PCMA CONVENING LEADERS 2014 PREVIEW
Mike Walsh on Innovating Like an Anthropologist
Rather than giving people lots of surveys, asking them whether they like the food you were serving, just look at what they’re eating. Look at where they’re hanging out. What are people doing? Give somebody the job of keeping a diary during the meeting, just following people around.
Where are they hanging out? What are some weird prob- lems? Like when you go to a tech conference — the first thing that everyone is fighting over is electricity plugs.
Look at what people do. Then, rather than fighting their behavior, the second step is to [ask yourself,] if my at- tendee is in charge of innovation, how can I let them lead me to make this a better event? The key is don’t do a focus group. Don’t do a survey. Just observe.
But let’s say that before they added you on those social
networks, you met them first at an event. You spent even just five minutes over coffee talking about your mutual interests. When they then add you on a social network, you’ve got a context for that relationship. In fact, the social networks at that point will strengthen those ties. There is actually a kind of a symbiotic relationship between interpersonal physical interactions and social networks.
So when you meet face-to-face, your conversations start at a different level? I would reverse that. I would actually say that when you meet face-to-face, your virtual interactions made more sense. Because it’s kind of creepy when someone you don’t know says, “I’ve been following you,” [although] we don’t admit it. The other side that’s interesting is that it’s not just public
Can you talk about why you think that technology is creating more, not fewer, meetings? I think people see this a lot in my line of work — people often think about technology in binary terms, that one technology replaces the others. That the meeting industry was going to be in decline because new forms of communication would mean we were not going to meet anymore. And it’s not just the meeting industry. If you look at the whole, the business market in general, it’s really fascinating some of the kind of trends around human interaction and how they’re changing. [Yahoo! President and CEO] Marissa Mayer made quite a startling pronouncement when she said to everyone who was working from home at Yahoo! that they would start reporting to the office at 9 a.m. the next day. This is in Silicon Valley, [amid] the companies that created the very tools which were seen as the end of hav- ing to turn up at physical spaces. There are a bunch of these things hap-
pening. People are traveling more than ever, meetings are becoming more important than ever. People are redesigning their offices
social networks. The big trend now in companies is enter- prise social networks. This is relevant, I think, to the people who organize corporate meetings rather than big public events. Because new tools like Salesforce, Chatter — you could think of them as kind of internal Facebooks — are just for the company. The same logic applies inside a big company as well as [to] people connecting outside of the company. Because of technology and because of new business
ON THE WEB
— moving them away from big corporate cam- puses into urban locations that people actu- ally want to hang out in. Because they realize they’ve got to get people to actually interact physically now.
› Mike Walsh will be a General Session speaker at PCMA Conven- ing Leaders 2014 in Boston on Tuesday, Jan. 14. For more infor- mation, visit
convn.org/cl-2014. › Learn more about Mike Walsh at
mike-walsh.com. › Read more of Mike Walsh’s career advice for meeting profes- sionals in the June issue of Con- vene at
convn.org/be-prepared.
challenges, the company of the future is very global. It’s dis- tributed, and uses internal social networks to get people to engage, to collaborate, and create value together. At the heart of the company of the future is communication.... Because meetings, especially for global companies, are going to be critical for their best partners to be able to meet to give them- selves context for their relationships — and to effectively manage the complexity of a modern world.
What skills are going to be important to meet- ing planners in the future? The first is the ability to think like an edi- tor. To be very skilled at curating content: Have I found the right content that engages the public imagination? Is this meeting the business’ need? That is a very unique skill around editorial judgment — picking the right people to help bring [a meeting]
How do social-media connections intersect with physical meetings? Let’s say 10 people [connect with you] on LinkedIn or Face- book or Twitter — you haven’t met any of them. Now, you form a view of them based on the content they generate. It’s quite a high threshold for you to actually take them seriously.
74 PCMA CONVENE SEPTEMBER 2013
to life. That’s really been the success of TED. They’ve man- aged to take people and subject matter that would have only appealed to supernerds, basically, and make them interesting and sexy. The other thing I think is very important is community
building. This is especially relevant if you’re building a confer- ence. Conferences and trade shows have moved away from the monolithic model to very focused seminars and conferences.
PCMA.ORG
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108