I’m working at home today, recovering from RADIO.

RADIO is an internal VMware event, and it stands for Research And Development Innovation Off-site.  It’s a huge event intended to get our R&D org thinking about how we can innovate around the company.

I just got home from it, and I’ve got to admit that I’m exhausted.  I was invited to speak there, and gave a talk about how engineers can better learn about our customers.  I also ran a birds-of-a-feather session on a similar topic.  But my exhaustion isn’t just from the preparation (and, I’ll admit, nervousness) from my sessions.  It’s from the sheer amount of awesomeness that I’ve seen going on around the company.

A lot of companies talk about supporting innovation from within the ranks of its team.  VMware delivers.  First of all, the whole of R&D is encouraged to submit their ideas and develop them.  We have features and products that were first suggested at RADIO.  Second, the RADIO folks put a huge amount of effort into helping those who submitted their ideas work on them to get them to a place where they’re ready to be shared with a wide audience.  Everyone who submits gets to go to the event, and other people around R&D get to come if they win a ticket in the lottery.  Attending RADIO is completely paid for by VMware itself, and it doesn’t even come out of our departmental budget.  And we’re given three days to bask in all of this: presentations from our fellow engineers about their awesome ideas, and plenty of time for breaks so that we can meet each other and discuss it.

And now it’s the day after RADIO, and I’ll admit that I’m exhausted.  My plans for today involve going through the mail that built up while I was at RADIO, and thinking about what I learned while I was there.