A guest blog from Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy, executive
creative director for meetings and events at Maritz Canada in
Ontario:

Top 5 Mistakes Made in Meeting & Event Planning:

–The conventional approach to staging that places the audience in
rigid rows facing forward toward leadership is alienating, mind
numbing, and supports the old-school style of business — “there’s us
and them.”

–Performances that offer packaged glitz and glamour, lacking
authentic personalized interaction, miss critical opportunities to
meet the most important objectives.

–Celebrities that are not personally aligned with the experience or
promise of your brand are better left to television, where they are
much less expensive to enjoy.

–Believing that your meeting or event is a moment in time unto
itself, ending with the departure of your attendees, assures that you
will not effectively leverage the larger investment made within your
communications plans.

–If a theme for your event does not ask to be extended beyond the
event, you are paying too much for it.

Interesting article from the New York Times that takes another look at Studs Turkel’s book, Working, which was published 30 years ago.

Says the article, “When it appeared, “Working” was a revelation, a window on the thoughts of Americans who were rarely heard from: hospital aides, skycaps, gravediggers. Many of the interviews follow a similar, surprising trajectory, beginning with mundane workplace details but quickly moving on to existential thoughts. Even for the lowliest laborers, Mr. Terkel found, work was a search, sometimes successful, sometimes not, ‘for daily meaning as well as daily bread.’”

That was before computers and new management practices changed just about everything, of course. Now we have higher productivity but, the article posits, “job satisfaction has plummeted. It is hard to read “Working” without thinking about what has gone wrong in the workplace.”

Are we really working on “digital assembly lines” that discourage creativity and independent thought? I don’t know about you all, but that’s definitely not the case for me in my job. And I’d think that meeting planners, on the front lines of creative thinking, would be among the other professions that are escaping this trend. Or is the trend toward commoditizing meetings changing all that?

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