Welcome to Austin: A Local’s Guide for NSA Influence 2026
NSA Influence Austin The National Speakers Association is bringing Influence 2026 to Austin, and as someone who has called this city home since 1991, I am excited to welcome hundreds of my speaker friends to my hometown. Influence officially runs July 25–27 at the...
Texas Embassy Podcast: Austin Texas Leadership, Technology, and the Power of Showing Up
I recently joined Marc Cervantes, founder and CEO of Q-Branch, for a conversation on The Texas Embassy Podcast. We covered a lot of ground, including leadership, networking, the growth of Austin’s technology community, and why collaboration across Texas matters more...
Stop Being an Efficient Stranger
If you lost your job tomorrow, how many of the 5,000 people you are connected to on LinkedIn would pick up the phone, call you, check in, and offer to help? Be honest. For most people, the answer is not very many. That is not because people are bad. It is because we...
Business Development for Lawyers – Newsletter
Why I Built the "Lawyer Level Up" Newsletter Business development for lawyers is not a talent you are born with. It is a skill you build, and most attorneys never build it because nobody ever made them practice. I spent five years running marketing and business...
Twenty Years Speaking About Human Connection and Networking
Twenty Years In: What I Got Right About Human Inteaction (H.I.) and What I Didn't See Coming In March of 2005 I started a blog to go along with my first book, Some Assembly Required: How to Make, Grow and Keep Your Business Relationships. Back then, if you told a room...
How to Find the Right Keynote Speaker for Your Event
The keynote is the backbone of your event. Get it right and you unify a room, set the tone, and give people something to carry home. Get it wrong and you spend the rest of the day fighting a flat energy you can't recover from. What a Keynote Speaker Actually Does A...
H.I. Before AI… Human Connection In a Tech Focused World
Are you seeing this too? Suddenly everyone... regular people, celebrities, CEOs... is posting about "human connection" like they just discovered fire. I call it Human Interaction (H.I.). And it's not new. I've been speaking on this for over 25 years. My first book,...
Be a Deliberate Human – Human Connections Keynote Speaker Thom Singer
In this short video, human connection keynote speaker Thom Singer shares why Human Interaction, (what he calls H.I.), matters more than ever in an AI-driven world. As technology, automation, and productivity tools continue to reshape how we work, many professionals...
Are You Available? The Question AI Can’t Answer for You
[Note: This post was inspired by Dean Dzurilla's reflection on AI Assembly... he captured something worth building on.] This week, 35 people gathered for Austin AI Assembly. No agenda. Just a room full of professionals willing to wrestle with a question that doesn't...
How to Stop Being an Efficient Stranger
You Didn't Choose to Become an Efficient Stranger. Here's How to Choose Your Way Back. The drift is quiet. That's what makes it dangerous. Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to become an Efficient Stranger. There's no single decision. There are a thousand small...