounds; the staff felt that my handicap of 50 could be a danger to some of the participants.

Jim Ehinger (left) and Joshua Campbell enjoy lunch at the Aragon Lawn courtyard. Jim and Joshua both serve as Training Consultants for Cornerstone Information Systems, a technology company that produces applications for the travel industry.

Amy Shoemaker is the Director of Talent Development for the accounting firm Kennedy and Coe. Patrick Barrett works for United Rentals, and is the Director of Training and Development. They both agreed that (1) the summit was a great opportunity to learn from other learning and development professionals, and (2) the chocolate raspberry souffle was one of the best desserts they’d ever had!

I devoured mine in 8.5 seconds. Chocolate stimulates the mind, right?

During the summit, Training Magazine honored 40 organizational development professionals under the age of 40 with their first annual Top Young Trainer Awards. Bill Gauthier, the Director of Training Technology at CCA Global Partners, was one of the recipients.

Holding a conference in San Diego during the first week in May? It’s the law: you MUST have a Cinco De Mayo party!

Lorne Novolker, President of Prospero Learning, and his lovely wife Lori enjoy a sangria and margarita respectively. (Later in the evening, they sang with the mariachi band.)

The Reformed Theological Seminary provides free lectures through iTunes University care of their virtual campus. Here, Andrew Peterson plays one of the segments (well, that’s his hand anyways. Sorry about that, Andrew!).

Brian Powers, the Director of EMC University, gave an informative (and entertaining) presentation on Managing Change. He explained how the tech giant instituted a formal approach to change and provided a case study on how this approach was implemented. Unfortunately, time constraints didn’t allow for an interactive workshop that Brian had planned on facilitating, but he assured us it would have been fantastic.

The summit concluded with a keynote address by Bruce Kimbrell of the Disney Institute, followed by a workshop on the Disney approach to talent management. Bruce also provided audience members who provided input during the session with what he called “PPIR’s” (Positive Plastic Interactive Reinforcers). Here’s one of them:

And just as Pooh is waving good-bye, we also have to go for now. But we’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Joyceann, Leah Nelson, and the rest of the team at The Nielsen Company for inviting me to this exceptional event! We’ll be back soon with additional follow-ups from the summit (and of course you’re regularly scheduled Leadership Training programing).