I am thrilled that the International Forum of Visual Practitioners 2012 conference will be happening in my current hometown, Pittsburgh, the City of Bridges. Pittsburgh holds the world record for number of bridges, edging out Venice by four bridges. I think this is very appropriate to the IFVP conference, as we help our clients connect to their best vision and to visual plans to execute their goals to achieve their vision. The conference themes are art, techology, and business. We want to help visual practitioners build bridges to new skills, ideas, and relationships to help them increase their impact and success. And we want to help people from the business, government, and nonprofit sectors learn more about how visual practice can help them.

I created the video above to help spread the word about IFVP 2012. Pittsburgh is an amazing city to hold this conference. It is within a days drive or a short flight from 50% of the population of North America. It is gorgeous—surrounded by wooded hills and renewed by three major rivers. Pittsburgh successfully bridged an industrial past to a knowledge industry present. Pittsburgh pivoted from steel to education, technology, healthcare, banking, and robotics, capitalizing on its 7 universities, including Carnegie Mellon University which has the top ranked computer science program in the USA, and the University of Pittsburgh, with its spin-off UPMC medical system, which has grown to an international health care provider (need an organ transplant in Sicily? UPMC manages that.)

Plus Pittsburgh has a core of dedicated visual practitioners who are excited about hosting what is going to be an amazing event. Look forward to seeing you in late July 2012 in Pittsburgh. Stay tuned for final dates in the next couple of weeks. And when you come, be sure to have a few of these Pierogies, a Pittsburgh specialty.

Envizualize is going intercontinental next week. I will give the wrap up presentation at the Technia PLM forum in Stockholm after capturing the conversations with large scale visual notes.

Here is the welcome statement from Technia CEO, Jonas Gejer:

Technia Innovation Forum is about how PLM software solutions can help your company, regardless of industry, to become much more efficient in your product development. Topics of discussion will include but aren’t limited to the following:

How can PLM solutions help your company better manage product structures and components? How can “better management” help you cut costs and shorten time to market? Can PLM ensure and enforce that you are in compliance with regulatory demands? Could it possibly help you manage your certifications? How can PLM help you shorten the process for component reuse, make a few design updates, locate a supplier, and meet your target product launch date with the desired margin? All these questions and many more will be addressed on September 21st, 2011 in Stockholm. Industry experts and PLM gurus will share with you their hands-on experience how PLM can revolutionize the way you bring products to market.

I’m looking forward to meeting the participants and learning from the great folks at the Technia PLM Forum!

Had a blast being part of Pecha Kucha Night Pittsburgh, Vol 8. I enjoyed everybody’s talks, and was honored to test out a new slideshow talk of my own on the packed-in audience.

Unfortunately I did not hand my camera off to someone to get a pic of myself rocking the mic. Anybody got a pic for me? If so, please send it to jonny(at)envizualize.com and I’ll add it to the set of images from that night.

Thanks to Assemble for hosting us and AIA and AIGA Pittsburgh for producing the event.

If you missed this one, come check me out this coming week, July 7, at 7:30 where I will be doing live illustration of peoples rants and raves about their neighborhoods, also at Assemble, 5125 Penn Ave in Pittsburgh.

These events actually have quite a bit in common. They are all geared toward inspiring innovation, be it in business, social, or artistic fields.

1.

The Collaborative Innovation Forum looks at how our hyper social environment impacts collaboration and innovation. The event is being catalyzed by Enovia, a collaborative product lifecycle management company, and brings together many of its partners —spanning a power generation company to a recreational equipment retailer to an electric car company and many more, to talk about our socially networked present and its implications for the future of product lifecycle management.

Product lifecycle management (PLM) is (from Wikipedia):

The process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal. PLM integrates people, data, processes and business systems and provides a product information backbone for companies and their extended enterprise.

OK, does that sound cool or what? People, data, processes, business systems to create the information backbone to design and make and recycle/reuse/dispose of STUFF! The STUFF that makes civilization possible. The kind of stuff you are using to read this blog post.

2. TEDxPhilly is about what’s happening in our nation’s 5th biggest megalopolis, Philly. You know how I love Philly, so I’m so excited to be part of this. My dear friend Roz Duffy is applying her curatorial touch to make this the event of the year in Philly. From the site:

Our goal is to showcase practitioners, makers, dreamers and thinkers who are contemporary and thought provoking; who are pushing the boundaries of their own disciplines; and who are working towards a more purposeful, socially responsible future. The event is multi-disciplinary by nature and the speakers echo the diverse perspectives present in our city.

TEDxPhilly happens November 18. If you want to tap into the intellectual, creative, social, can-do soul of Philly, be there. It’s going to be Philly’s event of the year.

3. MID. The MID program at University of the Arts prepares masters degree candidates to use design approaches to help improve social enterprises as well as industrial ones:

Because today, industrial design is no longer just about new products. It’s about a new way of thinking. One that allows us to step back and question everything, including what a “product” is. By expanding our definition beyond the traditional – to encompass policies, social initiatives and entire systems – we’re setting the stage for design to play a crucial role in society. It’s already become an integral part of the business world’s approach to innovation. At UArts, we help prepare students for this dynamic, demanding new landscape.

I will be teaching MID students to use hands on visual thinking to help their clients in government, nonprofit, and business organizations innovate better ways to serve their stakeholders.

Whew! I need to take a breath. I will need plenty of oxygen and caffeine to embrace the possibilities in front of me this month. Happy November!

I run my own business, Envizualize, where I am “keynote listener” at conferences and meetings. I listen intently and create large scale visual notes of the ideas bouncing around the room. I love what I do and have had some impressive achievements. But loving what I do is not enough.

Aside from my actual product, I need to manage sales, marketing, finance, and customer service. I need to scope out the competition and build useful relationships. This is a lot to orchestrate.

I wish I had read Melinda Emerson’s book Become Your Own Boss in 12 Month
in that year before I quit my day job.

But better late than never. I met Melinda at an event in Philadelphia and she had the publisher send me a review copy.

Melinda is brutally honest about all the work that goes into starting your own business. Luckily, she is equally thorough about what you can do to maximize your chance of starting a successful business.

There are many books out there to give a small business owner advice.Two things differentiate Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months from the other books. First, Emerson focuses entirely on preparing well *before* you actually formally open for business. Second, Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months explains everything you need to do month by month. Mapping actions to time like this is very helpful. Otherwise it is too easy to put off painful but necessary actions. Mapping actions to time also shows what areas support other areas.

Since this book was not available when I began my business, I will have to play catchup. There is a lot in this book, but I’m just going to move through it 1 month at a time and see how that impacts my business. Tune back in 12 months.

As General Eisenhower said “Plans are nothing; planning is essential.” No matter how much you plan, things are going to go differently than you imagined. But the kind of research you do in creating a plan will serve you well if and when you decide to start your own business. Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months will let you construct a solid plan that you can then improvise off of as reality dictates.

Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months
Melinda Emerson’s Site, SucceedAsYourOwnBoss.com
Melinda Emerson on Twitter @smallbizlady
Large size Visual summary of Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months

Got some pleasant news a few days ago when I learned my large scale visual notes were being used as a magazine cover illustration.

The backstory:

My friends at ImageThink asked me to represent them by providing Graphic Recording at the March 2010 Pharmaceutical Meeting Management Forum in Philadelphia.

People at this event shared ideas for finding innovative ways to make their meetings successful in the current challenging economic circumstances while I represented those ideas in pictures and key words as they spoke in a kind of real time mural.

People at the conference gave me great feedback on the visual notes. I sent them photos of the graphics and filed it in my memory as another rewarding and interesting session.

Months later, I was delighted that the editors of Medical Meetings Magazine decided to use a closeup of my large scale visual notes from the event as the cover for their June issue.

This is a great example of the way graphic recording can extend the impact of your event long after it is over. Even if the visual notes don’t end up on the cover of a magazine, you can share them in email newsletters, brochures, slideshows, websites, and so on. If you want conversations to really count, graphic recording is a powerful way to create a vivid record of the ideas bouncing around the room at forums, meetings, and conferences.

I am delighted that I will be taking visual notes at the 2010 140 Characters Conference, as I did last year. Only this year, on the first day, I will be creating the notes on an iPad that award winning digital agency R/GA is sponsoring me with.

Since the conference is about the business and social implications of the emerging real-time web, I thought it was appropriate to use the "nowest" device, the iPad, to capture the ideas and energy of the event.

If you are attending, be sure to say hi, and if not, I hope my viznotes will help you glean some of the knowledge and energy that will be coursing through the 2 day event.

—Jonny Goldstein