At the PCMA Annual Meeting general session this morning, Authenticity and The Experience Economy coauthors Jim Gilmore and Joe Pine did the best they could to condense hundreds of pages of explaining their five genres of authenticity and how to apply them to meetings.

I think it was a little too academic for a lot of the crowd, who were all jazzed up from the earlier speakers (including Washington governor Chris Gregoire, who I hope governs as well as she speaks–she was fantastic!). But it got a little too experiential for me when the coauthors asked people to stand, then to sit down if they hadn’t read The Experience Economy. Then they did the same for their new book, and out of however many thousands of people were in the audience, there were only three of us left standing.

I figured out too late what was going on to sit down in time, and so was called up on stage to join the other two loyal readers to talk about what we thought was best about the books. Man, I had to strain to remember some distinct points from The Experience Economy, since I read that several years and several hundred books ago. I did better with Authenticity, which I just read a month or so ago in preparation for interviewing the authors.

Being one of those people who’d rather eat a raw tarantula than be on a stage in front of a bunch of people, I thought I was going to die. Fortunately, I didn’t, and I’m told I didn’t embarrass myself too badly. It was, most definitely, an experience I’ll remember!

More later on other things from today…