Grandiose to Grassroots: Season 2 of Some Assembly Required Wrap Up

For the 2019 season, we took Assembly Required underground. Pivoting away from large-scale conferences to smaller, more intimate events, we set out to connect professionals and equip leaders, creatives, innovators, and entrepreneurs with skills to better their businesses and careers.

We’ve all been there: you’re spending another hour in a horrible presentation. An hour you’ll never get back. Or worse, you’re the boring presenter.

Our very own CEO, Kenny Nguyen built his career on the idea of ridding the world of bad presentations. As author of The Big Fish Experience: Create Memorable Presentations that Reel in Your Audience, used Some Assembly Required as an opportunity to teach about what makes a presentation go from snoozville to amazing.

It’s not just about a pretty presentation (while that is part of it), but it’s about creating a story and connecting with your audience.

The Takeaways: 

• People will always remember the presenter more than the presentation. – Kenny Nguyen
• When confronting audiences that may not believe in your idea, it’s important to address their biases out loud to let them know that you’ve considered their point of view.  – Kenny Nguyen

Too often, teams become less efficient over time. Tasks overtake critical thinking with no clear ownership or responsibility. We took a step back and asked, “how should teams be tackling complex problems in the modern workplace?” For our second event, Allison Schiller with Trepwise provided attendees with the tools to do just that. She reiterated that solving problems effectively as a team is all about using curiosity, empathy, and diversity, and that’s where design thinking comes in.

“Design thinking is a process that starts with the people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are tailor-made to suit their needs.” – Allison Schiller

The Takeaways: 

• For design thinking to work, teams must learn from others, be curious, embrace ambiguity, learn from trying, iterate, and be optimistic
• The three-step process of design thinking is:
  • Inspire – Gather inspiration by framing a clear design challenge
  • Imagine – Make sense of the common themes discussed to then come up with design ideas.
  • Implement – Brainstorm ideas that answer the question “How Might We..?”, to get a sense of what the solution will tactically be produced/look like.

At a time when social media has become littered with disagreement, disinformation, and endless opinion, there has to be a better way. Our guest facilitator, Brandi Boatner, shared a vision for a world where we use social media for conversation instead of conflict.

Following Brandi’s talk, our very own ThreeSixtyEight CEO Kenny Nguyen, Speaker & Author, took the stage again breaking down how to build your own event series. As a business, hosting an event series and using social media for communicating WITH your audiences helps make your business more human, and those human experiences are what will make your business stand out among the rest.

The Takeaways: 

• Your content should initiate a conversation. Stop broadcasting your thoughts. Stories stimulate conversations. – Brandi Boatner
• Human experiences are your business’s competitive advantage. – Kenny Nguyen

Culture recruits talent, but more than anything it retains talent. Walk-On’s Bistreaux & Bar CEO/Founder Brandon Landry and Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers Founder/CEO/Fry Cook/Cashier Todd Graves both built organizations that are known for cultures that bring out the best in their employees. Their main point: even in the face of opportunities and obstacles, it’s important to stay true to yourself (and your business’ “self”).

Create a culture that makes your employees feel appreciated and supported, and that happiness will spread to your customers.

The Takeaways: 

• Hire for the vision, not the need. – Brandon Landry
• There’s no way your customers will love your company if the employees don’t. – Todd Graves

Click here to watch the full presentation.

We want to give a huge thank you to the hundreds of attendees who attended Season 2 of Some Assembly Required. You make these moments possible, and we hope you got as much out of this as we did. 

Secondly, a big shout out to our sponsors who believed in this crazy idea of ours. Sponsors include Blue Cross Blue Shield Louisiana, Business First Bank, Soji Modern Asian, Tin Roof Brewing Co., and Rebel Graphix.

Thanks to all of you, we raised $5,000 for the Junior Achievement of Greater New Orleans’s Trust Your Crazy Ideas Competition during Season 2 of SAR.

We don’t know yet, but we’re assembling some ideas right now. Stick around to find out!

Not on our Some Assembly Required email list? Sign up here to get news on everything SAR and get first dibs on tickets.

Want to learn more or find out how to become a sponsor for our next installment? Please contact Kenny Nguyen at Kenny.n@tsedevelopment.wpengine.com.