How TED Talks Changed our Culture

If you've never watched a TED talk before, stop reading this article and go to TED.com and prepare to be amazed. TED Talks are up to 18 minutes of packed awesomeness by leading experts on a variety of topics from Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) and virtually everything in between.

If you already knew that, keep reading to learn how Axosoft brought the idea of short talks to our company and how it has changed the dynamics of our work environment.

Two years ago, the TED Conference started offering an option to purchase a live stream of their brilliant and nearly impossible to get into conference. As a huge fan of the TED Conference, I decided to shut down Axosoft for a week and watch the TED conference live stream with the entire company, about 30 people at the time. It was an amazing experience for the whole company.

Over the course of a week, we watched more than 50 amazing TED talks on what seemed like every subject in the book. We learned about politics, music, environmental issues, technology, population problems, nuclear physics and so much more.

We treated the event as though we had taken the whole company on a retreat. We planned breakfasts, lunches and dinners around the conference schedule. We discussed the more powerful TED talks as a group, giving us a chance to get to know one-another more closely than we ever had. We learned about each other's views and had the chance to experience moving talks together resulting in a bond and closeness between us that can only be had when people experience something together, at the same time.

But the conference schedule presented us with a small problem. Because the actual event was in a large venue with 1,500 people, the schedule had a generous number of long breaks. While the breaks may have been perfectly timed for the people who were in physical attendance, they were generally too long for our small group of 30 who were watching through the live stream.