I’ve spoken with a number of planners who are frustrated with their inability to inject what has been proven to have results into their meetings–namely, interactivity, case studies, and multiple formats to fit different meetings needs of the various participants.

While your board, your boss, or even your attendees might balk at doing something other than the usual talking-head Powerpoint lecture, why not put today’s big “multipurposing” trend–repackaging live activities and putting them up on the Web–to a better use by slipping in some of the interactive activities that do result in behavior change? After all, a recent study of physicians and online continuing medical education found that online interactivity is welcomed by participants with open minds instead of pushed away with cold, sweaty hands, as is all too often the case when live meetings try to get interactive.

Sure, it can take a little more time and money to create an interactive online activity, rather than just slapping a Powerpoint presentation up on your Web site. But, as Linda Casebeer, PhD, principal investigator of the online CME study, says, “You may multipurpose, but it doesn’t serve any purpose if you’re just changing the media, not the way the message is presented.”

Give it a try, just once, then measure the results. I think you might be pleased to see how effective a little online interactivity can be in changing your attendees’ behavior. And if you already are doing this, please let me know how it’s going!

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In the past, people may have retired happily and spent their golden years playing golf and pruning the petunias, but not us Baby Boomers. As author, columnist, and speaker Jim Carroll points out in an article called The End of Retirement, the confluence of an upcoming skills shortage, lack of retirement funds, and longer lifespan equals fewer and fewer true retirees in the future.

Actually, I think this is already happening, that even those who don’t need to continue working are still working just as hard after they retire. My Dad, for example, retired from his day job at Cigna Corp. a while ago, but he immediately plowed his energy and time into his true vocation: Working to protect the rights and improve the life quality of people with mental retardation, from working with The ARC to lobbying hard on the Hill and at home.

When it comes to planners, I see a similar trend. As this article from CMI shows, meeting planners most definitely are not fading away, but instead are turning their planner skills to charities and other good works.

The difference for the future, as I see it, may be that we have to work for money AND love instead of just for love, as so many are doing now.

P.S. As the headline for this post popped into my head, I couldn’t help but remember one of my favorite records as a teen by a group called Old & In the Way. Anyone else remember that group, with David Grisman, Vassar Clements, Peter Rowan, and Jerry Garcia? Uh oh, I’m dating myself–that AARP card could be coming any day now!

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Interesting editorial in today’s New York Times about the whole outsourcing trend and where the jobs of the future will be. According to authors W. Michael Cox, Richard Alm, and Nigel Holmes, forget about trying to hold onto the job status quo–”trade and technology will transform the economy whether we like it not,” they say.

If you read the article, be sure to click on the chart that shows the occupational increases and decreases in various areas–it’s fascinating. And while meeting planners aren’t specificaly mentioned, the evolution, they say, is going in the direction of “occupations that rely on people skills and emotional intelligence…and among jobs that require imagination and creativity.” Sounds like meeting planning to me!

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What is wrong with these people? You know, the people like the guy in this article who took pictures of his naked girlfriend without her knowledge, then posted them to his website? The only reason he got busted was because she was only 17–underage in Canada, where this happened. The other women he’d harrassed in the same way have no legal recourse, it sounds like, because this is not yet against the law.

Can you imagine if the soldiers who took the infamous Iraq prison shots had been using camera phones and instantly uploading them to a website, or e-mailing them to their friends?

Can you imagine someone sneaking one into the VIP lounge to instantly record and send images and words that your organization’s leaders perhaps would have preferred to keep amongst themselves?

Or using one of these things in the rest room at your conference, then beaming the images to a real-time blog and labeling them, “This show was a real p****r”?

I won’t even get into the whole area of industrial espionage, where the implications are huge and growing. I don’t know if it’s the dependence we have on TV, especially the “reality” shows where you get to drop in on–and judge–total strangers or what, but there’s something wrong with this picture, and it really, really ticks me off. Illinois is working on it, according to this article, and probably many other states and countries are as well.

But making it illegal to snap and disseminate an image of someone without their knowledge could work against the only legitimate possible use of these things I can think of: Taking a picture of someone committing a crime, where the picture-taker obviously wouldn’t want to tap the criminal’s shoulder and say, “Excuse me, do you mind if I take your photo and send it to the local police?” Could the criminal then turn around and sue the do-gooder? Just wait, I bet it’ll happen before too long.

I have no answers, but after reading those two articles and thinking about the ads for these camera phones that make voyeurism look like fun, I have a lot of outrage and had to vent it somewhere. Thanks for listening (the next post will have something to do with business, I promise).

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