By southwest

Last year’s travel almost sent me to an early grave and I’m earnestly trying to scale back this year. But there are some destinations I can’t bring myself to skip. Like South by Southwest.

I’m particularly excited about this year’s event, mostly because the panelists on the talk I’ll be moderating are so damn interesting.

• Irene Au, Director of User Experience, Google
• Chris Bernard, User Experience Evangelist, Microsoft
• Moshe Tamssot, Vice President, New Services, Kraft Foods
• John Wolpert, Executive Director, Team UpStart

Here’s the official panel description:

Entrepreneurship in the Belly of the Beast

Small is beautiful at SXSW. From Getting Real to starting up, the ethos is largely anti-large corporation. This attitude overlooks one of the most satisfying professional accomplishments: doing your own thing while working for The Man. This presentation uses examples to offer strategies for making the corporation work for you.

And the unofficial addendum: this panel at one time had a subtitle that seems to have gotten lopped off: “Why Working For a Gigantic Company Isn’t As Bad As SXSW Would Have You Believe”. The idea basically is to explore the dominant SXSW sensibility that large organizations are somehow inimical to creativity and innovation.

The idea for organizing something like this had been percolating for a while, but was pretty much solidified with this back-and-forth from last year’s SXSW.

The talk is scheduled for Monday, March 16, 11:30am – 12:30pm.

If you’re attending SXSW, stop by and say hello!