Back from San Fran, Italy, Paris

It's been a bit of a whirlwind for me lately ... helped teach a CEM certification course in San Francisco, where I was impressed with the commitment of corporate America to customer experience management -- many attendees actually had titles with "customer experience" in them!

After that, my wife and I flew off to Italy (after some transportation disasters thanks to a cancelled Delta flight), attending the NYU Stern Global Alumni Conference in Florence, held at Villa La Pietra. I'll probably do a blog entry on the future of luxury, which was one of the topics covered at the event. It was also an opportunity to meet up with my TRIUM alumni friends, who came in from Rome, Santa Barbara, Moscow, New York, Germany, Paris ... all over! TRIUM (a joint MBA put together by Stern in partnership with HEC-Paris and the London School of Economics) has an incredibly loyal bunch of alumni. Good folks, too. And fascinating. The group in Florence included an M&A expert from Cap Gemini, finance people from BP and Daimler, private equity, global HR, high tech startup, head of security for Deutsche Bank ...

I had a great time walking around Florence, and did a lot of thinking about brands, thoughts that continued while in Paris. I've got some pictures and some thoughts I want to share here, when I get a chance. In the meantime, I'm putting together a summary of the TRIUM Florence event for my TRIUM colleagues.

More later!