Last night, I had the chance to speak at the Experipro Business Summit. They put it on in an amazing video production studio, AMS, in Dallas (who knew that Dallas had a place like that.) There were some great speakers including Tim Houline, the CEO of Working Solutions whose presentation focused on lessons he learned as he grew that company. He had my favorite line from the evening, “No Buildings. No Fear.” I love that as a mantra for modern startups!

Tracey Altman, the VP of Marketing for Wholly Guacamole also gave a fascinating speech on branding and marketing innovation. I had no idea how much thought went into the packaging of smooshed Avocadoes. Besides giving away the best door prizes (a year’s supply of guacamole), she also had a very interesting statistic: over 300,000 people follow Wholly Guacamole on Facebook and 200,000 of those either comment or actively participate each month.

But there was one presentation that really stuck with me, because it changed the way I think about the people I work with. Mike Rose spoke about the ways in which we approach our work in his Return On Energy speech. His recent book by the same title goes into much more detail, but essentially, he breaks down the roles that people play in the organization in to three major categories:

Way 1: Vision: The people responsible for laying out the vision and direction of the company

Way 2: Strategy: The people responsible for translating that vision into action plans that can be executed

Way 3: Execution: The people who execute the strategies.

He talked about how challenging it is to move between these roles and how communication can breakdown between them. I’ve already found it changing the way I think about organizations.