what are the ingredients of a great workday?

• free food
• don’t work very hard
• be engaged and intrigued and challenged and learn new stuff
• hit a home run

add to that meeting some very interesting influential people, winning a PlayStation Portable, and getting some Dos Equis and 12-year old Scotch…its amazing I get paid for this!!

I’ll keep it general, since on principal I don’t like to talk too much about work on my blog. We were having our Technology Summit where many of the top folks from Phoenix and the various other Dev teams converged on the new location for 3 days of conferences and presentations and office warming. Good stuff, learned some things, networked a bit, breakfast lunch dinner and drinks on the 2nd day. The highlight of the conference was a competition dreamed up by my manager – the prize a new PSP and 15 minutes of fame and adulation from your coworkers-   where each person was challenged to come up with an idea to “Restock the Shelves” and help grow our business to offset the impending loss of our LiveNation customers. Whoever says Ticketmaster is an old fat happy monopoly has never worked with the R&D Team.

The idea came to me almost all at once, a geyser of connected thoughts that had been percolating slowly from my recent and frequent usage of Ebay, Craigslist, and SteapandCheap.com. What if we took our existing customer accounts and their ability to set notification preferences via email, but also tied them into postings on our Exchange site like Craigslist – enabling them to get customized timely messages about ticket resales and events of their choice – and sent it all out as RSS feeds, deliverable possibly by a desktop client like SteapandCheap??

I knew right away the PSP was mine!

The idea had it all – revenue generation, traffic to our site, traffic specifically to our Exchange sites that would hurt our competition, sexy evolving technology, and compulsive shopping. I shared it with Rich at the first break, and he was impressed, as were Beckie and one of the Dev leads I often kibbitz with. The best part was, if my idea got beaten out, then some of the other very smart and very capable people at the conference were surely working just as hard at their own ideas. And it meant money for the company, and ultimately more for all our bonuses. I was not disappointed, as the other ideas that I did hear were all pretty darn good in their own right. Its exciting being in a creative environment with other sharp people.

The competition led our resident Alpha Genius to establish a Friday morning brainstorming session to go with our free bagels and shmear, and I can’t wait to participate. This is where great new ideas are going to be born, where inside tracks to working on them will be established, and where individually i will get to play to some of my strengths in design and problem-solving.

and yes, i did go home with the PlayStation.