First Thoughts By Dan Gilmore – Editor-in-Chief It’s time again. 10 years ago, I wrote our initial (and somewhat infamous) First Thoughts piece on "Let’s Stop the Blah, Blah, Blah." The basic theme: too many presentations at various conferences and other events don’t say enough of real value. The jab was aimed primarily at speakers from the consulting, academic, solution vendor, author, and sometimes even the analyst community. This group, as we’ve noted before, too often tends to be focused on sound bites and restating the obvious, rather than delivering real insight. As always, I include myself in the category of those speakers who risk blah, blah, blah-ness at times, and recognize how hard it is, especially if you speak frequently on different topics, to avoid going there now and then. I fully admit to falling into blah, blah, blah territory on a few occasions. Gilmore Says: All that said, I offer again our Audience Bill of Rights , which offers some reasonable guidelines for what you should expect and demand from presenters. We have even heard of conferences where organizers are now using some version of this document in communicating with speakers. My conference schedule was about average this year. That said, in rough chronological order, I attended the National Retail Federation’s Big Show, MODEX, NASSTRAC, the Logility user conference, the JDA Software user conference, the Gartner Supply Chain Executive forum, the LLamasoft user conference, the annual CSCMP conference, the MHI conference (a first for me), the Vocollect partner meeting, and the BDO national conference (as a presenter). I unfortunately was not able to get to one of my favorite events each year, the Warehouse Education and Research Council (WERC) conference due to a conflict with the JDA event (ditto for the ISM conference), but feel like a virtual attendee […]