KEYNOTES:
Doug Lipp | The Magic of Exceptional Customer Service
What is the magic of Disney? Doug’s Walt Disney University training experience provides fascinating stories, unique insights, and invaluable lessons. Learn how certain skills, attitudes and behaviors contribute to exceptional performance. Doug's active listening strategy, R.A.P.S. introduces techniques for improving communication, building internal and external relationships, and handling unpleasant confrontations. His well-known "Life as Tigger" story animates how employees can positively address intradepartmental strife. Doug shares Disney's "SCSE" comprehensive service philosophy to illustrate how Disney achieves and maintains service excellence and loyalty. Other popular topics include Disney's show business service language and concepts, including why the terms "on-stage and off-stage behavior", "cast member", and "costumes" encourage employees to put on their best "show" for the "guest".
Doug Lipp is an internationally acclaimed expert on customer service, leadership and diversity who has spent over 30 years working from the front lines to the boardrooms of corporations around the world.
Formerly the head of training at Disney Studio's Walt Disney University, Doug provided the well-known "Traditions" orientation program and other leadership courses. Pivotal in Doug's career with Disney was his experience in the mid-80's when the corporate culture changed from the arrogant: "we're the best, why change?" to the progressive: "don't rest on your laurels" powerhouse corporation that it remains today. Doug addresses the topics of global and domestic customer service, leadership, and cultural diversity with his clients in the U.S. and abroad.
He is the author of 6 books including his most recent book The Changing Face of Today’s Customer, which proclaims the use of “cultural sense” in addition to common sense. It is endorsed by One Minute Manager co-author, Ken Blanchard.
Scott Barry Kaufman | Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined
Severe ear infections rendered three-year-old Scott Barry Kaufman nearly deaf. As a result, he needed a few extra seconds to process things in real time—which landed him in a special education classroom. Inspired by his personal experience, Kaufman, now a cognitive psychologist, has made it his mission to debunk traditional methods of measuring intelligence. Why do we have such an obsessive need to compare students? Why do we insist on labeling and categorizing everyone? In his talks, Kaufman encourages us—and specifically educators, school psychologists, parents, and caregivers—to move towards a culture of inspiration, where we only compare people to their past and future selves. He argues for intelligent testing as opposed to intelligence testing: deep evaluation that focuses on finding out a person’s strengths and weaknesses, and the characteristics that make them unique. And, he advocates for thinking about talent and potential as moving targets—they’re not inherent qualities we’re born with, they’re based on our engagement with something that is meaningful to us. When students are inspired or activated, they come alive. Kaufman encourages audiences to take a holistic approach to evaluation that benefits all students. It’s time to focus on individual needs that enables students to unlock their potential and reach their goals, at school and beyond.
Scott Barry Kaufman is a cognitive psychologist who studies the development of intelligence, creativity, and personality. In his book Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, he takes a look at why our society is so obsessed with measuring intelligence, instead of using the test results to inform tailored interventions to help all people succeed. As the Scientific Director of The Imagination Institute and a researcher in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, he investigates the measurement and development of imagination.
Kaufman was formerly an adjunct assistant professor of psychology at New York University. He is a co-founder of the popular nonprofit website The Creativity Post, writes the blog “Beautiful Minds” for Scientific American Mind, and is co-editor of the book The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays. Kaufman is on the editorial board of journals BioMed Central Psychology and Journal of Intelligence. He has a doctorate in cognitive psychology from Yale University and a master’s degree in experimental psychology from Cambridge University, where he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.
Brigid Schulte | Overwhelmed: A Call to Pause
Overwhelmed? The Greeks said pure leisure, that place where we refresh the soul and become most fully human, is the point of The Good Life. In our busy modern, rushed, distracted and tech-addicted world, what has happened to leisure? What are the costs? More, how do we get it back and why it is imperative to do so. Not only does it improve the quality and creativity of the work we do, but it connects us deeper with others – which, for humans, is what makes us truly happy – and allows us to sink into that time-out-of-time state called 'Flow', known to psychologists as the peak human experience.
Author Brigid Schulte, fellow at the New America Foundation, award-winning journalist for the Washington Post – and harried mother of two – began the journey quite by accident, after a time-use researcher insisted that she, like all American women, had 30 hours of leisure each week. Stunned, she accepted his challenge to keep a time diary and began a journey that would take her from the depths of what she described as the Time Confetti of her days to a conference in Paris with time researchers from around the world to exploring new lawsuits uncovering unconscious bias in the workplace. She spent time with mothers drawn to increasingly super intensive parenting standards, mothers seeking to pull away from it, and fathers trying to get more involved.
Along the way, she was driven by two questions: "Why are things the way they are?" And, "How can they be better?" She found real world bright spots of innovative workplaces, couples seeking to shift and share the division of labor at home and work more equitably and traveled to Denmark, the happiest country on earth, where fathers – and mothers – have more pure leisure time than parents in other industrial countries. The answers she found are illuminating, perplexing and ultimately hopeful. Her book both outlines the structural and policy changes needed – already underway in small pockets – and mines the latest human performance and motivation science to show the way out of the overwhelm and toward a state that-time use researchers call … Time Serenity.
David Rose | Enchanted Objects: Connectivity, Design, and the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things is the hottest topic of the moment—a shift predicted to be as momentous as the impact of the internet itself. The internet has allowed us to share ideas and data largely input by humans. What about a world where data from objects as diverse as umbrellas, fridges, and gas tanks all flows through the internet? We are truly at the frontier of a new, hyper-connected future: and MIT Media Lab’s David Rose is our guide. Author of the first major book on the subject, Rose is bringing the inevitable takeover of the Internet of Things to the forefront of public consciousness and how it will influence various industries. From manufacturing to healthcare to education—literally any industry—will be affected. In this mind-opening talk, Rose explains how to get in on the ground floor of the Internet of Things or, as it’s known in the manufacturing sector, Industry 4.0 (the fourth industrial revolution). He describes how products are poised to become services, and how we will be creating new user experiences, not new technology. How can you embed connectivity and productivity into your product? he asks. It’s time to revolutionize the way you think about technology, design, and the Internet of Things.
Dr. David Rose is an instructor and researcher at the MIT Media Lab, and the author of the preeminent book, Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things. “The history of computers has mostly been about efficiency,” Rose told The New York Times in a major three-page feature. “I think one of the things that's changing is that enchanted objects can be about adding emotion and magic to the fabric of our everyday lives and experiences.” He continues: “Our devices can be a lot simpler, and our interactions [with] them can be a lot simpler....These are ordinary things that have extraordinary capabilities.”
A serial entrepreneur, Rose is the CEO at Ditto Labs, and was founder and CEO at Vitality, a company that reinvented medication packaging that is now distributed by CVS and Walgreens. He also founded Ambient Devices, which embedded internet information in objects such as lamps, mirrors, and umbrellas. He holds patents for photo sharing, interactive TV, ambient information displays, and medical devices. His work has been featured at the MoMA, and covered in Wired, The Economist, and The Colbert Report.