Heath Row over at the Fast Company blog got me a little hot under the collar with his comments on meetings. It starts out fine, with him talking about his magazine’s staff retreat, and he provides a link to a good article on the topic. But then he goes on to say, “While there are some resources available for different off-site activities and the dreaded team-building exercises, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of useful material on designing better off-sites.”

Hey Heath, we have not just the five Meetings Group magazines, we have all of our competitors, too. And Web sites. And listservs. And even blogs (well, only a couple that I know of). Even Fast Company itself has a meeting professional listserv, though it’s been pretty much dead since I joined it.

There’s no shortage of information about planning a good off-site company meeting. The problem is that all too many people don’t take meeting planning seriously enough to seek them out, or to find a good facilitator or adult education professional or independent meeting planner who could design the meeting for them. Then they have a less-than-productive meeting, and blame meetings themselves as being nothing more than wastes of time.

Sorry, but this makes me crazy. Plus, I happen to like teambuilding events.

To comment on this post, click on “comments” below. To receive a weekly blog update, e-mail Sue.

Heath Row over at the Fast Company blog got me a little hot under the collar with his comments on meetings. It starts out fine, with him talking about his magazine’s staff retreat, and he provides a link to a good article on the topic. But then he goes on to say, “While there are some resources available for different off-site activities and the dreaded team-building exercises, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of useful material on designing better off-sites.”

Hey Heath, we have not just the five Meetings Group magazines, we have all of our competitors, too. And Web sites. And listservs. And even blogs (well, only a couple that I know of). Even Fast Company itself has a meeting professional listserv, though it’s been pretty much dead since I joined it.

There’s no shortage of information about planning a good off-site company meeting. The problem is that all too many people don’t take meeting planning seriously enough to seek them out, or to find a good facilitator or adult education professional or independent meeting planner who could design the meeting for them. Then they have a less-than-productive meeting, and blame meetings themselves as being nothing more than wastes of time.

Sorry, but this makes me crazy. Plus, I happen to like teambuilding events.

To comment on this post, click on “comments” below. To receive a weekly blog update, e-mail Sue.

OK, so I read the story this morning on how the Transportation Security Administration is going to make airlines to turn over domestic passenger records “so the agency could test a new system to match passenger names against lists of known or suspected terrorists.”

Then I reflected on a note Joan Eisenstodt posted on the MIMlist listserv today about intolerance, racial profiling, and basically how the U.S. is not treating all the ingredients in its “tossed salad” equally.

OK, we’ve all noticed this phenomenon Seth Godin calls the echo chamber
–at industry shows, the hot new thing is discussed endlessly, all the insiders go crazy over it, but when all’s said and done, no one outside the ballroom cares a whit about it. We see it in corporations and associations, too, where enthusiasm builds on excitement about some new thing, and customers and/or members couldn’t give a hoot once you roll it out.

Kind of like this blog, where me and some of our new media people thought it would be a great new way for us magazine types and readers to connect in a different way. Except we’re not connecting. Just like the magazines, this is turning out to be a one-way street where we (OK, in this case, I) talk and you listen. Which is fine, just not what I was expecting to have happen, which was more of a dialogue.

I know what I think about things–what I’d really like is to get outside my own echo chamber and hear what you all think about life, liberty, and the pursuit of better meetings. So would you do me a favor? Just click on the comment button below–you can do it anonymously if you like–and let me know what’s on your mind.

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What is wrong with these people? You know, the people like the guy in this article who took pictures of his naked girlfriend without her knowledge, then posted them to his website? The only reason he got busted was because she was only 17–underage in Canada, where this happened. The other women he’d harrassed in the same way have no legal recourse, it sounds like, because this is not yet against the law.

Can you imagine if the soldiers who took the infamous Iraq prison shots had been using camera phones and instantly uploading them to a website, or e-mailing them to their friends?

Can you imagine someone sneaking one into the VIP lounge to instantly record and send images and words that your organization’s leaders perhaps would have preferred to keep amongst themselves?

Or using one of these things in the rest room at your conference, then beaming the images to a real-time blog and labeling them, “This show was a real p****r”?

I won’t even get into the whole area of industrial espionage, where the implications are huge and growing. I don’t know if it’s the dependence we have on TV, especially the “reality” shows where you get to drop in on–and judge–total strangers or what, but there’s something wrong with this picture, and it really, really ticks me off. Illinois is working on it, according to this article, and probably many other states and countries are as well.

But making it illegal to snap and disseminate an image of someone without their knowledge could work against the only legitimate possible use of these things I can think of: Taking a picture of someone committing a crime, where the picture-taker obviously wouldn’t want to tap the criminal’s shoulder and say, “Excuse me, do you mind if I take your photo and send it to the local police?” Could the criminal then turn around and sue the do-gooder? Just wait, I bet it’ll happen before too long.

I have no answers, but after reading those two articles and thinking about the ads for these camera phones that make voyeurism look like fun, I have a lot of outrage and had to vent it somewhere. Thanks for listening (the next post will have something to do with business, I promise).

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