The 20th Annual NAMIC Conference kicked off on Sunday, September 10th, at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, with a reunion of Executive Leadership Development Program and Leadership Seminar graduates, attending an all-day workshop designed to reinforce their leadership skills. I happened to attend the Leadership Seminar workshop, which focused on Time Management and Communication Skills. We all left with a different outlook about what we had to do to change or improve the way we impact our work style.

Chapter leaders also got to compare notes and receive their marching orders for the upcoming year.

First-time conference attendees and new members received an orientation about the conference and what they should expect out of it and then joined the rest of the members for the National Membership meeting.

Later on, folks got some networking in at the Welcome Reception, sponsored by Bloomberg TV at their beautiful headquarters on Lexington Avenue.

Manish Jha, NAMIC Chairman and Honorary Conference Co-Chair, began the Opening General Session, on Monday, September 11th, with a moment of silence in commemoration of the 5th anniversary of those who lost their lives in the World Trade Towers in 2001. He gave a brief speech on Diversity, which basically said that we, as a cable industry, are not doing the best that we can to foster diversity within our companies. Improvement is necessary. He then introduced the moderator, Roland West, President & CEO of Roland West Associates, and panelists onto the stage to participate in the Town Hall Meeting: Multiple Views on Diversity, which proved to be a very interesting forum.

Each panelist gave their opinions about how their company is dealing with diversity. Audience participation was facilitated by the issuance of a keypad to be used by the participants to answer questions that were displayed on the stage screen. Their answers were broken down into statistics reflecting how they think about different aspects of diversity in the workplace.

The panelists were:

• Antoinette Alfonse Zel, Senior EVP, Network Strategy, Telemundo
• Redia Anderson Banks, Chief Diversity Officer, National Principal Diversity & Inclusion, Deloitte & Touche USA LLP
• Patrick Esser, President, Cox Communications, Inc.
• Dinni Jain, President & COO, Insight Communications
• Johnathan Rodgers, President & CEO, TV One
• Joshua Sapan, President & CEO, Rainbow Media Holdings, LLC
• Henry Schleiff, Chairman, Court TV
• Luke Visconti, Partner & Co-Founder, DiversityInc

The session concluded with questions from the audience.