Obviously, you’re not alone. Witness these sheep in the Netherlands wearing stylish hotel-ad sweaters. That’s baaaad.

From 20 Minutos via We Make Money Not Art.

Congratulations to 25-year conference center veteran Bob Johns, who has been awarded the International Association of Conference Centers prestigious Mel Hosansky Award for Distinguished Service. The annual award, given to someone who has given the most to IACC and the conference center industry, is named for the late editor of Meetings & Conventions and Successful Meetings (and who also was Medical Meetings’ editor Tamar Hosansky’s father). Johns retired in December 2005 after 17 years at the Babson Executive Education Center, and has been very active in the association, including serving as the first Chair of IACC’s Technology Committee, as a member of the Annual Conference Planning Committee, a member of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of IACC-North America, and as president of IACC-Global.

I love that this BusinessWeek article on the world’s most innovative companies leads off with a description of a meeting:

It was a fitting way to wrap up the first day of IBM’s (IBM ) innovation-themed leadership forum, held in Rome in early April. Guests were treated to small group tours of the Vatican Museum, including Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. They sipped cocktails on a patio in the back of St. Peter’s, the vast dome of the basilica outlined by the light of the moon. They dined in a marble-statue-filled hall inside the Vatican. What better place than Italy to hold a global confab on innovation, the topic di giorno among corporate leaders? It was, after all, the birthplace of the Renaissance, another period of great innovation and change.

As the article says, innovation is about a lot more than new products and new technologies. It’s also about new ways of doing business—including new ways of doing meetings. The time is ripe, my friends, for meeting planners to showcase how what they do impacts what others in the organization do, and how innovation in meetings can lead to whole new field of endeavor, and profitability. The article talks about how meetings and incentives help spur innovation at companies including BMW, Southwest Airlines, Nokia, and 3M, among others.

Thanks to Joan Eisenstodt, leader of the MiForum listserv, for the pointer.

No matter how hard I try to concentrate during an audioconference, it’s really difficult not to get distracted. That’s why I found this article in BusinessEdge.com so interesting: It outlays some of the latest bells and whistles you can use to make your basic teleconference more engaging. Interestingly, it also talks about a downside to audioconferences that I hadn’t thought of before: Security issues. Like reusable passcodes, which are pretty handy. But they also can allow someone who’s not authorized to set up a meeting on your organization’s dime. And this, also from the article:

The security risk in teleconferencing is more than hypothetical.

Hugo Idler, who runs NetConnect Conferencing Inc.’s North American operations from Toronto, describes a much-publicized situation where an interloper penetrated an audioconference meeting of a pharmaceutical trade association.

Of course, that couldn’t happen with his system, and I imagine most providers have some sort of security in place to keep this from happening here and now. Or do they?