Last Lecture at our office

At our office, departmental meetings can be strange, varied -- and sometimes wonderful -- things. We've had how-to demonstrations of improvements to the our email newsletter tool, and we've talked through all kinds of organizational issues. Today, we listened to a dying man.

Many of us had already heard of Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor who delivered the traditional Last Lecture with a non-traditional twist -- he wasn't retiring, he was dying of pancreatic cancer.



It's rolled across the Web, Oprah and other network TV shows have had emotional features on this lecture, but you should listen to the real thing, (and preferably listen to the whole thing -- it's about an hour and a quarter long) for yourself. Our little band had a lot of teary eyes by the end -- not because it was sad, but because it was grand. We tried to talk about what we each got out of it, but for a pretty talkative group, we couldn't get much of a conversation going at all.

So we all took away something (I particularly was moved by the messages of the brick walls, but you need to find your own takeaway). It wasn't a classic, by-the-book organizational meeting, although it was all about work, and was all about organizations, but sometimes it's better to learn things in that different way.

Do your departmental meetings ever move you to this "good kind" of tears? Is it appropriate for a workplace? What do you think?