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What Does It Take for Women to Excel in the Meetings Industry?

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How we can start to close the gap between the number of women in the meetings industry and the number of women in industry leadership positions.

What would you do if your boss put his finger in a glass of water and said, “This is the office with you,” then pulled his finger out of the glass and said, “This is the office without you. Do you see any hole?” Karin Krogh, creative director, Engaging Meetings, shared that story during a campfire session on how women can excel in the meeting industry during IMEX America 2017 this fall. The comment stung, she said, but it also made her even more determined to become a leader—one who would never be so disrespectful of those in her charge. 

She posed a number of intriguing, complicated questions to the women (and one guy) who came to the session. We then broke up into small groups to tackle our table’s question before coming back together to share our conclusions. Among the topics we discussed:

• Should there be quotas ensuring women are included in boards and other leadership positions? Krogh told us that in Norway, there’s actually a law that boards have to maintain a certain percentage of women—is that a good idea? This was my group’s topic, and we struggled with it. I maintained that, until the inequity is resolved and having women in leadership positions is a norm, yes, quotas are a good idea because they would ensure that at least we can get a seat at the table.

Others disagreed, saying that it could cause resentment if men feel they have to get some woman, any woman, on the board, regardless of qualifications. To which I countered with my belief that there’s always a qualified woman to be found. You might have to work a little harder to find them, though, because women (at least of my generation) were taught early on to be modest and not toot our horns. They probably will have to be even more qualified for the job than a male candidate, and they will have to work harder to prove themselves, but as with other underserved demographics, we need to find ways to level the playing field. I maintain that quotas are one way to do just that.


Karin Krogh got us all thinking—and talking—about women and leadership in the meetings industry.

• How can we support and empower women in the meetings industry? This one had more of a consensus. Women in the industry should share resources and knowledge, and make connections and opportunities for each other. “Don’t be afraid that someone else’s success will mean competition for you,” said one person. Take ownership of being a leader, said another, so you can be a role model for those coming up in the industry.

• What’s the biggest obstacle for women in the meetings industry? Interestingly, most seemed to agree that we are our own biggest obstacle. “We need confidence in ourselves to ‘just do it’ instead of thinking of all the steps and obstacles that’ll stop us,” said one person. “Men just do it and if they fail, they try something else.” Another added, “When we share the obstacles—and how we overcome them—with each other, it’s empowering. Strength comes with vulnerability. We should not be afraid to be vulnerable, but also not afraid to be strong.” 

One comment that still rings with me as a pretty potent barrier was, “If you step up, people are going to see you, and they may not like what they see.” It’s hard for women to not take criticism to heart, to wallow in self-doubt, to depend too much on the support of others.

“Let’s stop obsessing about our weaknesses and focus instead on our and each other’s strengths,” said another person. “Let’s shore each other up by filling in the other person’s weaknesses with our strengths, and vice versa.”

Sharing Career Advice
Krogh wrapped up by sharing two of her favorite quotes:

“There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”—Madeleine Albright 

“Create a career that works for you rather than trying to follow a pattern set by some old white man.”—Fiona Pelham LINK http://www.meetingsnet.com/corporate-meetings/2016-changemaker-fiona-pelham, CEO of Positive Impact Events and former chairwoman of Meeting Professionals International

Then she asked us to give our own quick-bite career advice. Among our answers:

“Have passion and believe in yourself.”

“Don’t be afraid to say what you think. Take responsibility.”

“Be a lifelong learner.”

“The worst they can do is say no—don’t be afraid to ask.”

“Celebrate the small victories.”

“Be authentic. Share your successes—and your failures.”

Mine was: “Don’t wait until the stars all align perfectly—jump in and do it. Stretching out of your comfort zone is the only way to grow.”

What do you think we all can do to encourage women who want to take leadership roles to go after them? What are some of the barriers we still have that keep women from developing their leadership potential?


Want to Scare a Meeting Planner to Death?

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A gallery of meeting planning horrors that haunt event professionals all year long.

Meeting professionals don't scare easy. Bumps in the night, creepy critters, ghouls, and gore generally don't faze them. But here are 10 things that are guaranteed to give planners goosebumps.

Lessons on Crisis Communications from Chipotle’s Brand Lead

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William Espey shows meeting professionals how to defend a brand facing a PR crisis.

“Transparency builds trust. Trust builds loyalty,” says William Espey, the marketing visionary who built up Chipotle’s iconic brand since 1999 and helped the restaurant through its most challenging PR crisis after a series of E. coli outbreaks.

Meeting professionals can gain valuable insight from Espey. When customers trust a brand, their expectations expand and deepen. They’re invested emotionally, and their attachments run deep. So, when an issue presents itself, they expect to be treated like friends or family. And what do you do when your friends or family feel like you let them down?

You apologize. You listen. You communicate, and you work through the problem together by remembering why the relationship exists in the first place. “Brands have to be prepared to simply confront the truth immediately and own up to being at fault,” says Espey.

Evolving technology has made responding to crises at times more challenging than ever, now that attendees are scattered across so many social media platforms. “Where’s the audience? Where are your customers now? They’re everywhere and nowhere,” says Espey.

Attendees are constantly sharing ideas and opinions with each other, as well as their frustrations and criticisms. Sometimes these conversations spiral out of control. If you’re not engaged and responding in real time, there’s a higher chance that inaccurate or untrue information can get passed around and exacerbate the conflict.

The key is to embrace direct engagement. To do that effectively, here are some of Espey’s thoughts on brand building and communications for meetings and events.

Everything You Do Is Branding
“Everything is branding, and branding is everything,” says Espey, underscoring that everything from employee actions to corporate announcements represent the brand.

It’s just as important for planners to keep this in mind while planning events—if messaging is consistent and relevant, brands can build goodwill with clients, customers, and attendees that ultimately has the potential to form a halo effect. Then, if crises occur, there is a much greater possibility of the parties coming together to alleviate the issue, based on the reservoir of goodwill. Brands have personalities that express values, says Espey—and every aspect of a customer’s experience with your event contributes to how they view your brand. 

“When we start expressing values as a brand, we create connections with customers on a more profound level than just a simple transaction,” says Espey. “You’re actually sharing something. You’re sharing a connection that creates a long-term customer relationship.”

These connections matter because customers look to brands for transcendent experiences. “As a company, as a brand, that’s your job, to make your customers have these moments where they feel that bliss, where you’re taking their problems away from them, and they will love you for it,” says Espey. “I think with Chipotle, what happened and why it was so dramatic, is people really connected with the brand and the brand personality. They really felt it was a friend, and they felt betrayed.”

Turn Your Team into Brand Ambassadors
Because every interaction affects your brand’s reputation, Espey emphasizes the importance of hiring the right people and retaining talent. “It’s important to understand your employees and how they represent your brand,” he says. “As you’re hiring people, as you are training them, you must be acculturating them into what your brand is and what your core beliefs are, so even in a casual conversation on the airport shuttle bus, they’re representing that brand in a way that you feel comfortable with. 

It doesn’t stop with hiring. Remind employees of their roles and responsibilities as brand ambassadors daily—whether they are in their first year of service, or their twentieth. Just as important is for the management team to exemplify what it means to be a brand ambassador.

Lastly, don’t forget external parties. Your clients can be your most powerful brand ambassadors, so make sure that you are consistently nurturing those relationships, which will encourage them to want to speak highly of your brand to others.      

Develop a Communications Plan
A communications strategy is essential but it is only as good as the team-members executing it. Once the strategy is established everyone must have a solid understanding of their roles, as well as the roles of others, to ensure clear and coherent messaging throughout all mediums. While every channel, or platform is different, the brand voice and the messaging must remain consistent. Given the nuances of different channels, static talking points will come off as inauthentic. Instead, create communications that convey the general tone and desired messages, including relevant facts, then trust team-members to tailor them to audiences on different channels.

Espey suggests having an individual or group assigned to specific areas based on their knowledge and depth of experience, but managed under an overarching communications team to ensure that the brand messaging is similarly reflected in all instances

Finally, it’s important to remember that all successful brand communication relies on transparency and authenticity—especially during and after confronting a full-blown crisis. Chipotle’s response to its E-coli crisis included clear and detailed information about the company’s plans to address the situation. 

Build Trust, Gain Loyalty
When attendees come to an event, they expect a smooth and rewarding experience. The key is to avoid unwelcome surprises so communicating in advance can prevent PR problems.

Espey also advises meeting planners to create a system that empowers team-members to resolve attendees’ problems proactively and quickly—this could be a designated and well-identified troubleshooting team or a specific Twitter handle or email address to message. He calls this a “pressure release valve” that allows attendees to release their frustrations with you easily and directly.

Getting to know your client is another important part of managing and avoiding potential problems. When you understand what the client is trying to achieve—the objective of the meeting—you’re in a better position to communicate with attendees and bridge gaps in expectations.

At the same time, you’re building trust. If something should go wrong, and you’ve built enough trust over time, attendees and clients will have confidence that you and your team will handle crises effectively, says Espey.

Learn from Mistakes 

One way to mitigate PR issues or potential crises is to learn from yours and others’ past mistakes. Chipotle’s peers in the restaurant industry took note of what happened and proactively began evaluating their supply chains to avoid a similar circumstance, including developing contingency communication plans to manage the fallout from bad publicity. 

Likewise, when event planners make a mistake, it can be an incredibly valuable learning tool, says Espey. It shows where your event may be exposed to potential risk and provides the opportunity to address them. This is where post-event surveys can be especially useful, to provide attendees with the opportunity to tell you where you can adjust or improve for next year.

If the worst happens and you face a crisis, it’s imperative that you reflect on your communications efforts afterwards. A formal review of what went well and what could be improved upon will help ongoing efforts to run a strong communications program.

 

 

 

 

Event Prof Shines in Forbes Q&A

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Christy Lamagna tackles the difference between strategy and logistics, what makes for a dream client, fam ethics, and more.

When I hear a meeting professional is mentioned in the mainstream media, I get a little nervous. Is it because of some scandal or boondoggle? A lone voice defending meetings in an effort to balance an otherwise meeting-bashing extravaganza?

But when I saw a link to this Q&A with Christy Lamagna, CMP, CMM, CTSM, founder and president of Strategic Meetings and Events, in Forbes, I was just excited to hear what she had to say. I’ve been a fan of hers for years—it's so weird that we just met in person for the first time at IMEX America this year—and I knew she would show the meetings industry in a good light.

And she does, though she also shines that light on a few of the areas that still need work, such as a lack of professional standards with real teeth, unethical fam trippers, and “box-checker” clients who aren’t willing to do the work of connecting the meeting to real goals and outcomes. But she also talks about the importance of being strategic about meetings and events, because when we are, the results can influence behavior and bring about real change. We can’t talk about that enough.

This is my favorite quote of many in the article:

You want the strategist to ask, “What's your goal for having this meeting? Tell me what you would like to accomplish. What do you want your attendees saying, thinking, and doing when they leave?" The goal is to make events investments, not expenditures.

Here’s the link: Sick of Lousy Meetings? Christy Lamagna Has the Solution

Business Travel: What Me, Worry?

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Carlson Wagonlit Travel, working with Artemis Strategy Group, surveyed more than 1,900 business travelers from around the globe in spring 2017 for its CWT Connected Traveler Study. While researchers found that business travelers are indeed connected—on average carrying four types of technology—they also learned that many travelers find a lot to worry about when on the road and many use strategies to relieve some concerns, including buying insurance and signing up for alerts. To participate in the study, respondents had to have made more than four business trips within the past 12 months.

How to Become a More Mindful Meeting Professional

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Introducing a new seven-step program designed to support you throughout the stressful holiday season and into the new year.

At MeetingsNet, we know the countdown to the holiday rush officially begins now. You are busy finishing up your 2017 meeting rosters, and are diligently preparing for your 2018 meetings and beyond. 

To support you, we’re partnering with mindful leadership expert Holly Duckworth, CMP, CAE, LSP, to bring you seven weeks of Mindful Monday mini-messages in our MeetingsNet Today daily newsletters. In these mini-lessons, you will learn what mindfulness is, why it matters, and one technique each week you can use to bring more mindfulness to your life and work.  

Each Monday you can start your week with a short practice that you can reference during those stressful negotiations, crazed BEO reviews, or horrific hotel room block blunders. We know you are busy—our hope is that you will find two minutes in your day to practice these mini-lessons designed to help you painlessly ease into becoming more mindful, find a short respite from your stress, and be more peaceful, present, and profitable as 2017 winds down and the busy-ness winds up.

For a preview of each of the mindful Monday themes and a mini-poster for you to print and post as a reminder, visit www.hollyduckworth.com/mindfulplanner (free registration required to download).

Mindful Monday Week 1: Centering

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How to reconnect to your own voice when the world around you is shouting

Our world is overwhelming. Our fear of missing out on something important makes us feel we need to sift through the constant, unprecedented deluge of information coming at us, even though we know most of it is just noise. We have less recovery time between events, and we’re getting less of the sleep we need to rejuvenate. It’s unsustainable, it’s exhausting, and it leads to a mindlessness that takes a toll on our personal and professional lives.

Enter mindfulness.

Mindfulness is the practice of becoming fully present in the moment. It is often confused with meditation. While meditation is one form of mindfulness practice, it’s not the only one. In today’s 24/7/365 world where stress is rampant, mindfulness has been scientifically proven to reduce stress, decrease health challenges, and increase focus, resulting in a better quality of home and work life.

Mindfulness has seven practices. This series is designed to educate, connect, and hopefully inspire you to try each of the seven for just two to five minutes on the next seven Mondays—and all week long. 

Week 1 Mini-Practice: Centering
Centering is practicing the process of reconnecting to the still, small voice inside of you.

Today, push yourself away from your desk for just two minutes.  Yes, you can set a timer if it reduces your stress. Feel your breath enter through your nose and move through to your heart center, then exhale through your mouth. Do this three times. When was the last time you took a mindful breath? 

Next time you are heading to a conversation that may be less than mindful, try centering. This practice, while simple, is not easy.  The more you try it this week, the more you are likely to let go of mindless and become more mindful. 

Download your Mindful Meeting Professional mini-poster at www.hollyduckworth.com/mindfulplanner (free registration required).

Mindful Monday, Week 2: Examine Your Beliefs

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This week’s lesson and two-minute daily practice will help you reflect on how your beliefs affect your life and work.

MeetingsNet has partnered with mindfulness leadership expert Holly Duckworth, CMP, CAE, to bring you seven weeks of Mindful Monday mini-messages and two-minute practices to help planners bring more mindfulness to their work and lives.
 
Week 2: Examine Your Beliefs
Reading our Mindful Monday mini-lessons will help you become more mindful, but to really make it sink in, you have to practice. This may be easier to do some days than others. How did you do with centering last week? Drop me an email and let me know—holly@hollyduckworth.com.

If mindlessness is being asleep at the wheel of life, mindfulness is becoming more awake and aware of your beliefs—as media mogul Oprah Winfrey says, “What I know for sure.” What do you know for sure? 

Your mindful practice for today is to push away from your desk for just two to five minutes—yes, you can set your phone timer.

Use that time to ask your inner self what is it you believe about the way you are running your life. What is it you believe about the way you are running your meetings? 

Don’t panic! You don’t have to tell anyone, and there are no right or wrong answers. What you believe tends to be what manifests in your life. If you believe life is a challenge, you get more challenges. If you believe it’s supportive and easy, you get more ease. 

This week, spend those few minutes a day thinking about what you want to believe about an experience you are having. Feel in your body what you want to believe. Your feelings are your power center.  Believe in the power of you!

Download your Mindful Meeting Professional mini-poster with all seven practices at www.hollyduckworth.com/mindfulplanner. (Free registration required.) 


5 Top Trends Shaping the Meetings Industry Today

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Human safety and data security top the list of meetings CEO concerns voiced at a recent Events Industry Council meeting.

Some troubling trends bubbled up at a recent gathering of meetings industry leaders at Events Industry Council meeting. Representatives of EIC’s 30-plus meetings industry organizations attended the meeting.

Here are the top five that EIC suggests planners should be paying attention to.

1. Event safety and security. The all-too-prevalent floods, hurricanes, mass shootings, and other recent acts of terror and mayhem are pushing event safety to the top of mind of all the industry association executives at the EIC meeting. They also are more resolved than ever to provide risk management education and resources event professionals can use to make their meetings safer. For example, says EIC President and CEO Karen Kotowski, CAE, CMP, “The Events Industry Council is working through our APEX committee to curate resources available as well as develop tools for meeting professionals to use.”

Industry execs also talked about the shift they have seen in expectations around safety and security, such as having gone from questioning the presence of metal detectors to questioning their absence.

The WannaCry ransomware cyber attacks that brought computer systems around the world to a halt until and unless users paid a ransom to regain access to their data also refocused industry execs on the importance of cyber security. 

2. Data protection regulations. The European General Data Protection Regulation, which goes into effect next May, “will have a significant impact on how organizations in our industry manage personally identifiable information,” the EIC says in a statement. While GDPR is a European regulation, any meeting that draws participants from Europe must comply, as does any organization anywhere that offers any goods or services to people who hail from across the pond. The EIC already has put together a resource to help meeting professionals prepare to comply with the new regulation.

3. Demonstrating relevance. The execs also discussed how they could better tailor their association’s membership, management, and event models to meet the specific needs of all their membership segments, as well as the industry as a whole.

4. Changes in the workforce. Automation, outsourcing, and new technology are pushing changes in the workforce that will require new skills. Meeting and event professionals must continue to prioritize career paths and workforce development, along with technology developments, in their offerings.

5. Diversity and inclusion. Look for ways to encourage diversity in everything you do, including how you select suppliers. It’s important to foster more interaction between all of the industry’s many segments, and between planning professionals throughout the world, execs at the EIC meeting concluded.

The Meeting Design Game: Plan Your Meeting with Play

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Whether you’ve been naughty or nice, a new card game for meeting planning is available this holiday season.

Ann Hansen and Bo Krüger are meeting designers based in Copenhagen, Denmark, and run workshops and events to train other meeting planners.  Known for gamification and other innovations to engage meeting attendees, the duo came up with a card game to help train planners, but quickly realized that the game could be used independently of training to improve the meeting planning process. Hansen and Krüger knew they were onto something when they used the game at a meeting with Meetings Professionals International and found that the planners loved it and wanted to take it home with them.

They improved the Meeting Design Game (MDG) for corporate and association use and last month launched it for sale online at www.meetingdesigngame.com.

The game consists of more than 100 English-language cards outlining the components of a meeting and ways to enhance each step of the planning process. The goal is to come to a common understanding about expectations for the meeting. It can be played by a team of planners working on an event together, or a meeting designer working with clients to discover their goals and focus for the event. The game also is designed to help key stakeholders within an organization express preferences for every aspect of an event, acting as a guide for the planner. It takes a couple of hours to play, and takes users through each stage of the process. It has been tested by planners in the United States as well as Europe and Asia.

The game creators call it the event design tool meeting planners didn’t know they were missing. Hansen and Krüger say, “We have condensed 20 years of strong knowledge, experience, training, and research into the game, and it is an easy way to level up from planning meetings, to designing meetings.”

 

 

 

FICP Celebrates Turning 60 in Style

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The FICP Annual Conference this week is drawing record crowds to celebrate the association’s ongoing achievements, and learn from experts and each other.

In its 60th anniversary year, Financial & Insurance Conference Professionals continues to set records, evolve its member resources, and throw a heck of an annual conference. 

FICP’s “Endless Summer, Endless Impact” themed 2017 Annual Conference, under way through Wednesday at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, Calif., drew a record number of meeting professionals—268—and an overall attendance of 772. Attendees include 15 former association leaders and other guests who returned to help celebrate FICP’s six decades of success. 

And celebrating they are, with high-energy networking events, quality education and speakers, and top-end food and beverage, overseen by conference chair Caryn Taylor Lucia, CMP, vice president, corporate event marketing, SEI. Conference highlights so far have included the animated goofiness of master of ceremonies Joel Zeff; the passionate optimism of keynote speaker Burt Jacobs, co-founder of the Life Is Good brand; generous and creative evening events hosted by Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina and Hotel Del Coronado (with the final night event planned for the decks of the USS Midway aircraft carrier!); and a big-picture panel discussion on economic trends affecting the meeting and hotel industries, featuring Nick Sargen, Fort Washington Investment Advisors, and Michael Dominguez, MGM Resorts.

Joe Scully, senior director, John Hancock Financial Services, who ends his term this week as the association’s board chair, brought attendees up to date on the association’s accomplishments over the past year:

• This fall the association updated its name. The “P”in FICP’s acronym now stands for “professionals” rather than “planners,” to better reflect the key role of members at their companies.

• FICP debuted a new website, which includes a blog, improves mobile use, and makes the sign-in process simpler for members.

• The Education Essentials newsletter is a new content-rich resource.

• A new influence committee is working to raise the association’s thought leadership profile. The committee is in charge of executing Pulse Surveys that take a snapshot of what’s on members’ minds.

This year’s silent auction is another record breaker for the 60th anniversary. Silent auction co-chairs, Martin Johnson, regional director of sales for Montage International, and Lynn Lee, global sales director, AlliedPRA, and their team have 120 items, the most ever, on the auction block at the conference. While bidding hasn’t concluded, organizers hope to also see record proceeds, which this year will be distributed to two groups: the association’s ongoing charity partner, Junior Achievement; and Global Giving, where FICP will target its funds to support disaster relief efforts.

Look for a full conference wrap up in the December issue of the MeetingsNet digital magazine and tablet app.

IMEX Frankfurt to Launch “She Means Business” Event

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The new half-day conference held during IMEX Frankfurt’s EduMonday in 2018 will address issues faced by women in the meetings and events industry.

“It has long been noticeable that whilst women are in the majority in the meetings industry, they are in the minority in leadership positions,” says Carina Bauer, CEO of IMEX Group. “We want to play our part in highlighting the challenges that women face, but more importantly helping to introduce solutions. The best way to do this is to bring people together for open conversation, collaboration and learning.”

That’s why her group is launching a new half-day conference called “She Means Business” at the May 14 EduMonday event held the day before the IMEX in Frankfurt show opens in 2018.

The event will feature inspirational speakers and mentors sharing their expertise and insights on how to advance gender equality and career development for women in the industry. It was created in partnership with tw tagungswirtschaft magazine, which last year conducted the “Women in the Events Industry—Equal Partners or Assistants?” survey and a follow-up report in conjunction with the IMEX Group. The survey found that almost 80 percent of respondents wanted platforms to meet and to exchange ideas. She Means Business is supported by H-Hotels.com.

“As an industry we must continue to discuss, ask questions, challenge preconceptions, and push forward for change. It’s only by meeting and collaborating that we can make an impact for women in the industry,” says Bauer.

SPIN Launches Recognition Program for Seasoned Planners

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Called SPIN: 40 over 40, the initiative honors planners for their work as industry role models.

SPIN: Senior Professionals Industry Network has released the list of winners of its inaugural SPIN: 40 over 40 program, which honors veteran planners for their work as influencers, innovators, and pioneers in the meetings and events industry.

SPIN Founder Shawna Suckow calls the depth and breadth of what the honorees have achieved “amazing,” adding, “Just like our membership, this list is diverse and includes planners for large corporations, associations, and smaller third-party agencies. Our award recipients speak, they teach, they plan large conferences and small incentive programs, work locally and globally, and find time to mentor and volunteer.” Winners each receive complimentary registration for SPINCon 2017, and another free pass they can give to their nominator or a fellow qualified planner. They will be recognized at the conference, which will be held at the Great Wolf Lodge in Grapevine, Texas, December 3–5.

“This is an exciting and humbling honor to be recognized by SPIN for my contributions to the industry,” says Terri Woodin, CMP, of Meeting Sites Resources. “There are so many truly amazing planners around the globe that work tirelessly to achieve great things for this industry, their company, and themselves, so to be selected as one of the first 40 is very rewarding.” 

Another honoree, Marti Fox, CMP, CMM, CPECP, of GlobalGoals, Inc., says, “We have taken different paths to get where we are today and are all committed to the elevation of the meeting planning profession.”

Here’s the full list of SPIN: 40 over 40 winners:

Deborah Agricola Kuns, CMP, Frosch & Christine Peat International 
Jan Aument, CTSM Silver, Good Plan Jan 
Melissa Benowitz, MRB Meetings & Management, LLC 
Lisa Boyd, CMP, CEM, CASE, Institute for Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 
Patrice Bradshaw, CMP, Boeing 
Jody Brandes, CMP, CMM, Genentech 
Mozella L. Brown, CMP, M. L. Brown & Associates 
Carolyn Browning, CMP, CMM, HMCC, MEETing Needs, LLC 
Alexandra Carvalho-Lukachova, CMP, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. (Kaiser Permanente) 
Carolyn Davis, CMP, Strategic Meeting Partners, LLC 
Corné Engelbrecht, CMP, Conference Consultancy South Africa (Pty) Ltd 
Marti Fox, CMP, CMM, CPECP, GlobalGoals, Inc. 
Leticia Harnung, LMH Consulting Services, LLC 
Lori Hedrick, MHA, CMM, CMP, CSEP, Burroughs Wellcome Fund 
Abbey Herman, CMM, Meeting and Event Consultant for Fortune 500 Companies 
Donna Johnson, CMP, CMM, Capitol Hill Management Services (CHMS)
Desirée Knight, CMP, The American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association (AREMA)
Christy Lamagna, CMP, CMM, CTSM, Strategic Meetings and Events
Wendy Laugesen, CMP, MarkLogic
Michael D. Lynn, CEM, CME, CMM, CMP, CPC, CPECP, Global Protocol, Etiquette and Civility Academy | Professional Tradeshow Resources
Pam Martin, Creative Meetings & Incentives (CM&I)
Terry Matthews-Lombardo, CMP, TML Services Group, LLC
Deborah Molique, Molique EPS
Pat Moore, CMP, Mattel
Annette Naif, Naif Productions
Natalie Norris, CMP, CMM, Meetings and More, Inc.
Qualena Odom-Royes, CSEP, CMP, CDMP, EventEssentials, LLC
Barbara Ozenbaugh, CMP, CAE, Seaside Event & Non-Profit Management
Sanece Marie Poolas, Strategic Meetings & Events
Dana L Saal CMP, CAE, Saal Meeting Consulting
Heather Sampson, CMP, DES, Aspire Meetings & Events, LLC
Bonni Scepkowski, Stellar Meetings & Events
Arlene Schilke, CMP, Timewise Event Management Inc.
Marilee Sonneman, CMP, DMCP, Spotlight Sojourns
Karin Soyster Fitzgerald, CMP, CAE, International Association of Fire Chiefs
Chip G. Stockton, CMP, Conference ConCepts, Inc.
Tracy Stuckrath, CSEP, CMM, CHC, CFPM, Thrive! Meetings & Events
Heather Switzer, CMP, Winsight, LLC
Peg Wolschon, CMP, CTA, Calyx Software
Terri Woodin, CMP, Meeting Sites Resource 

Mindful Monday, Week 3: Set Powerful Intentions

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This week’s lesson and two-minute daily practice will help you become clearer about what you plan to have happen, including how you intend to feel about the experience.

MeetingsNet has partnered with mindfulness leadership expert Holly Duckworth, CMP, CAE, to bring you seven weeks of Mindful Monday mini-messages and two-minute practices to help bring more mindfulness to your work and lives.
Week 1: Centering 
Week 2: Examine Your Beliefs 

Mindfulness grows as you practice in little bits each day. Just like a bodybuilder doesn’t become lean and muscular in one session, a mindful meeting professional must continue to work on the seven practices we’re introducing in this series. This week, as you keep practicing your centering breath and beliefs work, we will add a new practice: intention. 

Intention is becoming clear about what you plan to have happen. I like to think of it as where your head goals meet your heart of action. For example, I intend for this experience to be educational and fun—intention adds a feeling to your goal. We live in a feeling universe, but all too often our human experience does not embrace those feelings. Mindful meeting professionals set powerful intentions for their day and for the meetings they design. 

Week 3 Mini-Practice
As you look at your day today, pick one event and ask yourself, what is the intention for this?  How do you want to show up energetically to that event? What do you want to have happen or to feel as a result of the experience? 

The practice of setting intentions will help you align your needs to your feelings, and to those of the universe around you. And you may be surprised how often you get what you intend.

Download your Mindful Meeting Professional mini-poster at www.hollyduckworth.com/mindfulplanner (free registration required).

 

What Am I Most Grateful For?

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What can I say? Meetings industry professionals never cease to amaze me.

As I started thinking about people I need to talk with for an upcoming story, I ran into the weirdest problem—there are just too many options! The meetings, events, and hospitality industry is ridiculously rich with thoughtful, interesting, independent thinkers and researchers. It’s an almost embarrassing wealth of brilliance I have to tap into.

And these are just the people I already know about. I can only imagine how many more beautiful brains I haven’t had the joy to encounter, how many unique and fascinating perspectives that I haven’t been able to connect our readers with, how many cool ideas are out there that haven’t crossed my path. 

I like to take this grace period we have in the U.S. that falls between the ghosts and ghouls of Halloween and the crazed partying and gifting roaring toward us in late December to take time to reflect on all that I have to be grateful for. In addition to a safe and healthy home (sporting a brand-new kitchen, no less—and I am also very grateful I’m no longer living in a construction zone!), a loving spouse, friends I can count on no matter what, kids that are happy in their “adulting” journeys, a sweet pup who walks me in the woods every day, parents and sisters I can’t wait to see over the holiday weekend, and of course good health…I have so much to be grateful for in my personal life.

And I get to work with you each and every day—you brilliant, funky, fabulous, unique, wonderful, opinionated, sharing, and caring people who populate this amazing industry. I want to thank you for letting me into your world, for showing me how you get it all done despite daily—sometimes hourly—challenges, for telling me your stories so I can be a platform for your voices to be heard more widely.

It is a privilege, and one I do not take lightly. So thank you for being who and what you are, for doing what you do, and for letting me be a part of it. I am grateful for all of it, and pledge to do my best to live up to the trust you place in me to when you let me share your stories.

Wishing a peaceful, fun, and delicious Thanksgiving for those in the U.S. who celebrate, and time for reflection and gratitude for all.

 


Mindful Monday, Week 4: Create a Vision

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This week’s lesson and two-minute daily practice will help you learn how to recreate your reality using visioning.

MeetingsNet has partnered with mindfulness leadership expert Holly Duckworth, CMP, CAE, to bring you seven weeks of Mindful Monday mini-messages and two-minute practices to help bring more mindfulness to your work and life.
Week 1: Centering 
Week 2: Examine Your Beliefs  
Week 3: Set Powerful Intentions  

Mindfulness, the practice of becoming fully present—it’s not as easy as you thought, eh? I hope the first three practices—centering, examining your beliefs, and setting intentions—are helping you to slow down and see how running from place to place and to-do-list item to to-do-list item may not be optimal for you. As you continue to use the Mindful Meeting Professional poster <link to poster> and these practices in your daily living, you will continue to open up more ease and flow in your day.

Week 4 Mini-Practice: Create a Vision
In Week 3, we talked about how the more we can feel, the more we heal, and the happier and healthier we can be. This in turn enables us to create peaceful, productive, and profitable meetings for the organizations we work with.

Creating a vision means adding sight you your mindfulness practice. What is it you want to see in your life? Do you want to see traffic lights, long lines, and stress? Or do you want to see green lights, parking spaces, and calm? Our heads look for problems; our hearts look for solutions. Professionals with a regular mindfulness practice joke that they just have to envision green lights, parking spaces, and calm, for these things to appear in their lives.

While I can’t cover everything about the visioning process in a mini-practice—I have full-day programs on just this topic—here are two simple questions you can use for any life experience or meeting you are planning in order to become more mindful. As you work with the questions, use your centering breath to access the answer from your heart and not simply your head.

• What is the highest vision for what I am about to experience?

• What does my vision look, feel, and sound like?

Take just two minutes to create a mental picture of what you want—it can be as big as a palace or as small as a drive home from work that’s full of ease and flow—and then take note of how you create your reality.

 Mindfulness is the process of becoming fully present and aware in the moment. How are you doing with these practices? Drop me an email with your celebrations and challenges at holly@hollyduckworth.com.

 Download, print, and post your Mindful Meeting Professional mini-poster at www.hollyduckworth.com/mindfulplanner. Also, visioning is a great team activity for meetings—give me a call if I can help you host a visioning session.

 

TED Talks Events Struggle with Sexual Harassment

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The “ideas worth spreading” media organization is working to address complaints about conference behavior.

The Washington Posthas reported that TED Talks, the nonprofit global media organization and conference organizer of TED, TEDWomen, and TEDx events, is struggling with accusations of sexual harassment. The harassment is thought to have taken place internally, with settlements against the organization from employees, and at events, including the annual conference in Vancouver. According to the Post, conference attendees, speakers, and a TED Prize winner were victims of harassment, and even TED Talks’ general counsel, Nishat Ruiter, says she was subjected to inappropriate touching and comments. In an email to leadership after the April conference, Ruiter said she found it difficult to believe the issue was being addressed and that, “We are clearly not doing enough.”

It is not known if harassment at the conference is getting worse, or whether victims are reporting harassment more than in the past.

In November 2016 TED updated its code of conduct for attendees to include any form of harassment and added a process for reporting incidents. Last summer, it updated the language again to include “sexual harassment of any kind, including unwelcome sexual attention and inappropriate physical contact” and began promoting a zero-tolerance policy on harassment on stage before speaker presentations. TED also told the Post that two attendees accused of harassment had been disinvited and banned from future conferences and events.

Perhaps before next year’s conference the TED leadership should watch some of their own speakers. High-profile victims of online and workplace sexual harassment, including the actress Ashley Judd and former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson, have both contributed TED Talks. The video of Carlson’s talk, “How We Can End Sexual Harassment at Work" debuted only two weeks before the Post story was published.

A talk by TED fellow, epidemiologist, and founder of tech company Callisto, Jessica Ladd could help the TED conference, and many others, by instituting an online reporting system that identifies offenders with multiple accusations. View her video here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mindful Monday Week 5: Mindful Movement

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This week’s lesson and fIve-minute daily practice will help you learn how to reconnect to your inner self by moving your body.

MeetingsNet has partnered with mindfulness leadership expert Holly Duckworth, CMP, CAE, to bring you seven weeks of Mindful Monday mini-messages and two-minute practices to help bring more mindfulness to your work and life.

Week 1: Centering 
Week 2: Examine Your Beliefs 
Week 3: Set Powerful Intentions 
Week 4: Create a Vision 

Mindfulness is thought to be about sitting on a meditation pillow and attempting to still your mind. While that can be one way to access your present moment, it is not the only way.

Week 5 Mini-Practice: Mindful Movement
Doctors today say sitting is the new smoking, and meeting professionals do a lot of sitting behind computers, in meetings, and on planes.

This week, add mindful movement to your practice by making time each day to move your body. Take a five-minute walk. Go dance. Stretch at your desk. Make a sit-down meeting a standing meeting. As you move, take a mental note of the energy in your body.

Mindfulness practices—centering, examining beliefs, setting intentions, creating a vision, and now moving mindfully—are simple ways to re-connect to the inner you and disconnect from feeling overwhelmed and stressed.

As we practice and add new mindful strategies, we often learn thing about ourselves that we may not like. This week, honor those feelings by breathing them in, and then breathing them out to release them back to the nothingness from which they came.

Mindfulness is the process of becoming fully present and aware in the moment. How are you doing with these practices? Drop me an email with your celebrations and challenges at holly@hollyduckworth.com.

Download your Mindful Meeting Professional mini-poster at www.hollyduckworth.com/mindfulplanner.

 

PCMA President Sexton Stepping Down

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Current Professional Convention Management Association COO Sherrif Karamat is named as new CEO.

After more than 12 years at the helm of the Professional Convention Management Association, PCMA President and CEO Deborah Sexton will relinquish the organization’s leadership role after the Convening Leaders conference in January. As she moves onto the next stage in her career—starting her own consultancy—PCMA just announced that its board of directors unanimously voted to give the top job to current chief operating officer Sherrif Karamat. 

Calling her years of service to PCMA a privilege, Sexton says, “Having worked alongside Sherrif for more than a decade, I have great confidence in the future of PCMA.” Karamat has worked closely with Sexton throughout her stint at the 6,000-member association for meetings and events professionals, including developing plans to expand PCMA as a global organization, advancing its content platforms, and adapting its educational delivery channels as technology continues to evolve. Before joining PCMA in 2003, Karamat was vice president of business sales and services for the Toronto Convention and Visitors Association (Tourism Toronto).  

“Deborah’s passion, boundless energy, and her hunger to continuously innovate have resulted in tremendous growth and progress both for the organization and the industry,” said PCMA Board Chair Mary Pat Heftman in a statement. “We could not be more grateful for her dedicated leadership, driving strategic plans that make PCMA the leader in our industry.” In addition to her role as CEO of PCMA, Sexton has also served as president of the PCMA Education Foundation and publisher of PCMA’s Convene magazine.

Among the highlights of Sexton's time as PCMA president and CEO:

• PCMA more than doubled its membership and revenue; the Foundation also more than tripled its support for scholarships, research, and education programs.

• The organization’s annual conference was revamped to include more experiential and experimental elements, and it acquired a new moniker: Convening Leaders.

• PCMA acquired the Digital Experience Institute to enhance PCMA’s tech and online education and increase global participation.

• The organization led the development of the “business event strategist” concept to advance the profession to a more strategic role that incorporates event design and engagement. 

 

New Airline Restrictions on Smart Luggage Batteries

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If a piece of “smart luggage” is on your Christmas list this year, make sure Santa shops carefully so your new case isn’t an unwanted fruitcake.

New checked bag restrictions by three airlines—American, Delta, and Alaska—will go into effect early next year banning the high-tech bags unless the lithium-ion batteries that power the smart features can be removed. More carriers may follow suit.

Lithium-ion batteries are a fire danger in the cargo area of passenger planes but are allowed in the cabin. However, if your smart luggage is carry-on size, the battery may still need to be removable. The Transportation Security Administration has been testing new security measures

that require travelers to place all electronics larger than a cell phone in bins for X-ray screening when going through the security checkpoint, with nothing above or below them. The procedures will be implemented at all airports nationwide by spring 2018.

The promise of traveling with a suitcase that offers built-in phone-charging ports, weight scales, location tracking, and other conveniences is not lost. The key is whether or not the battery is easily removable. According to Mashable, some already are, including the offerings from Marlon, Trunkster, Raden, and the newest versions of Bluesmart luggage.

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