Willow Creek Leadership Summit

Coming down from the summit…

I should start by saying that all of the speakers are better looking, more interesting, talented, compelling, insightful and entertaining than me.

Having said that I’d like to rank the different talks (IN MY OPINION)

1. 1. Marcus Buckingham – great talk – interesting, informative, funny, engaging, facts, stories, random…it had the whole shabang.

3. 2. John Ortberg – great stuff – inspirational – funny at times – poignant – spiritually uplifting - Saget-like
4. 3. Bill Hybells second talk – just a well thought out, simple message that made great sense and made me wish our staff would have shown up to see it

4. 4. Bill Hybells first talk – the most “on” I’ve ever heard him. He was funny…seriously, he was pretty funny – it was the perfect talk to start the whole thing off. I thought he did a great job.

5. 5. Fuller talking about Fergler in the lobby

6. 6. Richard Curtis – I’m not a fan of interviews at these things but the video with the girl on the street making her bed killed me. I loved Four Weddings and a Funeral and would love to see more of his work.

7. 7. Colin Powel - his was pretty good. It felt like a lot of quick little thoughts – some I agreed with and some I didn’t…but it was pretty good.

8. 8. Jimmy Carter – it was interesting to hear some of his “insider” stories. I love what he’s doing with Habitat.

9. 9. Carly Fiorina – she came off a little stiff to me – I don’t like interviews and hers was the first – I thought the 60 minutes piece actually made her look bad and I wasn’t sure why they ended it with, “but because your company took such a huge loss in the stock market, that could be a very viable reason for you being fired, right?”

10. 10. Michael E. Porter – I’m sure he’s a good professor. I’m not sure he’s a good conference speaker. I thought he made a few good points. I just think he could have made them in 7 minutes. He seemed a little out of place and kept saying, “you do this…” and really isolated himself from the audience (at least in my opinion)

11. 11. Floyd Flick – a friend of mine said, “he hasn’t breathed once” about five minutes into his talk…and for the next ten minutes that’s all I could focus on…and then I was a goner.