Like most men, there are few things I find more enjoyable than a long, emotional conversation about life issues that end with tear-stained hugs.
Whenever I board a plane for a long trip, I’m always excited by the possibility of sitting next to someone really interesting whose life story I can delve into hour after hour while we ride the skies.
I’d write more, but I’m busy talking out my office window to the woman whose dog just peed on my front stoop. We’re 2 hours into our conversation (did you know that city dogs live longer than country dogs? I didn’t, but I find it totally riveting).
Ah, screw it. No witty introduction to today’s blog post.
One of the new, unique session designs we’re including within the CMEpalooza Fall agenda on Wednesday, Oct. 19 is called “Casual Conversations in CME.” This one will begin at 11 a.m. ET. Clearly, it’s not a session I would likely have personally volunteered to be a participant in, but I’m nonetheless looking forward to being an educational eavesdropper and hearing what our panelists have to say.
For this session, we’ve paired 3 panels (2 people each) and really given them carte blanche to talk about whatever they want to for 15 minutes each. Presumably, it will have something to do with something related to CME, but beyond that, I really don’t know what to expect (OK, I have a little bit of any idea – I mean, we do talk to these people before our live broadcast date).
What I think will be interesting about this session is that we’ve purposefully created interesting pairings of people. For instance, Jann Balmer and Ron Murray worked together for many years and will (hopefully) fall easily into a casual banter. Our other two panels — Hilary Schmidt and Rob Bartel along with Mike LoPresti and Ro Brual — only met due to our matchmaking ability (my yenta grandmother would be so proud!) and have had to both “get to know each other” as well as figure out what they want to talk about during this session.
Frankly, I have never seen anything quite like this session, and I’ll be very interested to see how it goes. You should be too. So tune in.
Just don’t try to talk to me if we ever sit next to each other on a plane.
CMEPALOOZA 