Paul Colston travels to the Lone Star State and sees PCMA bring movie stars, economists and space scientists into the convention collaboration
“I could live anywhere I like in the world and I choose to live in Austin,” was the line delivered by Hollywood A-lister and local boy, Matthew McConaughey, at the opening ceremony on Day 1 of PCMA’s Convening Leaders 2017 in the Texan capital. And it was no cheesey one-liner, ‘Have a nice day’ and exit stage left, McConaughey really did put on a show for his favourite city and showed what a film star destination ambassador looks like. McConaughey also stressed Austin was “a city of ideas” and was proud of its ‘weirdness’ too.
Day 2’s keynote on the main stage, while not quite in the glamour boy category, brought some startling predictions about the coming Third Industrial Revolution. Futurist and economist Jeremy Rifkin said climate change was no longer imminent, but “at the house, in the door”.
Rifkin gave meeting planners some mind expanding pearls of wisdom to tax their future strategies, connected with the Third Industrial Revolution being fuelled by a confluence of communication, energy and transport to manage, power, and move economic activity.
Day 2 also saw the chair of the UK Events Industry Board Nick de Bois spar with David Wallace, a former mayor in south Houston and adviser to UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s foundation.
De Bois urged the largely US-based audience that now was the time to bring events to the UK. “Come on over, the UK is at a 15% currency discount.” He added that Brexit had provided an opportunity to move away from the trading bloc which had become protectionist.
He urged meeting and event professionals to try to anticipate new skillsets the profession would need in future and said that business could solve problems of skill shortages itself.
Wallace agreed that tremendous disruption was afoot in the industry and said we needed to prepare students how to lead in the new economic environment with ‘soft skills’.
Unfortunately, for a conference that is so notoriously slick, the facilitation of the two politicians going toe-to-toe was plodding and missed a trick in keeping the drama flowing.
Convening Leaders also offers plenty of food for thought at lunch times and top speakers took to the stage as the audience gathered to eat in plenary session.
This year the over-arching theme was ‘Designing colLABoration’ and the first day’s Networking Lunch, brought insights into ‘Seeing the Unseen’ with Dan Goods, visual strategist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Goods took the audience on a journey of scientific art projects that he has helped shape.
The idea of inviting leading economic and scientific speakers from outside the industry to stimulate the meeting and events industry’s own thinking has proved popular.
The Austin conference was the most successful ever Convening Leaders with 4,175 delegates attending.
And the collaboration wound its way throughout the city’s musical DNA, with many promising musicians pitching in to entertain delegates at pop up venues around town. One of the most popular was Austin House, across the road from the convention centre.
Nearly 1,500 further delegates attended Convening Leaders LIVE on-line, and an additional 180 Asian meetings professionals participated in a delayed rebroadcast of specific content for Asian audiences.
Proof of the event’s growing international outlook is the figure that delegates came from 45 countries to attend the event this year, up from 36 countries in 2016.
The Austin Convention Center also hosted multiple Learning Labs featuring numerous all seeking to demonstrate how collaboration can enhance the quality and return for business events.
Deborah Sexton, president and CEO, PCMA said: “Austin was the perfect destination to turn our lens towards the value of collaboration. The contributions of Tom Noonan and Mark Tester’s teams at the Austin Convention & Visitors Bureau and Austin Convention Center, as well as many of Austin’s noted citizens, demonstrated the power of real-time collaboration to conference participants.”
Medical matters
Medical meeting professionals had an opportunity to explore the Dell Medical School. Josh Baer, a tech entrepreneur, invited attendees to tour Capital Factory, a space where bright minds find the resources and knowledge to turn their ideas into realities.
Leaving a Legacy
Delegates were also able to leave a social legacy, with 130 attendees participating in PCMA’s Hospitality Helping Hands, benefitting Sammy’s House, an Austin not-for-profit agency that provides services for children who are medically fragile and/or developmentally delayed. The group worked on a variety of indoor and outdoor projects including playground repair, toy sorting, sanitising classrooms and other general maintenance throughout the facility.
The PCMA Education Foundation sold out this year’s Party With A Purpose, with over 1,600 donating participants. In its 24th year, PWAP has raised more than $2.4m for a range of notable causes. The Austin event also raised more than $200,000 USD that will be returned back to the industry for scholarships, grants and research. Post-party, Found and Sustaining Sponsor, GES presented a check for $25,000 to the local Health Alliance for Austin Musicians.
Sexton also said that security was now the No.1 issue facing the meetings industry and PCMA chairman William Reed added that the issue needed to be placed at a higher strategic level than purely drawing up crisis management plans. He also led the conference in remembering the victims of the recent shooting at Fort Lauderdale airport.
Mulling over all the mind blowing information I’d learned during my first Convening Leaders, I saw one of the keynote speakers, childhood actor, entrepreneur, Harvard-trained lawyer and truly inspirational speaker Isaac Lidsky. His achievements are all the more remarkable because — as he revealed to the PCMA Convening Leaders 2017 audience – he’s blind. Lidsk’s lesson was all about his achievements being made not in spite of his disability, but because of how he responded to it. “Only you create your reality,” was his mantra and his development story held the audience rapt.
Lidsky certainly carries an aura that seemed to light a path through the airport for him and left this UK-bound delegate with a meetings moment on the road to Ephesus.
The next Convening Leaders will take place in Nashville, TN on 7-10 January, 2018.
