When do you stop pouring resources into things that have achieved their purpose? asked management guru Peter Drucker. It’s one of Drucker’s signature strategies: abandoning the past for tomorrow. He called it the concept of purposeful abandonment. Purposeful abandonment doesn’t sound very attractive. Few leaders brag about the product, service or idea that they abandoned. Yet deciding to abandon a conference programming element can clear the way for new successful traditions to take … [Read more...]
Seven Reasons Why Your Conference Attendees Don’t Want You To Change
It’s just not the conference is used to be! That’s a common complaint from long-term conference attendees. Often they resist changes or conference growth. Conference organizers have to carefully watch placating these long-term attendees versus attracting new ones. Sometimes, we have to let the legacy attendees complain or leave in order to make the appropriate changes for growth. Change is never easy or we all would embrace it fast. Common Change Complaints Why does forward-change and … [Read more...]
Grow Your Conference By Becoming An Attendee Action Hero
You don’t have to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Nor do you have to fly at the speed of light to respond to a conference crisis. Nor do you have to use your special hidden super powers to meet your attendees’ expectations. Instead, it’s more about reliability than heroics. It’s about creating a conference experience that attendees can count on you to deliver. They know they can rely on you to provide an experience that helps fix what ails them, to care enough to give them what they … [Read more...]
Attitudes That Separate Growing, Healthy Conferences From Declining Ones
So what’s the difference between a growing, healthy conference and a declining one? Well, there are a lot of differences. Leadership—boards, committees, volunteers, staff—of growing, healthy conferences share some common attitudes. And leaders of declining conferences share similar outlooks as well. These mindsets have a huge influence on a meeting’s outcomes. Here are five leadership attitudes that impact conferences. Which ones do your leaders have? Hat tips to authors Carey Nieuwhof … [Read more...]
What You Are Doing Today Probably Will Not Drive Your Long Term Conference Growth
Most conference strategy is stuck! It’s stuck in strategic thinking based on ideas and frameworks designed for a different era. Our current conference growth strategy is out of context with today’s dramatic accelerated pace of change. We have taken for granted a set of growth strategy assumptions that served us in the past. But they have been overthrown by a new set of customer and market principles. The Purpose Of Old-School Strategy Most strategic plans and goals are based on one … [Read more...]
