Last week was crazy for me – during the week I had dinner with Utah Governor Gary Herbert, the First Lady, Governor Scott Walker (Wisconsin), and a few other business leaders at the Governor’s mansion to discuss the importance the States need to play in driving Washington to balance the federal budget.  After the dinner we headed over to hear Sir Elton John do his farewell performance. All I can say is that Elton John is amazingly talented – WOW!

Then last Thursday and Friday was the big UVU National Advisory Board Conference for the Business School Board that I Chair.  As Chair of the board, twice a year I plan and put on a big two day conference for all of our board members to come together with the University. It takes a tremendous amount of work to get ready for these board conferences…more than I care to think about right now…it’s a ton of stress to get them ready and put them on and when they are over I have to crash for several days just to recover…but its totally worth it because the work this board is doing is SO impactful!

Last week’s conference ended up going AWESOME!  For the opening dinner I brought in motivational speaker and former UVU Student Clint Pulver come and share his story of how as a young boy with A.D.D. he was always getting yelled at by teachers for not sitting still in class. Until one teacher saw something in him the others had failed to notice and he handed Clint a pair of drumsticks. Those drumsticks led Clint to becoming an incredible drummer and they eventually led Clint to approach the President of UVU with an idea to form a drumline of students all dressed in neon green morph suits doing crazy fun acrobatics and performances with their drums.  The President loved the idea and allowed Clint to found UVUs Green Man Group which has become legendary and they travel the country performing and knocking the socks off everyone in the audience watching. Clint expressed how all it takes is one person who believes in you to change a life. His talk was awesome and as he ended his talk he was joined by the current Green Man Group who came in and put on an insanely awesome performance for our board.  Following that we had Quick Wits Improv Comedy team perform for us and they engaged the board members to help them do an improv routine that had us all laughing together. It was a great night of bonding with fellow board members.

The next day we had our full day board meeting. We started with UVU’s President Astrid Tuminez addressing our board members and walking them through her vision for the future of the school.  Next I walked through a review of the exciting things happening at the University and then I conducting several group discussions with the board members to give them the opportunity to offer their amazing advice and ideas with the Woodbury School of Business Dean and his leadership team.  I love the discussion part of our meetings because this group of board members brings unbelievable experience and knowledge to the table and I always learn so much from all of them.  Finally we ended our board meeting by having a student launched company,  iDrive Entertainment, bring in a few racetracks for our board to do some team building racing against each other. It truly was a great day and another successful board conference. 

I’m still exhausted from all the hard work that went into making last week a success but it’s a good kind of tired because I know this board is helping make the future brighter for over 40,000 students that attend the University and their posterity to come – and that is just plain AWESOME!

Here are some fun pics from the UVU Board Conference:

~Amy Rees Anderson (author of the book “What Awesome Looks Like: How To Excel in Business & Life” )