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
Full slides: It Seemed Like the Thing To Do At the Time: State of Mind and Fail­ure