I just recently learned about the International Network of Travel Directors’ new Web site, and thought it sounded like a great resource for both TDs and meeting planners who want to hire them. Generally hired to handle the on-site logistics, TDs are an essential component of many meetings, particularly those where the planner can’t be there in person, so I thought this would be of interest to both the planners and TDs among us.

INTD’s Web site, on a brief skip through, allows planners to connect directly with freelance travel directors, and gives TDs their own networking and career center. In an e-mail introducing the INTD site, executive director Alison Ray, CMP, said, “As a business owner and planner for over 10 years I found it extremely challenging that it took so long for me to locate experienced and qualified staff when I was hosting meetings and events across the world. After spending several years interviewing travel directors and discussing this issue with other meeting planners, I realized there was a definite gap in the industry. This became my motivation for founding an organization that would bridge the gap between planners and freelance staff.”

What’s not to like?

If so, check out the (relatively) new job board over at Confabb. It looks like it has quite a few meeting planner jobs posted–one of which just may be the perfect match for you or someone you know.

There’s also a place for vendors to display their wares on the site, though it looks like you may have to pay to play on that one. If it builds out some, that could become another good resource for planners.

I’ve always liked the idea behind the site, and these look to be useful additions. Good job, guys.

In my humble opinion, anyway, this webinar series from UNLV is it when it comes to meeting planning. I know I shouldn’t promote it here, since we are affiliated with the series, but really, what’s not to like?

For $99 you get a one-hour live presentation on topics from catering to entertainment and special events, all presented by industry experts (you can view as a group as well as individually). You can view them multiple times, too, since they are recorded and participants have access for two week after the live webinar, so if you miss anything the first time around, you can always go back for more. It may sound like a lot of money, but think about it in relation to a conference session–no flying, no hotel, just pure education at your desktop.

And, since we are affiliated with this series, if you type MNPenton into the Group Discount Box at checkout, you get $20 off the registration fee. If you go, tell ‘em I sent you. Not that it would get you any more discounts, but…

OK, end of shameless plug–please forgive me!

Here are a couple of good Web sites for planners, courtesy of Jim Spellos of Meeting-U’s Techniques e-newsletter:

The first one is just for those looking for a new job: Indeed, which Spellos calls “a search engine for jobs” where you can browse what sounds like a big assortment of Web-based job listings. And you can subscribe to an RSS feed for your specific job results so you can stay updated.

This one could come in handy for meetings: Walk Score, where you can find out what’s within walking distance of your meeting.

Thanks as always to Jim for collecting a wide variety of interesting tips and sites! If you don’t subscribe to MeetingU Techniques, I highly recommend you do–you can sign up here.

Well, they’re actually 10 rules from the Immaculate Heart College Art Department, but I’m adopting them for life. Here’s the link.

#8 is one I need to work on: “Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.”

#6 is my favorite: “Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.”

(via Kottke>

Peter Hutchins posts an interesting result from ASAE and The Center’s Technlogy Conference today:

When asked in today’s Technology Conference Town Hall Meeting how many people had been to any form of technology training in the last year, a startling percentage of the room indicated that time had prevented them from taking advantage of any technology learning opportunity.

Do you buy that? I don’t, for reasons I outline in a comment on his post. If you are jazzed about the technology (or aardvark farming, or whatever the topic is), nothing will stop you from learning more about it, on your own time and in your own way if need be. The information’s out there on the Web to learn about pretty much anything, for free in most cases, so why not dive in? But, if you’re not interested, your employer can shove all kinds of training down your throat and you still won’t swallow. The excuse may be that you don’t have time, but the reality is that you don’t have the interest.

I would argue, hard, that these days, if you have the will, you’ll find the way (including time) to learn. If you don’t, any excuse will do, and time is a good one since everyone is so starved for it these days. Funny thing is that time spent learning usually ends up providing you with ways to make each of those precious minutes count a bit more. As Alanis Morissette would say, isn’t it ironic?

I went to a fabulous session on how to increase communication and collaboration to both bring innovation to the meeting planning/content building/marketing process, and to make the process work much more smoothly than it all-too-often does, especially for associations that tend to keep their planning, education, and marketing departments in separate silos. Session leaders Lisa Block with the Society for Human Resource Management, Charlie Jones, Heart Rhythm Society, and Janine Pesci, Gensler Architects, were all excellent in showing how it can work from the planning, marketing, and education perspectives (respectively).

No time to go into huge details, but here are a few key takeaways. From Lisa:
-everyone has a responsibility to collaborate
-build on small successes
-key into specific values in your organization’s culture
-build interdepartmental teams, with members who have true buy-in from their respective bosses to put the time and energy needed into the process
-planners need to relinquish some of their inner control freak to let others have ownership in the process
-develop key relationships that will let you feel ok, if not great, about relinquishing said control

From Charlie:
-Establish credibility with other team members to build trust and respect
-no one gets anywhere alone. Our successes and our failures are a result of collaboration. Help others succeed and your own success will follow.
-Make creativity fun, even if it means doing hokey teambuilding activities. You may hate them, but they do work.

From Janine:
-everyone has ideas, and they should share them through visioning sessions that bring all types of voices to the table (she also stressed the vital importance of having interdisciplinary teams and the buy-in from leadership and the organizational culture to make these teams function well)
-honor all talents and contributions
-provide easy access to idea sharing through IT, such as an intranet

Great if hokey quote from moderator Gerald Haman,kk SolutionPeople, about teamwork: “We all want to be the stars, but would you rather look at a star or a whole constellation?”

One thing I really liked about this session, format-wise, is that it wasn’t your basic moderated panel. The panelists did do some speaking, but a lot of the session was having the audience talk amongst ourselves to come up with our own challenges, solutions, issues, etc. At the end, Gerald had us fill in as many ideas about collaboration as we could in, say, 30 seconds (there was a specific question he asked us to address). Then we passed our sheet to another person to elaborate/expand on the ideas the first person had put down.

He’s going to compile them and put them up on the PCMA Web site, but we came up with close to 300 ideas in six minutes. How cool is that?

According to this article, event planning is one of the five hot careers you can have without getting an MBA. But their definition of event planning is basically party planning. It’s not all fun and games, folks. Someday, people will get what it is event planners (not to mention meeting planners, convention organizers, etc.) do, but that day is not today.

Thanks once again to the MeCo listserv for the pointer.

The December cover story series of Association Meetings just hit the Internet, and I have to say they were the hardest articles I have ever written (they are called Bias? What Bias?, 17 Ways to Be More Inclusive, and Can’t We All Get Along?.

I did more thinking about my ways of doing things while writing this series than I can even begin to explain. I agonized over this series, because I knew that no matter what I did, it wasn’t going to satisfy everyone—I couldn’t be totally inclusive even in my writing. So how could you possibly manage it in your meetings? And a lot of what I heard from one person would be negated by another; what one found offensive, another did not; what one person thought would be inclusive, another found exclusionary. And there was a tendency to focus on race, when there are so many other ways in which we categorize ourselves. I talk about some of this in my editor’s note, which also involved a lot of soul-searching.

Anyway, I’d love to get your take on these articles, my editor’s note, or the topic in general. Please leave a comment below (you can register as anonymous if you prefer), or if you’d be more comfortable, feel free to drop me an e-mail. This is too big, and too important, of a topic to cover in the pages of a magazine. Let’s talk.

Meeting planners are masters of doing a seemingly impossible trick, especially while on site: Keeping a close eye on the detail at hand, while simultaneously monitoring everything else going on around them. I thought I was pretty good at it, too, until I watched this video:

I found this video at Tom Asacker’s AClearEye blog, where he likens it to the myopic view of companies that, in putting all their energies into one thing, miss the big-picture changes that are going on around them. I’d like to think that planners, given this unique ability that is required by the nature of their jobs, would be particularly attuned to whether or not their organization is missing the forest for the trees. The question is, what can you do if it is?