archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Thanks to all who made the 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas this year both worthwhile and memorable, by organizing, presenting, volunteering, or attending. Thanks especially to everyone who participated in our panel Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs, and brought with them a willingness to share, laugh, and think differently about a normally taboo subejct.

We limited our presentations to 10 minutes to encourage audience involvement, and reduce the talking-head with a microphone quotient typical of panel formats. This worked well, but meant setting aside quite a bit of material that’s worth bringing out: the abbreviated version of my talk on how states of mind affect failure is available directly from the conference site.

The full version of my slides on state of mind, self-definition, and parallels between individual and societal responses to failure is available from Slideshare here, and appears below.

The full version includes:

• additional discussion of societies in crisis
• President Bush
• a major figure in Buddhist philosophy
• a personal tale of business venture gone wrong
• Captain Kirk
• systems theory
• leverage points potentially useful for averting failure

Stay tuned for a possible written treatment, in Boxes and Arrows soon.

Should I see irony, serendipity, or both in the fact that while I was sharing my tale of not succeeding as an entrepreneur, the room down the hall was hosting Start-up case studies: how five of us started our own businesses – featuring Victor Lombardi, Lane Becker, Frank Ramirez, Lou Rosenfeld, Gene Smith, and Christina Wodtke? If you’re thinking of starting something as you read this, I’ll bet my advice on what *not* to do is better

There were many, many good sessions this year; a few that I considered highlights include:

Olly Wright’s Information architecture and ethical design
Emmanuele Quintarelli’s FaceTag: integrating bottom-up and top-down classification in a social tagging system
James Robertson’s Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier