They put speakers on a leaderboard. You won't believe what happened next!

NDC is an amazing conference, one of the best you can attend. I’m very privileged and excited to be speaking there.

This year, an “innovation” has been added, one that many american conferences have: the speaker leaderboard.

I don’t get it. Conferences for me are about learning, sharing and presenting. I don’t think that competition for attendees reviews is useful. It doesn’t teach anything to anyone, it puts speakers against one another, it pushes people to go for green cards and easy delivery rather than for challenging and controversial topics, and it raises the bar for new speakers to enter.

I don’t think adopting celebrity culture and pushing people to go for personality cult is a good idea. I’m all for people liking people and good speakers having a following, but a celebrity speaker world is not a world I want to be in. How long until we throw all the previous leaderboard winners in a bath full of crickets while they eat kangaroo penii? No thanks.