Meet Chester and Amanda – I Did
Me. Chester Elton and Amanda Hogue
While it has been in the bag for more than a week, I am still referring back to the recently completed SHRM Leadership Conference to talk about things that went on at the event. I was particularly looking forward to the last breakout session of the day. I was attending a session put on by Chester Elton on Team Building. I had just met Chester at lunch and found out he was the writing partner of another author I had seen speak a couple of years earlier. Chester and his partner Adrian are the Carrot Culture – Think Orange guys. I highly recommend their books.
In waiting to hear Chester get underway, I sat in obscurity along the wall (close to an outlet) so I could cabbage on to some electricity for
John Jorgensen, Amanda Hogue and Steve Browne
my gadgets. A young man and young lady walked into the room and sat down in the row in front of me. The young lady turned around and smiled at me and said hello, then turned forward. In about 5 seconds she turned back around and said in a confirmatory fashion – “You’re the HR Czar?” I smiled and said “Yes.” She told me her name was Amanda Hougue and that she was HRAmanda on Twitter. Bingo, the twitter handle gave her away, and then I made the connection.
She was so cute, funny and energetic, she was genuinely excited to meet me. So to some degree, or at least in this instance I had reached the status of micro-celebrity stardom, for a day, or an hour, or a minute perhaps. I look3d at her profile to see that she had not been on twitter too long and so I understood the way she was feeling. I too have met folks in real life, that I had first met on line and I was truly jazzed to do so. It’ s fun!
Now the rest of the session was just an enjoyable. Chester killed it talking about Teams. After the session, people were coming in from the next room and asked what went on in here, it sounds like you guys had a blast – we did. Amanda and I tweeted each other from row to row. We tweeted to the conference and the world that #ChesterElton was rocking the house at #SHRMLead. When the session wrapped up Amanda and I were lucky enough to get a picture with Chester, before he had to run off and sign books.
I ran into Amanda later and she got to meet a couple of my buddies and now her new friends John Jorgensen and Steve Browne. Us folks in Human Resources are a pretty cool bunch – don’t ya think?
November 27th, 2011 at 7:47 pm
I had the pleasure to hear Chester speak and meet him at Snagajob Hire Minds in September. He is an awesome human being and doing.
Twitter has lead to my meeting and connecting with so many people online. I cannot wait to meet more of them in person. Thanks for sharing, Dave!
November 27th, 2011 at 9:47 pm
It is fun, and then when one finds out things like this. I met Chester and so did you. And we both think he is an awesome dude!
Dave “theHRCzar” Ryan recently posted..Meet Chester and Amanda – I Did