After reading this article on how to build a better meeting, as recommended by a MIMLister, speaker, futurist, author, and all-around great guy Jim Carroll came up with some ideas of his own.

While turning the chairs around backward and upside down might be a bit extreme for your attendees, some of his ideas are just too good to ignore, such as: “Banish bad phrases. At your first meeting planning meeting, stop the meeting the first time someone says, ‘We’ve always done it that way.’ Stop. Pause. Deep breath. Calmly state, ‘And your point is?’”

Another good one:

Forget teambuilding, icebreakers, keynotes, spousal programs, breakouts. Think of new words that mean new things. “Startling openers.” “10 ideas that will shock you.” “Not a keynote — it’s a dramatic wake up call.” “A big group talking about big things”. Whatever — the point is to banish words *that mean the same old thing*. Banish the words — and you are banishing a certain line of thinking.

And he’s right, when he says at the end of his post that “The fact that there is an article like this out there *IS NOT A GOOD THING*. This is an industry suffering from a deep malaise. The same programs. The same content. The same table settings. The same stuff. The same places. The same things. The same phrases.”

What would/could you do to shake things up and make meetings meaningful again?

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“Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”–Edward R. Tufte

(via the MIMlist listserve, which got the quoter wrong (fixed now). Thanks, Anne, for letting me know where it came from, which is a pretty interesting article in Wired magazine.)

Despite local hoteliers fears that the new Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine would suck all their business away, the "giant sucking sound from the west" the Dallas hospitality community expected has yet to be heard.

less than nine months after it opened, the Gaylord complex appears to be performing well beyond its developer’s expectations — without stealing business from the competition.

"It certainly has increased the level of competition, but it’s also brought more attention to the area," said Phillip Jones, chief executive of the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau.

"Clearly, we’d like to have all their room nights in Dallas, but in retrospect it’s been a positive development for the area."

Washington, D.C., hoteliers, take heart from Dallas’ experience as the new Gaylord National Convention Center and Resort on the Potomac goes up.

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Well, now it’s official: hotel room rates are on the rise. Rates have been in the dumps for three long years, but now, according to PKF Hospitality Research and Torto Wheaton Research, they’re not just on the way up, they’re escalating:

Room rates across the Top 50 hotel markets in the U.S. will increase by 3.7 percent in 2004, followed by another 4.7 percent bump in 2005. Stronger demand levels, combined with the increasing use of savvy price-setting practices by both hotel chains and individual property managers, are making hotel bargains harder to come by.

New York will lead in the rates, natch, with a 13.7 percent bump (click on chart to see a readable version of the other highest ADR growth cities for ‘05.) The most expensive cities, they say, will be New York ($236.97), Honolulu ($143.36), and Boston ($132.86), compared to the top-50 average of $102.44. But there are still bargains to be had in the lowest ADR-rate cities of Dayton ($64.15), Albuquerque ($66.26), Charlotte ($67.28), Raleigh ($70.11), and Memphis ($71.22).

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