Royal Caribbean is taking a lot of heat over its decision to continue to bring passengers to its private beach at Labadee, about 100 miles up the coast from earthquake-shattered Port-au-Prince. Never mind that it donated a million bucks to the relief efforts, and is bringing in aide and supplies along with passengers — to most, it may look like, as David Letterman, said, something only “idiot cruise ships” would do. But it’s not so simple to deride the decision if you look beyond the first gut reaction.

I think that Royal Caribbean is doing the best it can under horrible circumstances; it’s just that we’re all really uncomfortable about it. Personally, there’s no way I could sip a rum drink knowing about the devastation just down the coast — just as I couldn’t go enjoy being in New York for a long time after 9/11 or New Orleans while the worst of the post-Katrina nightmare was still going on. Being in close proximity to so much suffering precludes good times for most of us, even as the local NY and NOLA CVBs begged us to bring our tourist and meetings dollars to the area so business as somewhat usual can resume and people can have some sense of normalcy again (and a cash-flow source, of course). Haiti, of course, is not a major meetings or tourism destination in the same way New Orleans or New York are, but there are some parallels to be drawn.

Then there was this quote in a Miami Herald story a poster on the Miforum listserv pointed out:

Arthur Applbaum, a Harvard University professor of ethics and public policy, said that while it shows “moral sensitivity to be disturbed by the thought that one is vacationing on the beach when others are suffering nearby … it also shows insufficient moral reflection to think that proximity makes a moral difference.

“The people of Haiti are suffering whether you take your beach vacation in the Dominican Republic or in Hawaii,” he said, “and it is a failure of the moral imagination not to be equally troubled in Waikiki.”

I have a failure of moral imagination then, because to me, there is a difference — even if I can’t articulate what exactly it is. I still think RCCL is doing the best thing it can in a terrible situation: bringing continuity to the people who depend on its passengers for their livelihood, along with aide and funds. I just would not be able to stomach being one of the passengers, not now. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it.

For a first-person account of what being a passenger on a recent stop in Labadee was like, check out this post: Cruise with a Purpose. Granted, coming from an executive with cruising company Seasite.com may give it a bit of a positive spin, but I have a feeling she speaks for how most of the passengers probably felt about the experience.

and I do love face-to-face meetings, one thing I’m not wild about is the opportunity to pick up germs from around the country, even around the world. I was so careful to wash my hands at every possible occasion while at PCMA this week, but I knew I was doomed as I started to feel a bit woozy while listening to Malcolm Gladwell (whose message was one we all should pay attention to right now: why we should look for humility in our leadership, not just intelligence, technological advancement, and all the other things that can lead to overconfidence. He was awesome, BTW). By the time I got to the airport, the fever was raging, and I’ve just been totally punky ever since.

To anyone I may have unknowingly infected in Dallas, my sincere apologies. Once I knew the disease was descending, I tried to keep to myself as much as possible. To whoever decided it was a good idea to mix and mingle at PCMA while you were feeling ill — on behalf of the rest of us, don’t do that again. Watch the Twitter stream, read the blog summaries, check out the Web TV and general session webcasts, but keep your participation, and your germs, virtual. To do otherwise is rude, nasty, and dangerous to the very people you’re looking to connect with.

Anyway, I’m still planning on catching up here on some of the rest of my PCMA experience as soon as I’m a bit more human again.

Are meeting planners among the most devoted meeting-goers, or would they rather just stay home? I was just reading this post by Seth Godin about insurance agents who don’t have insurance themselves, nonprofit workers who don’t give to charities other than their own, and waiters who don’t tip, and it made me wonder if there are any meeting planners who aren’t among the most avid meeting-goers around.

Of course, I only meet those who do go to industry conferences and events at industry conferences and events, so those I’ve spoken with at PCMA or ASAE say they wouldn’t miss the chance to learn from what their associations are doing with their events, from talking with their peers, and possibly even a nugget or two from the sessions. But what about those who don’t like to go to meetings, yet spend practically their every waking hour planning them? Do such creatures exist?

That’d be like a magazine editor who never cracked a magazine — how would you ever know what cool new things were happening?

The debate on “free” when it comes to whether or not to charge for repurposing conference content for the Web (for links to the posts that started it all, see What is the cost of free?) got me thinking about a similar discussion that’s been raging in the industry my new job covers, medical meetings.

Everyone from the pharmaceutical industry and medical device organizations to congressional leaders to state legislators have been working to sort out the problematical relationship between healthcare provider education and the industry folks who shoulder most of the financial burden for providing that education.

The easy answer, at least for some people, is to cut the commercial support ties altogether and just have docs pay full freight for their continuing medical education. No ethical issues, no worries about commercial bias creeping in, no more marketing disguised as education, the argument goes.

But docs are decidedly unhappy with the idea, because it means they’d be paying a lot more for what used to be either reasonable or even free (sound familiar?). And education providers aren’t happy, because they wouldn’t be able to afford to put on all the education healthcare providers need to keep current these days. Those workshops on rare diseases? Gone, because the audience is too small to make it worthwhile. And the commercial supporters aren’t happy, because they lose the opportunity to get in front of the docs. You should hear the resounding “no!” that echoes from almost every quarter every time the suggestion comes up.

Would HCPs be willing to pay out of pocket if the education truly was amazing? Maybe. Would some pretty lame CME finally bite the dust if people had to pay? Assuredly. Would there be a lot less variety of offerings? Probably. Would physician education, and patient health, suffer? Most likely.

Like the arguments over “free” in online content repurposed from meetings, the argument over “free” (in this case, aka commercially supported) education is far from over. I happen to think sponsorship is a good happy medium, as long as there are controls in place, which in CME there most assuredly are. Someone suggested in another discussion over on Facebook that we need to recondition people, whether HCPs or not, to accept the fact that we have to pay for what we get. Sounds simple, and it sounds right. But the reality is a lot more complicated.

After reading Ann Oliveri’s Creative Brief post about the new ad for Shredded Wheat (you know, the “we put the NO in innovation” one), I can’t help but wonder if sometimes a lack of innovation might not be a bad thing—which by the way is the opposite of the conclusion she reached.

It got me thinking about Gilmore and Pine’s book, Authenticity, which while confusing is a pretty interesting read. When I interviewed Gilmore and Pine a couple of years ago, one of the five genres of authenticity they say people are longing for nowadays is just what Shredded Wheat is doing: staying true to your roots. We are what we are, we got it right the first time and don’t need none of the new-fangled stuff, etc., etc.

But no, you still can’t count out innovation after all. Your meeting of course has to stay true to its roots (education, an incentive to reward a job well done, or whatever that root purpose might be), but the way you do it should constantly be adjusted to bring that message in a way that resonates with people today. People’s need and desire for the type of wholesome breakfast grandma made may not have changed, and their need for education itself is probably more essential than ever, given today’s information firehose. But the type of education they need likely has changed, along with their lifestyle, their jobs, the way they like to learn (and yes, possibly what they want to have for breakfast at a conference).

So I guess I agree with Ann after all, but I do think we need to be very, very careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. What is it that is at the core of your meeting? Why does it need to happen? If you stay true to that, innovation just gives you a better means to deliver it.

Thoughts?

That’s not exactly the question David is asking in this post about last-minute planning, but it could be. The question he’s really asking, after running through some last-minute planning requests he’s been able to pull out of his hat, is, “If people had to pay extra for last minute planning, would they still wait until the last minute?”

Yup, I’d bet they would. Those who are organized would never be in that situation; those who aren’t organized, well, I’m not sure they could make themselves get their act together ahead of time no matter how hard they tried or how much it ended up costing them. Fortunately, professional planners tend to be a pretty well-organized bunch. I bet they were making sure everyone had enough of all the different colors of crayons in their boxes back in pre-school…

I can’t decide if this logo for the upcoming IAEE Expo Expo show is clever or annoying:

I mean, I like wordplay (a lot), but M-IAEE-Mi seems to be pushing it. Maybe it’s just that I still haven’t gotten used to trying to say the new acronym yet.

I just read this post by Joan Eisenstodt on ethics in challenging times like these…and how some might be taking the downturn in the economy as a license to steal, basically (though she says it much more nicely than that).

Is it easier to lower your standards when money gets tight? Does having less make it seem less wrong to double dip, or take something that’s not rightfully yours? I’ve had some pretty tight times in my life, and I’m glad to say I didn’t lower my ethical standards to survive–though I did have to lower my standard-of-living standards quite a bit and take on some really awful jobs to make ends meet. Then again, I’m not that fussy and, while I like “stuff” as much as the next person, I don’t define myself by my stuff, so it’s not too hard to let most of it go if need be.

However, if I was starving, would I steal? Yeah, I probably would, and would likely be able to justify that to myself. But in the case Joan talks about where employees are setting up “side companies and seeking (and securing!) commission on the very meetings they are being paid to book and manage,” I don’t see how anyone could talk themselves into thinking that was OK, not matter how light a planner’s wallet might be.

So I guess my ethics are situational to a degree, but it has to be a pretty dire situation before I’d chuck my ethics under the bus. And you?

Driving home last night, I could not believe the invective I was hearing on a talk radio show about the recently held AIG incentive, which happened at a posh resort shortly after the company received $85 billion in government loans. I could practically see the host foaming at the mouth as she called for the Attorney General to sue AIG on behalf of the American public to get the money back. Everyone is piling on the get-those-b*()$#@Q bandwagon, it seems–even the President’s spokesperson has weighed in, calling the $440,000 incentive trip despicable.

After getting more heat today, the company canceled another incentive planned for next week. Now another financial institution, Wachovia, is starting to feel some heat too over a planned cruise incentive to the Grecian Islands. (Update: Now AIG’s put the hold on all future offsite meetings, pending further review.)

As a citizen, I can’t help but feel awfully outraged too at all this conspicuous consumption going on at a time when we the people are coughing up a lot of cash just to keep the financial system afloat. As caller after caller said on that radio show last night, why should they get to fiddle with our money while the system burns down around them? And it just feels good to have an actual target of well-spa’d faces for all this outrage and general unhappiness we’re all feeling as we watch our portfolios continue to shrink as markets continue to tumble and the Fed’s actions continue to not seem to do much good in stabilizing things.

And yet…

The AIG meeting was an incentive, folks. Who if not you and I should understand that incentives are not, in fact, junkets for fat cats to roll around in our dough and laugh at us suckers for not being fortunate enough to be them. There’s a reason that sales incentives trips have been a staple in business for, well, just about forever. I even got to cover one once, and while, OK, the biking in the mountains around Banff was definitely not work, the sales people were talking business with each other. I could practically see their competitiveness come out at dinners where they talked about what they were already doing to try to qualify for the next one. And the executives who attended weren’t there for a holiday; they were there to keep those high-producing sales people focused on selling their products, fill them in on how their business works, and give them tools to do their job better. (Update: A colleague just reminded me that incentives generally are considered to be taxable income to the participants. That’s another important piece that has gotten lost in the hoopla.)

Not a junket. Not a boondoggle. An incentive. There is a big difference.

Especially in a lousy fiscal environment, you want the pieces of a financial company that are still doing well to do even better, to pick up the slack for all those billions other pieces are losing. That means incentives.

There’s a lot to be said for perception being reality, and it’s something I’ve seen come increasingly true for pharmaceutical companies, which now are really good at both stripping out the excesses and hiding their sales travel incentives from public view. It was only a matter of time before financial services followed suit. Looks like that time has come.

And while it was, I think, a very poor decision to carry on with the incentive instead of swallowing what I’m sure would have been a roughly equivalent cost in cancellation fees for last week’s event, I can’t fault AIG too much for going through with it. A promise is a promise, and those folks went out and did their jobs specifically knowing this was what they’d get if they did really well. Should they be punished for bad decisions made in areas completely outside their realm?

Bottom line? If I had been planning that trip, I would have tried to postpone it until Q109 or later, like all the other corporate meeting planners appear to be doing with their fall meetings (if at all possible), and I would have tried to trim as much of the fat out as I could. I do believe that those high-producing agents should have gotten the travel rewards for a job well done they were promised, but the timing could not have been worse. I’m sure they would have understood having to wait a few months until things start turning around again.

And now the American public has a whipping boy for all their financial angst: An incentive. This is not good for business, folks–yours, ours, the government’s, or anyone’s.

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?