Guy Kawasaki hits it out of the ballpark again, this time with a post called How to Be a Great Moderator. Anyone who moderates a panel should memorize these tips and, more importantly, follow them. My favorite:

Involve the audience. Moderators should allocate approximately 30% of the duration of the panel to questions from the audience. Any more, and the audience will run out of high-quality questions. Any less and the audience will feel like it did not participate. However, don’t feel obligated to accept any stupid questions from the audience any more than you accept stupid answers from the panelists. Just in case, always have a few good questions in your hip pocket just in case on one in the audience has a question (thanks for the suggestion, Alek). Or, even better, you could “seed” the audience in advance.

And please, please, feel free to cut off those audience members who really want to give a little dissertation of their own instead of having an honest question to ask. They make me—and, I suspect, everyone else—nuts.

This is great–The TED Commandments (scroll down to the Feb. 20 entry to see what I’m talking about). This is how the TED Conference sent its speakers guidelines. Did I mention that this is great?

1. Thou shalt not trot out thy usual schtick.
2. Thou shalt dream a great dream, or show forth a wonderous new thing, or share something thou hast never shared before.
and so on. Though #7 made me laugh out loud: “Thou shalt not sell from the stage neither thy company, thy goods, thy writings, nor thy desperate need for funding, lest thou be cast aside into outer darkness.”

And TED organizers sent these commandments to speakers on a stone tablet. Amazing.

This could be pretty dire, if it comes true. According to an article in the New York Daily News, the national Unite Here labor union is urging its locals to strike specifically negotiate separately with Hilton properties this summer as part of its campaign to leverage its muscle when the contract in several cities come due. From the article:

“We’ve decided to isolate Hilton because they are the most recalcitrant and belligerent employer in the industry,” said Peter Ward, president of the New York Hotel Trades Council…

Labor agreements with the city’s 25,000 hotel workers expire July 1. But bargaining starts later this month, and Ward has already made it clear to the hotel owners association that he will insist on two separate sets of talks - one with Hilton and one with everybody else.

And New York is not the only place the Hilton chain is facing the isolation treatment.

Other locals of UNITE-HERE, the national hotel workers union, are pursuing the same strategy in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Boston, Chicago and Washington.

Watch for this fight to heat up as time for the contracts to expire grows closer.

In other labor union news: Change to Win Unions Mobilize at More than 100 Hotels in Support of Hotel Workers Rising Campaign. This time, they’re targeting non-union Hiltons and Starwood properties.

Update: One of my colleagues has been following up on this, and neither Unite Here nor Hilton is talking. I’m guessing the New York Hotel Trades Council spoke out of turn on this one.