Great Booth Traffic and Dinner in Downtown Disney

Yesterday was a great day in the exhibit hall. We've collected over 100 business cards from interested organizations. If we can generate a dozen good leads from the show then it was a worthwhile trip. Of course, the other great thing about the WorldatWork show is seeing all our friends from around the country. We met some new people from a company called PayScale. They have a new approach to collecting compensation data. I visited for a bit with Leigh Culpepper, President and CEO of Culpepper and Associates. We had a great discussion on the future of salary surveys. In talking with other organizations on the show floor the trend seems to be moving toward more seamless integration of the survey data with other systems, like NextComp, using XML web services. This would come as a welcome new method of distributing survey data. France Lampron, CEO of Nuvosoft and Jill Vaslow, Manager of Compensation at Nintendo of America presented a very well recieved session on real-time compensation management. The other hot topic this year is global compensation. This is the first year in the history of the conference that a representative from China presented. I think this trend will only continue as the economy in China continues to evolve. After the conference closed, Bob and I wanted to go ride the roller coaster in California Adventure, but the park was closed at 7:00 PM! Bummer, so we headed over to Downtown Disney for dinner at the Jazz Kitchen instead.The decor of the restaurant made me feel like I was back in the New Orleans French Quarter, only it was cleaner and brighter in Downtown Disney.
The food was excellent and there was a jazz pianist to complete the scene. After dinner we went to ESPN Zone, which gave both Dad and me a sensory overload. It was wild, especially since it was 9:00 PM and there were little kids there playing video games (I mean like 3 and 4 year olds). But it's Disneyland after all. You've got to get your money's worth in entertainment. We ended the evening visiting with our friends from WorldatWork. We ran into several people involved with the WorldatWork Group Partnership Network. We had a fun and lively discussion. They were impressed that Bob was hanging out and going on this trip. Thanks Dad! It's great to have you here in Anaheim. One more thing I found out yesterday, Ryan Johnson with WorldatWork has a blog. You have to be a WorldatWork member to view the blog, but it's an entertaining log of Ryan's travels and work. Check it out. More to come tomorrow once I return home from the conference.

Oh yeah, here is a picture of what has to be the world's largest Lego Batman!



Here are some more pictures from the Jazz Kitchen.