Your Knowledge14 Presentation: The Gift That Keeps On Giving - To You!

[MichaelDortch]

My esteemed colleague Stephen Mann has waxed eloquently about why you should speak at Knowledge14 next April in San Francisco. Stephen argues persuasively that the conference gives you an opportunity to "pay IT forward."

All well and good, but perhaps a bit too altruistically focused. I blame it on Stephen's generally genial temperament and being British. As a born-and-raised American (from Brooklyn, New York, no less!), I thought I'd take a slightly different tack.

Ahem.

Yo, you should speak at Knowledge14 because it's all about you — as it should be.

Look. You and I both know that the majority of people appear to suffer from some form of glossophobia -- they fear and/or hate public speaking. Despite this, ServiceNow customers compete for speaking slots at Knowledge conferences.

Why? Because telling audiences about how they personally are leading their enterprises to IT and business transformation with ServiceNow is good for their careers. Those audiences may include their next bosses, colleagues or clients. And they know it. And how can a success story not help you move your career forward, where you are or elsewhere?

And the icing on the cake? Your telling your success story at Knowledge14 also makes you look like the do-gooder Stephen Mann hopes you are. How? By praising your colleagues and sharing useful information with a grateful audience. With no additional effort required from you! What could be more effortlessly self-serving?

Knowledge14 offers you a plethora of potentially career-enhancing, reputation-inflating options. You can answer the call for speakers, and submit a title and abstract for a proposed breakout session — or several. You can come up with an idea for a killer custom app (or "borrow" the idea from a colleague) in preparation for a reprise of the successful Hackathon held at Knowledge13. You can shine up your best achievement with ServiceNow (or again, that of a colleague) and get ready to submit it as a candidate Innovation of the Year next month.

What the heck? You can do all of the above, especially if you can convince some less-ambitious colleagues to help you. Then all you have to do is register, make your travel plans, make some notes for your acceptance speech(es), pick a nice outfit, and get ready to bask in the career-advancing kudos, connections and offers.

See? Presenting at Knowledge14 really is all about you. So yo, why would you not??