Category: international convention

Friday dinner: Golden Gavel Dinner

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Wow, caught myself typing LUNCH up there in the headline — hard to think of it as dinner.  The honoree was Carolyn Kepcher, who became famous as Donald Trump’s assistant on “The Apprentice”.  Now, however, she is writing books and providing career advice in a New York Daily News column, and started a web site to help professional women, WorkHerWay.com.

Her presentation was a very interesting review of how she got to where she is.  One of her most interesting claims is that she didn’t believe in work/life balance; she used to believe that if you weren’t in the office, you weren’t working.  But the Blackberry has changed all that.

The distinguished districts were the guests of honor for this, they were announced, and pictures of the DGs and the trio names played on the video screens throughout dinner.

Friday morning: Candidate showcases

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Oh my back!!!  4 1/2 hours of interviews, standing up, reading the same set of questions to 13 different ID candidates (and four 2VP candidates), while making it sound fresh and exciting every time!  At least there was a short break in the middle; the first version of the schedule had NO breaks at all from 8 AM to almost noon.

It was very interesting hearing what the candidates had to say, of course, but by necessity, I’ll keep my opinions on those to myself.  Some were clearly a little confused by the question, but I could not do anything to help them understand it — just repeat the question verbatim.

Being on the other end of these questions next year will certainly be interesting!

Thursday evening: Speech contest semifinals

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As a second-year director, I was chief judge for one of the nine semi-finals, but it wasn’t exactly hard work.  WHQ staff had already recruited all the judges, timers, and ballot counters, and all I had to do was find a tiebreaker judge.

It was a great contest, we had a fantastic winner, and I can’t wait to see how he does in the finals on Saturday afternoon!

Thursday morning: Hall of Fame

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The Hall of Fame is always a fantastic celebration of our achievements over the last year, the energy is so up and enthusiastic!  Every distinguished district brings their whole convention delegation up on stage for the awards!

I was privileged to be the very first announcer (photo below), reading off the Presidential Citations, and there were only NINE this year, compared to the usual 20-30 or so.  And two of them were for people from Region V, Michael Smith and Justin Gottfried.

Two of the Region V districts (where I’m from) were Select Distinguished, D43 (James Mayhan) and D8 (Dori Drummond), and three more were Distinguished (D30-Michael Gougis, D35-Kathleen Wesselink, and D63-Allan Daniels), which ties our best-ever number of distinguished districts (5 of 8).

Truly amazing — this is the event that district leaders worked for all year long, and they deserve it!

Thursday morning: Board of Directors briefing

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The board members were present for this, but had no role.  We sat there and listened as the officers (VPs and president and immediate past president) have reports summarizing our work for the week.  Full details will be on the TI web site by Friday, Aug. 20, but in short:

  • New area, division, and district recognition plan (effective 7/1/2012)
  • Numerous policy revisions, including campaigns
  • Big new strategic plan for growth!

I was heavily involved in the first one, so I’ll summarize those here:

Distinguished Area

  • Twice-annual AG visit reports for at least 75% of club base
  • No net club loss (this is a change)
  • At least 50% of base (July 1) clubs distinguished

Select Distinguished Area

  • As Distinguished, but 1 more club distinguished

President’s Distinguished Area

  • As Select, but a net growth of 1 club (same as now)

Distinguished Division

  • No net club loss
  • 40% of base clubs distinguished

Select Distinguished Division

  • As Distinguished, but 45% of clubs distinguished

President’s Distinguished Division

  • As Select, but 50% of clubs distinguished
  • Net growth of 1 club (same as now)

Distinguished District

  • 40% of base clubs distinguished
  • 3% club growth
  • 3% membership payments growth

Select Distinguished District

  • 45% of clubs distinguished
  • 5% club growth
  • 5% membership payments growth

President’s Distinguished District

  • 50% of clubs distinguished
  • 8% club growth
  • 8% membership payments growth

Perhaps the best feature is that the Distinguished District program is no longer competitive — EVERY district can be Select or President’s Distinguished, regardless of how other districts perform.

President’s Ball, Calgary

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I spent some time on Saturday adding the rest of the districts to my daily and weekly reports on the web site, and adding the “Top Three” of each Region V district (where I’ve known them personally for a long time) to the weekly e-mail list. Oh, it feels good to finally throw off the shackles of candidate campaign rules, which strictly limited contact! I actually heard that one past 3VP candidate went into a depression during the year of candidacy, since he or she was practically unable to talk to so many friends and fellow Toastmasters (no one outside the home district)!

Joan Diehl and myself at the President\'s Ball, where the board was installed.

Saturday evening started with a photo session of the new board. We were also given our committee assignments for the new year; I’m on the District Administration (DA) committee. Next was a reception for the District Governors. We then were lined up to march into the ballroom, where we were announced and took our places at the head table — it was truly an exciting moment to look out on what must have been a thousand Toastmasters! I was accompanied at dinner by my campaign manager, Joan Diehl, and we had an entire evening of interesting conversation (see photo).

One of my greatest privileges was to pin Dietmar with his Past International Director pin (see photo), and him to pin me with the International Director pin. International President Jana Barnhill had a wonderful inauguration speech about her theme, “The Courage to Conquer”, including some video of her skydiving! The total time up on the stage was almost three hours, but it just flew by, seemed like mere minutes.

The evening ended with dancing until late. I didn’t stay long, as I knew I had to be up at 7:30 AM for our board orientation Sunday morning!

The vote, Calgary

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Ah, the big day has finally arrived! While I should have nothing to worry about (being unopposed), there’s the technical but remote possibility that someone could run from the floor. So when the president opens the floor to nominations, I’m immensely relieved when there are none, nominations are closed, and I’m declared elected!

But wait, there’s more to this business meeting. The third vice president is always the most hotly-contested race, and when they declare the vote — it’s extremely close! Just four votes separated the two candidates, less than 0.1%! There’s a call for a recount, which itself requires another vote, and it passed, so then they declared a recess for lunch while the actual recount was conducted.

Lunch was the Club Leadership luncheon, after which, the business meeting was briefly resumed to announce the recount results. The recount resulted in a slightly larger difference in the vote difference, but no change in the winner. Then it was on with the regular afternoon event, the Hall of Fame, recognizing districts and individuals for their accomplishments over the last year. Since each district was being called up on stage, I took advantage of that to hand out the rest of the district directories.

Friday evening was for the regional gatherings, where we roasted the outgoing International Director (whom I’m replacing), Dietmar Wagenknecht. That was a lot of fun, every district had several stories to tell about working with him over the last two years. After that was time for people to announce intentions to run for International Director for next year, and Ron Kirchgessner announced his candidacy. Furthermore, Dietmar got up and announced he was running for Third Vice President! It’s going to be a fun year for both of them, as they work to get the votes to be elected at next year’s convention!

Second day of campaigning, Calgary

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Today is another busy day like yesterday, spending most of the day next to this larger-than-life black-and-white photo of myself. Lunch was the Golden Gavel award, to Pamela Wallin, the Canadian journalist and media personality. She had quite an interesting talk on Canadian/American politics, and just as she made a small joke about Canadians being the Americans’ best friends, whether the Americans knew it or not, the stage lights slowly dimmed down to black! At first, I think some thought it was a joke, but they didn’t come back up. She kept on going, and then someone got a spotlight on her, and after a while longer, the lights sort of came up. Apparently a technical glitch!

Thursday evening was the candidates’ showcases, where we (candidates) travel through four rooms (grouped by region) answering questions for 10 minutes about our candidacy in a table topics style. All three unopposed candidates (including myself) were put into a single group for questions (opposed candidates were questioned alone). It was only enough time for an average of three questions for each of us.

In the first room, I didn’t do very well on a question about team-building, but I think I did well in the second and third rooms. In the last room, which included my own home region, I was in the middle of answering an easy question, and I completely forgot what the question was! I mumbled off something about “and that’s why we have to keep on doing what we’re doing”, when I should’ve asked for the question to be repeated. But from the feedback I got afterwards, not many people noticed, I guess.

After that, all candidates were asked to attend a reception back in the area where our tables were set up, but that was in a different building, and the attendance was pretty light. By the end, I had given out over half of the printed directories, and actually had a few DGs coming to me and asking for them! Apparently there was some pretty good word of mouth going around, I received many many flattering compliments on the value of the book.