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As you may know…we are big fans of awesome at GovLoop. Our charity is AwesomeGov.org. We have great bloggers that advocate awesomeness like Christopher DuFour.
And generally it has always been my point that government CAN be AWESOME. Government has done all these awesome amazing things from inventing the Internet to putting a man on the moon to helping create frameworks like CMMI and ITIL.
I’ve always felt government failed to use this to recruit and retain government leaders. Government should be THE place to work if you want to tackle the biggest problems facing the world (environment, health, poverty, security) and we should do more to say that it is AWESOME to go tackle these huge challenges and serve your country.
So when we launched Next Generation of Government Summit, I really wanted to ensure that this message came loud and clear.
And it reminded me of my buddy Neil Pasricha who I met when I was on a conference panel in Toronto.
At the time, Neil had a pretty successful blog 1000awesomethings.com where he highlighted one awesome thing a day (examples include “Licking all the flavor off your fingers”, “Do Nothing Days”, “Getting Exit Row on an Airplane”)….
I asked Neil to participate right as he was about to launch his book “The Book of Awesome” and he agreed to speak at our conference as a favor to me. Fast forward, 8 weeks later and Neil is a bonified rockstar. His book is #1 bestseller non-fiction in Canada for 6 straight weeks, he just wrapped up a week of 40 interviews, and he’s been asked to turn his book into a TV series.
And I just talked to him last night and he’s super jazzed to be speaking to the over 200 registrants at Next Generation of Gov…And he’s been crafting his speech…and I’m so excited to hear the awesomeness.