Remember that scandalous 2010 General Services Administration conference in Vegas, the one with the $3,200 mind-reader and $75,000 team-building exercise? It cost taxpayers so much ($822,000) that the GSA chief was forced to resign amid cries for reform. Still, last year alone there were 750 government-held conferences, with a total taxpayer price tag of over a quarter-billion dollars. That’s pricey for a few inspirational speeches and an assorted cheese tray.
POWWOW South by Southwest, 2012.
Austin American-Statesman/Associated Press
But we’re all doing it. The Convention Industry Council says that conferences attract more than 200 million attendees a year—that’s a lot of lanyards. Everyone seems seduceable, from music lovers and techies (South by Southwest kicked off this week in Austin, Texas) to overachievers looking for epiphany (one attendee at last month’s TED tweet-preached, “If you’re not leaving your cynicism at the door, you’re doing it wrong”).
Travel agents, convention centers and airlines love a conference. But what are we buying when we pay for a ticket? We seem to be seeking, from “ideas” conferences in particular, something that we used to get at home: mental stimulation. Only now, we feel we have to tiptoe away from our daily lives to find it. Today’s conferences are bordellos for the brain.
They cater to whatever you fancy—from supercharged (World Economic Forum) to superheroic (Comic-Con), data-scientific (Strata) to world-saving (Clinton Global Initiative). Attendees find what turns them on and return repeatedly to get more of it. A recent survey from Conference Hound—a website that “helps people find, research and connect” with all kinds of organized meetings—found that 53% of those who had attended a conference in the past 18 months plan to do it again in the next six. Of course they do.
These gatherings happen at exotic locales—Summit Series bought a Utah mountain, dubbed “Summit Eden,” to host future attendees—and in lavish spaces. Dinner tastes different in the Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace. (The ceiling isn’t acoustic tile, it’s Rubens.) And the networking? Nonstop.
The rise of conference culture obviously reflects our desire to connect physically in an increasingly virtual world. And who doesn’t love a life-affirming keynote. But beyond the immediate relief from the daily grind and the pleasure of being lulled by a talk about the healing powers of lint, does anything result from all this organized fun, mostly attended on work time? Or are conferences truly boondoggles, a kind of scheduled serendipity—just a way to reassure ourselves we’re not alone?
The underbelly issue is that the most desirable invite lists—for both speakers and attendees—often remain fairly static. You can bet on some combination of Elon Musk, Queen Rania of Jordan, the next
Stephen Hawking
and whichever celebrity just got back from sub-Saharan Africa. The mix is great for regulars, less so for aspirants and actual idea pollination.
Thought leadership? This is thought needership. And, like everything else, conferences can get clubby.
Although traditional clubs have always forbidden overt work while socializing, the pop-up clubs that are conferences practically insist on it. At least, at the best professional powwows, things are off the record—and the talk isn’t small.
Oren Michels,
CEO and co-founder of the tech company Mashery, points to The Lobby, where “very successful entrepreneurs speak freely and, most importantly, share numbers, which is way more valuable than the talking in generalities that goes on in an open forum that’s being live-streamed.”
But it is Mr. Michels’s experience at the dawn of conference-mania that captures the original upside: “I can trace many of the people I know both professionally and personally to one dinner,” he says—the 2000 European Technology Roundtable and Exhibition conference in Prague. There he met two entrepreneurs, and they founded a company a few months later. Now one of them is his co-founder at Mashery.
So the real conference “take-away” may be this: The magic happens when you attend not for the umpteenth time but the first. There is value in freshness, in entering the room unknowing and unknown, particularly in this age of overexposure and social media know-it-alls.
What we’re really looking for when we seek out a mental bordello is the chance to be new and stupid. That’s why everyone should be allowed to go to the great conferences once—and no one twice.
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