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Why are you at this conference today?
Well, I'm here to learn...I'm here to network with other people, old friends to some extent but
just to hear. They have such a breadth and wealth of experience and great speakers.
People that are outstanding in our field and our industry and I'm here to learn from them.
And what is the focus of this conference and why is that focus important?
Well, the focus is leadership, and leadership from various aspects and
as much as anything that we do in the fire service, we need to learn about leadership.
We need to learn about leadership because we're in the people business.
We're in the people business both in the firehouse as well as in the community.
Our leaders are the people from the newest rookie to the oldest hand.
We're all leaders and we have to train as leaders
and unfortunately we have grown as an industry to be great technicians...
we have grown to be very competent in all of the skills and the knowledge
that are necessary to do our job and to do it well
but the whole leadership issue, I think, has been overlooked unfortunately
as a discipline in and of itself for too long in the fire service and
this greatly begins to address that.
And finally if someone is considering coming to this conference next year, why should they?
This is the best conference there is for this purpose.
There are excellent conferences throughout the nation on everything in the world
but if you want to learn about leadership and you want to more importantly see leaders
and meet leaders and hear leaders speak and hear people who have experienced the
trenches as well as the successes as well as the failures and all of the above
then this is the place to come.