The Meeting Planner of the Future

Resources for Planners

Want to explore this topic further? The following are some books and websites that address the changing workplace and the skills needed to survive and thrive.

Books

Be on Your Best Cultural Behavior
By Colleen A. Rickenbacher

Virtual Presentations That Work
By Joel Gendelman

Leading the Virtual Workforce: How Great Leaders Transform Organizations in the 21st Century
By Karen Sobel Lojeski

60 Second Self-Starter: Sixty Solid Techniques to Get Motivated, Get Organized, and Get Going in the Workplace
By Jeff Davidson

Beyond E-Learning: Approaches & Technologies to Enhance Organizational Knowledge, Learning, & Perform
By Marc J. Rosenberg

Exploiting Chaos: 150 Ways to Spark Innovation During Times of Change
By Jeremy Gutsche

Websites:

www.doodle.com www.gist.com www.foursquare.com www.dropbox.com www.ted.com www.ideaarchitects.org

The Meeting Planner of the Future

By KATIE MORELL

At the end of May, Hot Topic presented a dialogue on The Meeting of the Future. This time, we're looking at what it will take to plan those meetings.

How will the job of the meeting planner change over the next few years? In terms of career success, who will move forward and who will be left behind? Will there be new skills—and a change of attitude—required for veterans and newcomers alike?

To get some answers, Meetings Media asked six leading meetings industry and business gurus for their take on where the workplace is headed. They include corporate trainer Alisa Peters, meetings industry educator Joan Eisenstodt, futurists Jim Carroll and Rohit Talwar, management and human resources consultant Joyce Gioia and meeting jobs placement expert and Meetings Media Career Forum columnist Sheryl Sookman Schelter.

What are the skills that planners will need to stay on the job in the future?

Alisa Peters, CMP, CMM, vice president of Chicago Indoor Racing; president of MPI Chicago Area Chapter: I think the biggest area of opportunity for our planner community is going to be on the technology side.

Around 20 or 30 years ago, planners would worry about things such as selecting a great venue with good food and hiring a great speaker. Nowadays, our planners really need to know how to produce an event that will deliver the strategic value that shareholders or boards are looking for in an organization. Meetings need to have a metric tied to them and planners need to be experts in providing those metrics. They need to be able to show decision-makers what they can contribute to the bottom line of the organization.

Technology is controlling everything. You now have meeting attendees that are coming to you on a host of platforms—virtually and in-person. Meeting planners need to be aware that if a speaker says something off-color, attendees will tweet about it instantly.

The biggest area of opportunity for the planning community is technology right now. There are still some meeting professionals who are phobic when it comes to technology. They aren't completely familiar with the power of Twitter or Facebook. These are excellent platforms for getting their messages out.

Jim Carroll; trends and innovation consultant; www.jimcarroll.com; Toronto: Business and professional associations are facing numerous changes that are occurring at a very fast pace; business model change; very rapid skills change; fast market change; new competitors; and the impact of younger generations in terms of adaptability to change.

This means that organizations must be able to enhance the knowledge, skills...

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