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Leadership principles for meeting planners and convention organizers - lessons from the Asian classics
by Dr Seamus Phan

If you have lived with a traditional Chinese family, you might notice a thick red volume known as the “Tong Sheng” (通勝, roughly translating to the “all pervasive winning book”), which provides a family encyclopedia for everything ranging from agriculture, acupressure points, divination, philosophy and much more.

Inside the “Tong Sheng”, there is a portion dedicated to the Three-Character Classic (三字經, or Sanzi Jing), written in the thirteenth century and usually attributed to Confucian scholar Wang Yinglin (1223 to 1296 AD). What Wang did was to compress the essence of Confucianism into a mere 1,200 characters running in three-character verses. Most teachers and parents of old would teach their children these classical values and philosophy with the Three-Character Classic.

How then, would meeting planners and convention organizers benefit from the likes of the Three-Character Classic? Plenty.

Building trust with wisdom for kids
From the Three-Character Classic, Wang mentioned four verses, “曰仁義, 禮智信, 此五常, 不容紊”. We can roughly translate these verses to “The five virtues of Benevolence, Duty, Etiquette, Wisdom and Trust are constants that must not be compromised.”

When meeting planners and convention organizers work with professional speakers, content experts and academics, it is important to see beyond just dollars and cents.

Yes, it is a business after all, and meeting planners and organizers might be hard pressed for resources, finances and time, and the competition is deafening. However, if we subscribe to a long-term business model and intend to stand as long as the pillars of business, much as many classical businesses that last till today, then it is important to look beyond short-term results and cut-throat practices.

With the five virtues of benevolence, duty, etiquette, wisdom and trust, let us see how meeting planners and convention organizers can better work with the speakers and experts they represent.
  1. Benevolence: Benevolence is the cousin of compassion, and it springs from a honest and caring heart. When we work with speakers and experts, we should find out the idiosyncrasies and preferences of our speakers, to facilitate and smoothen the working relationship. For example, if the speaker suffers from specific health challenges, he may need special help or custom diets. For speakers from out of town and have no experience in traveling to your location, it helps to empathize with them and plan for a person to make sure the speaker is received at the airport and properly sent to his accommodation or seminar location.

  2. Duty: Duty is similar to when we serve our nation as national servicemen in the army. Rather than seeing that our relationship with our speakers as purely a financial transaction, we should see our relationship with our speakers as family. After all, if a family member requires our help, would we even hesitate? We should fulfill all obligations, contractual or personal, to our speakers without arguing nuances ad nauseam. For example, if the contract did not specify that the speaker should fly with airline A, but the speaker prefers airline A due to person reasons, it is our duty to help facilitate that, rather than simply use a cookie-cutter approach. The caring of our speakers yield fruits when speakers go out on a limb to do the same for us, such as recommending us to corporate clients for large-scale events. The relationship is a two-way street.

  3. Etiquette: Etiquette extends beyond just basic courtesy and shaking hands. If you approached five speakers for a potential slot, do you politely inform the four speakers who did not get selected for the slot? Do you offer alternative slots to the other four in the same or upcoming events, having made them spend time presenting their credentials or sending you materials and abstracts? Wouldn’t you expect the same professional and personal etiquette from your speakers if they cannot make time for your event?

  4. Wisdom: Wisdom is not intelligence, but rather, the accumulation of knowledge tempered with compassion and a heart. For example, rather than simply rely on general topic areas and pigeon-hole your speakers, why not spend time studying the philosophy and underlying beliefs of your speakers, and help your speakers expound deeper and more inspiringly to reach out to your audiences? For example, a business speaker may speak on leadership, but he draws his principles from a non-competitive value system such as Buddhism, and that contrasts greatly from the usual “Art of War” types. How then, can you use your own experience and wisdom to position this speaker to YOUR benefit, as well as your audience and the speaker?

  5. Trust: Trust is the fundamental value in ANY relationship. When we endear ourselves to journalists and get frequent media coverage, it is not just because of substance and content, but also, in our consistent adherence to building trust with the journalists. When the journalist calls us for a story or a comment, he can be 100% sure of us telling the truth and presenting all facts, and declining to comment if we don’t have available information. Likewise, meeting planners and convention organizers can endear themselves to their speakers by building a trust-centric relationship, that is above and beyond the dollars and cents. When a speaker presents confidential information meant for your eyes only, can he have an intrinsic belief and trust in you that you will not betray that trust and hand that information to your pool of competing speakers? This is perhaps the hardest value to build, but the most precious to speakers and planners alike.

The Feng Shui of collaborative success
Christopher Reed, a writer in Los Angeles, wrote an article "Feng shui craze hits American corporate suites", on the 27 March 2004 issue of Business Times Singapore, a national business daily newspaper.

In the article, Reed mentioned that businesses ranging from NewsCorp, DirecTV, and even the State of California, are all looking at Feng Shui, or geomancy, the art and science of building and fixture positioning, to enhance wealth.

Feng Shui is not just physics and mysticism, but about harmony. It is really about how your location can BLEND harmoniously with its surroundings to bring you prosperity. That is why the best Feng Shui often means that your neighbors and the surrounding ecosphere must be successful in order for you to be successful as well.

So the next time you sit down and chat with your speakers about events, think about what kids of yesterday learned from the Three-Character Classic, and see what the classics can do to not only improve your bottomline and outreach to speakers and experts, but how it will spread by positive word-of-mouth for you and your company to other speakers, as well as corporations alike.

Dr Seamus Phan is a leading author, keynote speaker, trainer and naturopathic philosopher. Seamus is one of Asia抯 early Internet pioneers and bloggers. Seamus consults and speaks for international companies, governments and emerging enterprises around the world. He is the bestselling co-author of Dot ZEN \, a business leadership book, and This Body This Life , a holistic health and fitness book.

Copyright (c) 1990-2005 Seamus Phan. All rights reserved.

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