I have always thought of HOK as a passport to opportunities and I have certainly been one of the most fortunate to somehow find my way into some really incredible places.  My trip last week to the Meeting of the Minds conference in Boulder amazed me with the best of them. 

YES….the conference was awesome.  Each speaker more inspiring than the last…sharing their views with everything there is to know about transportation/technology/smart cities/sustainability/and then some.  Here’s a link to a post covering the conference on the Sustainable Cities Collective blog and link to videos of the presentations. 

But one of the best parts of the whole adventure was the work in preparation for the conference…and a little behind the scenes MotM we managed to pull off while we were there.  

Ann Althoff, our super client catalyst, worked her magic to assemble a power house team of thought leaders from Cisco/IBM/GE/NREL/Autodesk/Buro Happold/and Biomimicry 3.8.  We had a 3-hour strategy session on how we can integrate our expertise and industries to solve the biggest challenges our cities face.  Steve Morton, clearly one of the most brilliant strategists at HOK, cooked up an idea for the reverse RFP [rRFP] that could bring us together again around a real project to take these ideas and make them reality. And Jeannette Thompson, our behind the scenes social media specialist, created our first QR-code enabled card set and blog to get the dialogue started [all done in the time you read this!].

ANYWAY…this meeting of the minds at the meeting of the minds was a very special place to be…the concept of these major players coming together in a more integrated way is exhilarating…and I can’t say enough about these three HOKer’s and the effort they put in to make HOK be a player in that game…[talk about Life at HOK!]