The only way to change the world is to meet, keynote speaker Emmanuel Gobillot told participants at the Opening General Session of MPI’s 2010 World Education Congress Sunday morning.
At a time when more generations are working together than ever before, everyone is suffering from information overload and the world of work has become more temporary and complex, meetings and conversations create the sense of shared history that leads to effective action, he said.
“The only way to change your organization, the world or your community is to meet, is through dialogue.”
Earlier, MPI President and CEO Bruce MacMillan listed a series of high-profile meetings that that led to profound changes for the organizations that hosted them.
“These are game-changing actions inspired by the meetings and events that you put together,” he said. “That’s why you do what you do. You make the difference.”
British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell said we live in a world “that wants to travel, wants to connect, wants to come together and learn from one another. For all the new technologies and ways of looking at things, there’s nothing more important than a face-to-face meeting.”
After participants reacted, he added: “I never thought that would be an applause line.”
Campbell traced the province’s experience hosting the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, an immensely challenging program that “reminded us all of how incredibly powerful the human spirit is” and brought significant benefits to British Columbia. He said the Olympics “united an entire country around a common purpose, a common vision.”
MPI’s 2009-2010 Chairwoman Ann Godi, CMP, said MPI members had used the chaos of the last year to develop new strategies for success. The MPI Business Barometer shows that the majority of the meeting industry is doing better now than last year, and Godi said MPI is positioned to “measure and articulate the results that are missed when meetings and events are cancelled.”
Eric Rozenberg, CMM, CMP, MPI’s 2010-2011 chairman, looked back on the challenges the industry has faced in a tough business environment. For meeting professionals who want to succeed, “delivering logistics alone is no longer enough,” he said. “To be relevant, you need to understand the strategy of the organization.”
He stressed the scope and importance of the meeting industry, noting that “if we were a corporation, we would be in the Fortune 500.”
John Furlong, CEO of the Vancouver Olympic Committee (VANOC), said the most challenging peacetime event ever held in Canada “inspired us and lifted us up.” He mapped VANOC’s success to its compelling vision.
“We believed profoundly in what we were doing,” he said. “We saw a higher purpose to the work we were undertaking, and we subscribed to a set of very important values,” including teamwork, trust, excellence and, most important, sustainability. He defined sustainability as “doing the right thing every time, no matter what, whether you’re standing in front of the camera or behind it.”