Founder and managing partner of Dallas-based Rudner Law Offices, Rudner, as chair of Equality Texas, is a staunch advocate for LGBT rights

Twenty-five-year hospitality industry veteran Ted Davis' gaze is always on the future.

The catering game in Las Vegas, like all other facets of the hospitality industry there, attracts the best and the brightest, and rising to the higher levels of Caesars Entertainment certainly takes more than a lucky roll of the dice.

As if working full time as director of meetings for the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses wouldn’t fill one’s calendar, 10-year meetings and events veteran Carrie Abernathy is involved in a full slate of industry efforts that keeps her engaged to the hilt with her meetings colleagues.

The hospitality industry benefits from many “lifers” who have worked in it for most of their careers, but sometimes it’s new blood that gives innovation oxygen. Edward Harris, who assumed the head marketing role at the Valley Forge Tourism & Convention Board three years ago, has leveraged his marketing background in digital powerhouses such as eBay to propel the CVB representing Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County into the 21st century through first-in-class...

Having to change one’s career is always an exercise in stress, but for Jackie Wright, becoming a meeting planner was a study in the power of networking and leveraging the unexpected. Now a meetings coordinator for Washington, D.C.’s American Society of Hematology (ASH), Wright found herself looking for a new employment opportunity after being laid off following a reorganization at the accounting firm where she worked as a relationship manager, liaising between different groups in the company.

In yet another somewhat circuitous career path that found its way winding through the meetings industry, meet KiKi L’Italien, who turned her training in journalism into a job in the marketing department of a small Joplin, Mo.-based association, then on to a larger, Washington, D.C.-based association, and now a thought-leader in the world of SEO and social media in the association segment and beyond.

In yet another circuitous career path that found its way winding through the meetings industry, meet KiKi L’Italien, who turned her training in journalism into a job in the marketing department of a small Joplin, Mo.-based association, then on to a larger, Washington, D.C.-based association, and who now is a thought-leader in the association segment and beyond.

You may know David Kliman as a facilitator of major customer advisory boards, an expert on international meetings, a frequent speaker at industry events and/or a leader in organizations such as MPI, but his climb up had modest beginnings.

“I came right out of college and I wanted a job in the travel industry, and I literally walked into the Plaza Hotel in New York and said I wanted to be in international sales, and they said ‘You and everyone else.’” Kliman said. “I got the glamorous job working as a reservations agent—taking telephone and telex reservations.

“A year later I got an international sales job and I was on a jet to Rio,” he added. “I was just a lucky guy at the right time and in the right place.”

There’s an immediate sense of calm that overcomes you when you meet Lee Papa. Warm, engaging, present and centered, this mindfulness and meditation expert definitely found her calling, first in owning a Las Vegas wellness center that taught 4,000-plus classes in the six years it was open and currently on a mission to create well-being experiences at meetings and conferences around the world.