To be honest: I don’t have much of a problem if I „have to“ fly to Florida every year at the end of february/beginning of march. At this time of the year, temperatures in Florida are simply more agreeable than in Vienna and I prefer endless beaches to the snow on our terrace. But that is not the only reason: This year, LeanAgileUS took place in Fort Lauderdale for the first time and it seems that it will take off to become a really cool conference on a regular basis. LeanAgileUS is organized by Steve Reid, who is living Kanban with about 4000 people at Ultimate Software, and my good friend Dan Vacanti, master of agile metrics. Initially those two simply wanted to organize an event for the local Agile Community of Florida but to me it looks like it will take on another dimension.
About 250 people already attended the first edition of LeanAgileUS from February 27th to 28th and in my opinion this had a lot to do with Dan’s and Steve’s concept. First of all, LeanAgileUS is open to people of all „persuasions“, may it be Scrum, Kanban, Lean – you name it. We talked about everything and learned from it. On top of that, Dan and Steve tried to show Agile in all its facets and so they invited practically experienced Top-Speakers from the US and the rest of the world to come to Florida. Dominica DeGrandis, Karl Scotland, Larry Maccherone, Wolfgang Wiedenroth, Troy Magennis … have a look at the list right here. 
So I felt all the more honored to be invited as well. I had the opportunity to talk about „Lean Business Agility“ and to hold two workshops. The most important insight for most of the attendees at my talk (about 80) was the fact that agile organizations aren’t a compilation of agile teams and that they should rather try to improve interactions between teams. It seems that organizations on both sides of the Atlantic are still very much focused on installing methods at team level. Fortunately, I heard the penny drop quite a few times.
Well, I guess that LeanAgileUS will become a fixed point in my conference calendar. The search for a new date has already begun.