The Conference Publishers Turns 25
I still remember exactly how things unfolded on October 5, 1984, the day The Conference Publishers was born. I had been in my job for 3½ months, after reluctantly leaving Canada’s Parliamentary Press Gallery and a career in freelance journalism. I had joined a small policy consulting firm as its publications director, hoping to spend [...]
A Dynamic Dozen: The Making of a “Killer App”
Everywhere you turn these days, meeting professionals are searching for the “killer app” that will make social media and virtual technologies more an opportunity and less a threat for face-to-face events. The language of hybrid meetings, virtually unknown a year ago, is quickly gaining currency. MPI experimented with a Virtual Access Pass at its 2009 [...]
Fight Like Hell for the Living
SAN FRANCISCO – In the week since Terri Breining announced the closure of Concepts Worldwide, the San Diego County firm she built into a meetings industry icon, I’ve been thinking about the capriciousness of a market that rewards the most arbitrary successes, while devaluing or ignoring the most genuine achievements. When we celebrate flash over [...]
A Quiet Sense of Duty
Late last month, I received a surprising email that will shape the lion’s share of the volunteer time I devote to our industry over the next two years. I wouldn’t normally be quite this excited about an opportunity to pack dozens of extra hours into a schedule that is already overloaded. But this isn’t just [...]
The Meetings that Elected a President
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH – Meeting Professionals International (MPI) kicked off its 2009 World Education Congress today with an opening general session that cemented the organization’s focus on the threats the meetings industry has faced over travel, incentives, and the value of meetings. But along the way, participants heard some ideas on the structure and [...]
Can a Value-Add be Free?
Recently a lot fingers have been doing a lot of typing regarding the Virtual Access Pass as proposed by Meeting Professionals International (MPI) for the upcoming World Education Congress (WEC). The dedication and earnest concern of the various bloggers should be commended, for this debate about using the Internet to extend the reach of conferences [...]
The Tempest Over MPI’s Virtual Access Pass
There’s quite a tempest brewing over the Virtual Access Pass that our professional association, Meeting Professionals International (MPI), has introduced for its 2009 World Education Congress (WEC), which gets under way this weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah. The conversation is an echo of a wider debate about when it’s legitimate—or whether it’s ever legitimate—to [...]
What Are You Waiting For?
In 1968, while most of his classmates were playing ball or watching Gilligan’s Island or sleeping, one 13-year-old boy was programming his heart out on a powerful (for its day) mainframe computer. It was a unique and improbable opportunity and he took full advantage of it. Reflecting on the experience today, Bill Gates says, “I [...]
Solutions in the Eye of the Storm
An interesting thing is happening on the way to the economic recovery. We certainly aren’t there yet—in the economy as a whole, or in meetings and events. The sheer, accumulating weight of cancellations is setting off alarm bells across the industry, and the U.S. Center for Exhibition Industry Research has just reported the first decline [...]
A Couple of Million Jobs at Stake
BREAKING NEWS: On March 10, The Huffington Post published my blog item on the meetings industry crisis and the Kerry bill now before the U.S. Congress. The central argument, drawing on data from MPI Foundation Canada’s study of the economic impact of meetings and events, was that the attack on meetings in the U.S. could [...]
