Inside Supply Management Magazine

#ISM2019: Happy Twitter Trails

April 10, 2019

The ISM2019 Annual Conference in Houston closed on Wednesday with a half-day of activity. However, attendees showed a desire to finish strong, firing up their Twitter accounts to share their final experiences and learnings, as well as say goodbye.

At an Institute for Supply Management® (ISM®) Annual Conference, the closing keynote is designed to provide actionable information that attendees can immediately use in their organizations. Mandy Flint and Elisabet Vinberg Hearn — authors of three books, most recently The Leader’s Guide to Impact — fit that bill on Wednesday, discussing, among other topics, how leadership and organizational dynamics will be impacted by digitization.

The Exhibit Hall was a hub of product and service knowledge — as well as networking and socializing — throughout ISM2019, and the smiles and sense of humor of supply management professionals are among the biggest treats at an ISM Annual Conference.

Eight morning breakout sessions were on the Wednesday agenda, and knowledge was still to be gleaned. In fact, this year’s Conference might have set a record for session-related tweets — hopefully an indication of the quality and value of the information presented.

Finally, it was time to depart the George R. Brown Convention Center, with some attendees off to a tour of NASA’s Johnson Space Center — a bonus item on the Conference agenda — and others heading home. Among the thank yous and farewells:

If you’ll indulge ISM for a moment, our Twitter feed had to acknowledge two groups of people who an Annual Conference cannot happen without: attendees (whose names were on a large placard at the Convention Center) and our volunteers.

And finally, the supply management profession will reconvene at ISM2020 in Boston. We’ll work on having session snack-bag mufflers by then, but no promises.