Reflections on A Few Days Away

UPDATED & BUMPED.

I encourage any of you social-media fans to attend the upcoming #140Conf Meetup in Philadelphia on March 8th. Click here for details. Below is my recap of the first Meetup back in January.
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Me with Jeff Pulver, founder of #140conf.

Terrible guy that I am, I left my wife and kids to fend for themselves in the bitter cold for a few days while I ventured north to take advantage of two opportunities: the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce’s annual dinner Monday night and the #140conf Philly Meetup on Tuesday night. Believe it or not, both were profound experiences.

It was not my first time at the DSCC Annual Dinner. My father was the President of the State Chamber from 1989-2000. But it was the first time I’d been back since the 2000 event, which was packed to the walls with the excitement from a solid economy and the prospect of a Presidential campaign featuring that night’s keynote speaker, Texas Governor George W. Bush, and a gubernatorial campaign featuring the outgoing Chamber president.

What a difference a decade makes. Bush won the election, and disaster ensued. Dad lost the election, and disaster ensued. Which was the greater disaster lies in the eye of the beholder and more likely in their political affiliation.

Fast forward ten years to the 2010 Annual Dinner. I’m most certainly a different person at 35 than I was at 25. But the environment at the dinner was incredibly reflective of where we are as a state. The night was dominated by elected officials. In fact, once you accounted for the elected officials, the appointed officials, the staff and the lobbyists, you had half the room covered. A telling statement on the government as the dominant sector in our economy. I can think of only two or three people among the dozens I talked to that weren’t tied to the government in some meaningful way.

The keynote from DuPont CEO Ellen Kullman confirmed for me one thing: I have a tremendous indifference for big multi-national companies. This is a massive sea change for me, but basically, I no longer trust any organization that can’t fit in my car. I’m not knocking DuPont per se, and we absolutely need DuPont and other large companies to employ Delawareans, but, in the words of E. F. Schumacher, “small is beautiful.”

What’s emblazoned on my brain from that dinner is that it was the old economy on display: 900 people in business attire paying big money to listen to the CEO of DuPont talk about globalization while trying to lobby legislators to lean one way or another, backslapping each other in echo chamber-esque fashion while ignoring the mounting evidence of a state whose government and economy no longer work.

For all the talk of the new economy, entrepreneurship, green jobs and innovation that spews out of the government/business PR machine nearly daily, nothing has ACTUALLY changed in Delaware and we are largely rudderless as an economy. No one wants to be the one to say it, but the telling glances and whispers confirm it: no one really knows what to do. It’s not that they’re not trying or don’t care. They just don’t know what to do.

And that brings us to Tuesday night and the #140conf Philly Meetup at a great bar called National Mechanics. (Dogfish 90min in the bottle was a welcome find.) The event brought together about 100 people to talk about and share the State of NOW and the Now Economy.

There couldn’t be a more stark difference. The fact that it was free. The sharing of real, valuable, actionable information. The passion and emotion on display. The feeling of movement and progress. The vibrancy. The community. The authenticity.

I was struck at the end by James Bressi, one of the event organizers, who put into words the way I live my life. I’m paraphrasing, but he basically stood up at the end of the event and said, “Thanks for coming, and if there’s anything you need help with, anything at all, contact me on Twitter. If it is within my scope, I will help you to the best of my ability.”

He said that earnestly to a room filled with people, many of whom I assume he didn’t know. He didn’t have to do it. And you could tell he wasn’t doing it for show. He meant it. Maybe had I not had such a contrasting experience the previous night it would not have been so profound. But it was.

And that was the vibe all evening. Great, great speakers who shared their Twitter experience:

• #140conf mastermind Jeff Pulver, who stripped Twitter down to its communication essentials and empowered everyone in the room;
• Chris Lehman, principal of Philly’s Science Leadership Academy magnet school, who talked about educating kids vs. training them, about teaching kids to think and question, and about how he’s used social media to take those lessons to the next level;
• Melinda Emerson, the “Small Biz Lady,” on her journey and her desire to “end small business failure.” (I Love It!)
• Author Jonathan Maberry, who has used Twitter to interact with fans, quell concerns (a white guy writing a comic with a black, female character?) and score gigs with Marvel Comics and Universal Pictures. (line of the night: “140 characters? I write novels.”)

Maybe I’m making too much of the juxtaposition of the two events, but here I am the next day and that’s what stuck. I got more — much more — out of 100 people I don’t know than I did out of 900 people, most of whom I do know. And I can say without equivocation that the future economy of the state I love and fight for needs to look a hell of a lot more like those 100 Twitter misfits in a Philly bar than like the 900 business & government dignitaries in the Chase Center.

And I intend to do my part to make it so. I hope you will, too.