FM Future attended EPIC, a one-day conference run by IPIA at the Congress Centre in London last week. And it may have broken the mold in some way, by, well, not really being a Print conference. It truly did something new by connecting a marketing community to attend an event produced by a print association, and it worked.
Why was it different?
You can see that if a ‘Why’ is applied to an organisation and then committed to by leadership, such as has been demonstrated by the IPIA, it will more than likely translate into success, assuming all the relevant hard work is thrown into the mix.
As is the tagline, it proved that ‘Everything’s Possible; Integrated Communication.’ But this does take leadership, creativity and courage. The events success is evidence of that. Epic was the best-attended and most interesting conference I’ve attended in a long time mostly as it committed to doing something new and didn’t appear to make any compromises.
And thank goodness there was not the usual boring sales pitches! These yawn inducing sponsor pacifiers were gratefully absent as the event kicked off, true to form, with a presentation by Peter Docker who is co-author of a book entitled ‘Find Your Why.’ Peter works closely with Simon Sinek who launched the ‘Start with why’ movement with one of the best viewed presentations on TED. Finding your why and then committing to it can clearly be a hugely effective way of succeeding and adding value in business as Peter demonstrated. For more info on this, check out an earlier blog here.
What Docker also went onto explain is that humans tend to only focus on technical leadership as this is ‘what we know’. We find it difficult to set an audacious goal without knowing first how to achieve it. Docker talks of Adaptive leadership which was originally expounded by Heifetz. With adaptive leadership you set targets or objectives then you working out how to reach them pretty much as you are doing it. It is this approach that creates new value. It isn’t easy and requires vulnerability, openness, and a creative mindset. But the point is that simply mimicking or just following well-trodden paths are unlikely to lead to new results. People actually say ‘Well we do it this way because frankly we have always done it this way’….it is comfortable but not innovative or dynamic.
Adaptive leadership requires what Docker explains as ‘Right to left thinking’ (left to right being linear best practice methodology) where we radically enhance the chance of successful change.
The next session of note I found useful was then of Mark Wright who won the apprentice TV Show and then launched a digital marketing agency called Climb Online. His honest, ebullient, autobiographical session won over most people in the audience I imagine. He’s hugely successful but he didn’t get there without a lot of sacrifice and hardship, he certainly had to push himself and well beyond his comfort zone in order to reach it. Again, he talked of his ‘Why’ and how that empowers him and his teams to succeed whilst building Climb Online, which is growing at a significant rate.
But nobody, and no event are perfect!
There was only one flat presentation about influencers, which personally I found a little uninteresting. I work within business to business and whilst I accept influencers exist, I am not into it and didn’t think the session was that great. However, I’m sure some of the B2C marketing community may have appreciated it. But you cannot please all of the people all of the time!!
It’s fair to say Print doesn’t always tell a good story, but some of the presenters at this conference certainly could. I look forward to the next one and again applaud this inspiration from the IPIA who have pushed themselves out of their own comfort zone to create a very worthwhile, useful, dare I say it, EPIC event.
Well done to all at IPIA. We look forward to next year’s edition.