Celebrating Collaboration in Chile

I am writing this as the 13th miner to be rescued from beneath a half-mile of solid rock is about to emerge into the Chilean sunshine, after spending more than two months in a collapsed mine.

We’ve written in Convene about how collaboration and crowdsourcing will help us reach our business goals, and make our meetings and conferences more effective, But the rescue operation helps to clarify -- in a profoundly meaningful way -- what's at stake. Working together and sharing knowledge allow us to accomplish things that seem absolutely impossible and connect us at the deepest levels.

The most visible symbol of collaboration is the rescue capsule, built by a joint effort of NASA and the Chilean Navy, but throughout the ordeal, the 33 miners’ hopes of survival have rested on a network of people, starting with themselves: For the 17 days before the miners were contacted by rescuers, they created brilliant strategies for their survival, while eating just two teaspoons of tuna and a biscuit every two days, washed down with a sip of milk.

A few minutes ago, a CNN news anchor interviewed J.D. Polk, NASA’s chief of medicine, and asked him what he would single out as a the key to the rescue efforts success. I am paraphrasing, but Polk praised the way the Chilean government split up the rescue operation into many parts, and then sought expert help.

It’s not over yet, Polk cautioned. That’s true, but it’s also time to celebrate.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome to this week's installment of Extra, Extra!, where we expand a bit on the meetings-industry news disseminated in our ThisWeek@PCMA newsletter.

In its Oct. 4 issue, the New Yorker published an architectural piece about Las Vegas' new CityCenter development, praising it for its modern sophistication, and for not (as many structures do in Las Vegas) simply cribbing from a previously existing architectural model. The writer described CityCenter thusly:

It is the biggest construction project in the history of Las Vegas. It has three hotels, two condominium towers, a shopping mall, a convention center, a couple of dozen restaurants, a private monorail, and a casino. There was to have been a fourth hotel, whose opening has been delayed indefinitely. But even without it the project contains nearly eighteen million square feet of space, the equivalent of roughly six Empire State Buildings.

That's crazy and awesome! Read more about CityCenter and Las Vegas here.

@jack_welch

One of the highlights of the World Business Forum (WBF), held Oct. 5 and 6 in Radio City Music Hall in New York, was hearing Jack Welch. The plain-spoken, hard-driving former CEO of GE has been named by many as the world's greatest business leader.

If I thought I could guess what Welch was going to say, I was wrong. Here’s what the man who was nicknamed “Neutron Jack” for slashing jobs at GE in the early 1980s had to say about leading through intimidation. “Fear is a dead issue for a leader … It was never very good – but it worked for a while.”

He also lamented the “tragic lack” of leadership development in corporate America: There’s a lot of “huffing and puffing” going on about developing leaders at conferences like WBF, “but back in the office, there ain’t that much going on.”

Welch, who is 75, is a fan of Twitter. “I think it’s fun. It’s good for getting out a message.” He’s also in favor of the increased transparency that the Internet and technology has helped create. “It’s so exciting to see everybody know everything,” he said. “A more open society, and more candor can only be good.”

Nothing if not candid, Welch had harsh words for President Obama’s 2009 criticism of corporate travel to Las Vegas. Here's Welch: "Conventions are the rhythm of business.”

FaceSkype or Skypebook?

Rumors have been circulating for the last week that Facebook and Skype are close to announcing what Kara Swisher -- co-creator and co-host of The Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference, who broke the story -- calls "a significant and wide-ranging partnership that will include integration of SMS, voice chat, and Facebook Connect." Sounds great to me. I use Facebook and Skype every day, professionally and personally, in ways that are similar but distinct, and it feels intuitive to integrate their services in some way.

Their (hypothetical) partnership also seems like it would create a social-networking analogue for a face-to-face meeting experience -- with Facebook as the platform that brings people together (e.g., an annual conference) and Skype as a program that gets them talking (e.g., a networking reception). That's a pretty good thing, right?

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome back to ThisWeek@PCMA's online news supplement, Extra, Extra!. So what's meetings-industry news in late September/early October? Let's see:

Party planners will be happy to hear that, after two years of scaled-back (if not entirely canceled) celebrations, holiday parties are apparently back for 2010, according to a story in the Boston Herald. One COO of a restaurant-owning company said its clients did want to hold holiday events in the past couple of years, but that they didn't want to spend so much per person on a meal. Now, though, a senior vice president of the event-planning firm Best of Boston says that companies are planning parties designed to reward their employees, rather than raise a toast to the company's revenue. "It's not lavish, it's conservative, but it's definitely focused on employee recognition," said the senior VP. But the question remains: How will employee spouses feel about once again having to tag along to their significant other's office holiday party?

The Human Touch

This is a screen shot from Cisco's recent hybrid meeting, the 2010 Global Sales Experience (GSX). Cisco made its global sales meeting entirely virtual in 2009, but came back this year with a hybrid event that featured both face-to-face and virtual elements. (It wasn't a retreat from virtual; a hybrid meeting in 2010 was part of the plan all along.)

One thing that strikes me about the screen shot is the use of the hand-drawn word, "together," above. To my mind, it provides a much-needed human touch, creating a point of emotional connection on the computer screen. (You can watch a video about virtual collaboration in the planning and design process here. ) I personally am going to be watching to see how virtual meeting interfaces evolve to create a feeling that is more personal and less "digital."

Another thing to watch for: Angie Smith, who manages global sales operations for Cisco, is scheduled to be a featured speaker at Virtual Edge Summit 2011, which will be co-located with PCMA's Convening Leaders next January.

Her talk is one that I don't want to miss.

'Smaller Is Friendlier'

Erin Fuller, CAE, is group president of the Coulter Companies, which offers management, events, and consulting services for associations and other nonprofits -- meaning she has a lot of experience with a lot of different size meetings and conferences. In a post on Coulter's blog, she draws three conclusions about face-to-face meetings based on events that Coulter managed for two of its clients, the International Association of Continuing Education & Training (IACET) and Association Media & Publishing (AM&P):

1. Smaller is friendlier. This is actually stolen from Claridge's hotels, but rings true. The relatively intimate scale of the IACET and AM&P events made them feel special, and more like a celebration than a convention center filled with hundreds.

2. Bells and whistles might be overrated -- both events used a minimal amount of staging, production, signage and marketing.

3. We all obsess over lead time -- and just in time works just fine too. Neither event had a long lead time in terms of planning -- but the right people showed up just the same. When it is important, people will come.

The whole post is worth reading. And, lest you think Erin doesn't fully understand the intricacies of meeting planning, allow me to remind you of her last appearance on our blog. This is someone who knows what time it is.

Toss Out That Criticism Sandwich

In this interview with Stanford's Clifford Nass, a professor of communications and author of the new book The Man Who Lied to His Laptop, Nass, who directs the Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab at Stanford, lists five key ways to build trust:

1. Flattery is underrated -- it's fantastic. Toss the "criticism sandwich."

2. Inconsistency is the single biggest threat to trustworthiness.

3. Most team-building exercises don't work. To be effective, they need to build team identification and foster interdependency between team members.

4. Negative emotions are the most important emotions in the workplace -- and must be dealt with well.

5. To be persuasive, focus on expertise and trustworthiness.

Convene On Site: ASAE Summit Awards

A quick impression from the ASAE Annual Summit Awards Dinner, held at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., last night: There's something to be said for matching a venue to the specific mission of a specific event. The dinner honored six associations for programs that have made the world a better place through initiatives that are flat-out inspiring, from the Food Bank for New York City's Earned Income Tax Credit program to the American Academy of Pediatrics' Helping Babies Breathe program to the American Automobile Association's School Safety Patrol program. And the venue was equally inspiring. The National Building Museum is one of D.C.'s grandest venues, a red-brick palace with a vast, soaring Great Hall dominated by eight 75-foot-high Corinthian columns; and last night, even the table settings (pictured above in a photo by Convene Account Executive Wendy Krizmanic) felt meaningfully ornate. It was the perfect setting in which to contemplate the heights of service to which all our organizations aspire.

Once Every 30 Years

In a Convene Reads item about the book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea a few months ago, I wrote about a human-rights conference at which a North Korean defector named Hyuck had testified: "[M]aybe we can take some small comfort in the fact that conferences of the type that Hyuck attended ... are helping shine a light on situations like this."

But conferences don't just happen outside the impenetrable Stalinist monolith that is the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea. Today, the Workers' Party of Korea -- the country's ruling party -- convened in Pyongyang for its first meeting in 30 years, according to The New York Times, during which Kim Jong-Il was "renominated" as general secretary. One doesn't imagine there was much debate. One also wonders about the meeting planners tasked with setting up this conference, and what that RFP might have looked like.