About four months later we held our big annual convention. We invited 2,500 real estate agents from all over the country, and you can imagine they were a pretty energetic crowd. We met in the Austin Convention Center, and this was my first presentation to this group as the new CEO. I wanted to engage the crowd and ask for ideas about how we can make our company better. Well, the professional speechwriters advised against it and literally deleted this part from my speech three times. They said, ‘‘No, you shouldn’t stop the show. It will distract people. It’s the wrong thing to do. You don’t want to get people engaged in a conversation when you’re giving a speech to a large audience. They are there to listen. You are there to talk.’’ Well, I decided to try something different anyway. In the middle of my keynote address, I asked for the houselights to come up. I asked everybody to take out their Blackberries and their iPhones and turn them on as opposed to turn them off. I asked them all to text or email one great idea — how to get a new client, how to close a sale, how to keep a customer for life. I said, ‘‘Take your very best idea, your absolutely best one, and share it. You will be sharing it with the person three rows behind you, down the convention center, across the hall. Let’s do it right now.’’ ‘‘I had somebody bring my Blackberry on stage, and I participated as well. We did that for about four or five minutes, and then I invited them to continue to do it for the next 36 hours — until the end of the convention. Do you know how many ideas we came up with? Over 2,200. When we sorted all the duplicates and a couple of those that, well, were just nonsensical, we had 900 unique ideas. One person sent 197. We’ve been using those ideas for the last 15 months. One office sends out one idea to each of its sales associates every day, and they said, ‘‘It gave us ideas for three years.’’ In 36 hours, we generated an idea a day for three years. That wasn’t about me. It was about creating a positive network.