An Audacity of Scope: A Million Tons of Trash
Participants at the Green Meeting Industry Council (GMIC) conference in Pittsburgh last week adopted a big, audacious challenge. The gathering of 150 or so meeting professionals called for a million tons of trash (or a million metric tonnes, outside the United States) to be diverted or recycled from the meetings and events that take place [...]
Debris in All Directions
O-ho the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-comin’ now. Is it a prepaid surprise, or C.O.D.? The Music Man Lyric by Meredith Willson 1957 The Wells Fargo Wagon is beginning to look like a train wreck in all directions. Meeting professionals have been hearing all about the pushback Wells Fargo ran into, in the media and [...]
How Incentives Can Change the World (And How the World Can Change Incentives)
ATLANTA – A tantalizing question is emerging from the raging debate over incentive meetings, employee retreats, and the appropriate use of U.S. government bailout dollars: Can the principles and practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) help reassert the legitimacy of meetings, the industry that plans them, and the client organizations that are now weighing whether [...]
Now It’s Up to All of Us
ATLANTA – In the nearly 12 years that I’ve been a member of Meeting Professionals International (MPI), I have never seen our industry so angry, energized, and ready to argue the value and business results of a well-orchestrated meeting. As my mother might have said, in a reasonable imitation of some of our earlier-generation relatives: [...]
Downturn? What Downturn?
As a meeting professional, how would you have felt if you’d received the following RFP? Meeting dates: December 15-31 Scope: Nation-wide (United States only) Estimated participants: 50,400 Room nights: None Venues: 4,200 Average participants per venue: 12 Food and beverage: Provided Audio-visual requirements: None Air travel: None Carbon footprint: Local ground transportation; public transit and [...]
The Numbers Tell a Story
TORONTO—When more than 70 million participants attend 671,000 meetings in one year, your first reaction might be that everybody needs to get out a little more. But when it turns out that those meetings generated $32.2 billion in spending and 235,500 full-year jobs across Canada in 2006, representing an economic sector that was just a [...]
