the meeting planner

LoriAnn Harnish, CMP, CMM
Serving and defining reality
Summer 2007

LoriAnn Harnish, CMP, CMM is the president of Speaking of Meetings, Inc. and an adjunct professor in event management at the Scottsdale Community College.  She was recently installed as the 2007-2008 president of the Arizona Sunbelt Chapter of MPI.

MPG: What attracted you to meeting planning?
LoriAnn: There is a certain sense of fulfillment in creating things and seeing them come together. You feel rewarded from the accomplishment and you are meeting the needs and the objectives of others.

What was your first job as a meeting planner?
In 1976, when I was 18 years old, I volunteered to help plan a Future Business Leaders of America program for 2,500 high school students in San Francisco. There were adults that guided us but I actually signed the contracts.

What did you learn from planning your first large event?
Make sure you look at everything and make sure that no page goes unturned. You learn to closely examine every minute detail and you learn not to take anything for granted.

There is the anatomy of an event that is critical - the six dimensions of an event - you start to understand the appetite, the experience, the appearance. Marketing theory looks at being at the right place at the right time. Event management theory looks at the dimensions of the event.

Some of it just comes with experience. People can learn it in school but you don’t really get it until you do it.

Tell us about Speaking of Meetings, Inc.
Our company provides consulting services to suppliers, independent planners and planning companies. We help examine their organizational management processes and business practices and provide assistance with incentive plans. Recently, I had a company that wanted to add team-building by doing cooking schools.

As the president of the MPI Sunbelt Chapter of MPI, what is your foremost objective for the year?
In my MPI installation speech, I read a quote by Max Depree, the author of Leadership is an Art. He said, “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality, the last is to say thank you, and in between, the leader is a servant.” His words will help direct my year as president. My number one goal is to guide the leadership team in communicating with and educating our membership about the value of their contribution to MPI - understanding how their own professional development is enriched by their contribution and service to the association.

Active committees keep a chapter functioning. We have to take a professional approach and either coach the committee volunteers toward success, which is part of our strategy, or we have to deal with not having an adequate number of volunteers.

During this past year, our chapter welcomed its 500th member. Kathy Overkamp was an excellent leader and an outstanding chapter president.

What issues do you believe that Bruce MacMillan, the CEO of MPI should address?
Bruce is forward thinking. He’s all about vision and aligning the association’s goals with its needs. I have actually suggested to him that it is vital that whatever goals that are established by the staff and volunteer leadership, that these goals and visions always align with the needs of the members. He agreed.

Moving beyond MPI, what are the “hot topics” among your colleagues?
I hear a lot of talk about green meetings, issues with contracts, the supplier/planner relationships and the seller vs. buyer market. I see discussions about the different ways hotels are looking for new revenue streams. Certainly, everything is important and relevant if it is being discussed.

The things that I get really passionate about are all technology-based. There is a new community called secondlife. Secondlife.com is a place where people can have meetings and I don’t necessarily mean web-casting. It’s a fictional diorama on your computer and yet, on the other hand, it’s real because people are going into this thing. It’s like a chat room. All of a sudden you’re having a pretend happy hour and doing some great networking. Open-space meetings are a totally new way of thinking about how to connect with each other and expanding our minds so that we can be more inventive and creative.

The other thing I am very supportive of is APEX (Accepted Practices Exchange) software that is supported and sponsored by the Convention Industry Council. I use this in my teaching and feel it provides an excellent standard for meetings’ industry people.

What will the meetings industry will look like five years down the road?
I believe there will be major changes in the roles we will all be in. There will also be a major change in the age of people that are actually planning and in the supplier-side sales force. I think that people will be retiring early or they will be transitioning into something new and different, something either more creative or more home-based.

What changes will the hotel industry see during that same period?
I think it can be a positive if they approach it in that way. If they don’t look at this as an opportunity for people to grow and an investment in people’s future, it will be negative because all they will see is their bottom line and they will not care about the people.

Do you see changes in the number or size of face-to-face meetings?
Every few years there is always something that will pull back a meeting because of the lack of funds or fear but I really don’t believe that face-to-face meetings will ever go away.

In order to be successful, people need to build solid business relationships. You can have meetings on the phone or online, and, through your voice, you can build trust but to confirm that a relationship is really solid, face-to-face meetings are the way to go.