501 Name Tags: How Everything You Need to Know About Business Can Be Learned at a Conference and Forgotten in the Trade Show

By Frank Diekmann

In a book unlike any other, veteran business writer, editor, small business owner and mystery-chicken lunch-consumer Frank J. Diekmann has compiled 30 years of reporting on the very best strategies and insights shared by some of the world’s most successful business and organizational leaders, and then cleverly illustrated all of those lessons by also drawing upon the very best (but often the very worst) practices witnessed in attending more than 500 trade shows and exhibit halls. “501 Name Tags: How Everything You Need to Know About Business Can be Learned at a Conference and Forgotten in the Trade Show” is a penetrating, often funny examination of what makes for success, combining the shrewd and challenging management acumen shared by conference keynoters with the real-world examples offered by the 10x10 “stores” found in that microcosm of the marketplace, the exhibit hall. The result is a challenge to readers to really rethink many of their own approaches and assumptions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frank Diekmann
• Release date: Mar 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463306291

Frank Diekmann

Frank J. Diekmann is a 25-year veteran of newspaper reporting and editing, having covered sports, travel and financial services. Along the way this included, sadly, many, many nights in hotels, where a TV was usually on in the background, and many years in vehicles and airplanes listening to classici rock and pop music. Diekmann has reported from more than 500 industry conferences and has leaned on a strong sense of humor to get through them all, building a significant following for both is fiction and non-fiction.

Book preview

501 NAME TAGS

How Everything You Need to Know About Business Can Be Learned at a Conference

& Forgotten in the Trade Show

Frank J. Diekmann

501 Name Tags

Copyright © 2020 by Frank J. Diekmann.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system with the exception of a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a blog, newspaper or magazine without written permission from the author.

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition: March 2020

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

So Much Preaching…

CHAPTER 2

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

CHAPTER 3

The Illusion of Knowledge

CHAPTER 4

Get Some Culture, Why Doncha?

CHAPTER 5

Branding: It’s Not About the Underwear

CHAPTER 6

The Answer You Don’t Want to Hear

CHAPTER 7

To Get Talent is a Talent

CHAPTER 8

Thinking Outside the Paradox

CHAPTER 9

So, What’s Your Story?

CHAPTER 10

Failure is the New Success

CHAPTER 11

Booth Duty

CHAPTER 12

Tomorrow & The Land of the Boiling Frog

CHAPTER 1

So Much Preaching…

Every day in the United States and around the globe, great masses of workers and their employers fork over hundreds and, much more likely, thousands of dollars as part of a never-ending quest for improvement. The corporate cavalry marches to workshops and flies in great flocks of metal birds to conferences and conventions all to hear the icons of our time, the industry leaders, entrepreneurs and stages full of other expert keynoters as they divulge their five- and six-figure honorarium insights on how to succeed in business. Or how to differentiate. Or engage. Or develop sales leads, build a culture, be a best practice, avoid a worst practice, not be disrupted, or morph an organization into some sort of hyphenated centric.

Differentiation. Disruption. Engagement. Rabid customer service. Leadership. Wait—that doesn’t move the cheese anymore– Extreme leadership. Buzzwords. Buzz Phrases. Buzz forecasts. Buzz Aldrin. At least one mandatory lame joke from a conference emcee about who was in the hotel bar late last night. And then that very same joke Every. Single. Morning.  From the worker bees to the C-suite, all those who have paid the registration fee necessary to secure passage beyond the consistently-less-than-crackerjack-security at these conferences and events will sit in the audience in semi-rapt attention, their faces bathed in blue light as they type copious notes into their devices and race to unlock their phones to shoot pictures of presenters’ slides. They will applaud rapturously in response to whatever epiphany has just been shared and then stream en masse from the room to gobble up signed copies of the books the speaker just happened to have with them, not even waiting to get back home before diving into the pages to uncover that one nugget of wisdom that is the express elevator to promotions, raises and maybe even an IPO and early retirement.

What follows on these pages are many of the best such nuggets of business acumen and experience I have heard in three decades working as a reporter covering some of the world’s most innovative and successful business leaders. In these chapters, I have synopsized many of the outstanding insights that have been shared, with a focus on the kinds of observations and lessons learned that will be of greatest benefit as you drive your own business or develop your own career.

But a second piece to this book is based on experiences and observations of my own from having spent much of those same three decades also working in (and often suffering through) the conference exhibit hall or trade show.  That experience is shared because here’s the thing –– the object of all those conference attendees’ great quest isn’t hidden like the Holy Grail. Should they open their eyes, it would be more like Holy Smokes. What so very few among the legions of paying attendees ever realize is if they genuinely want to get down to ground level fast from that 35,000-foot view TED Talk they just heard and witness the true Business Admin 101 lessons in what separates the failures from the successes, it’s Right. There. In. Front. Of. Them. And it will remain in plain sight for three days, sometimes longer, conveniently if not blindingly illuminated by spotlights.

Sadly, those kinds of awakenings are left for books by Oliver Sacks. Instead, the vast armies of conference bag-toting conventioneers will obliviously march right past the most valuable classrooms they might have entered. That’s because everything they are looking to learn about business success/failure can be found neatly on display in the trade show and exhibit hall.

If there is one great truism when it comes to the world of educational programs at conferences and the accompanying trade shows, and it’s shared by all major religions, it’s this: so much preaching, so little practicing.

500 & Counting

As of this writing, I have attended 501 meetings/conferences/symposiums/conventions/workshops and seminars, according to the ocean-threatening collection of non-sustainable plastic nametags and lanyards I have assembled. I’ve actually attended more than 501, but I haven’t saved each and every nametag and, besides, I can already sense the jealousy provoked by what amounts to at least 2,000 days (that’s over five years for readers who are CFOs and interested in calculating the depreciation on the author) of capitalist overload, all savored inside the most charming and cozy architecture the world has to offer, municipal convention centers and hotel ballrooms.

What wisdom can one draw in the process of collecting 501 name tags? I could offer you several acres of convention space worth, but ultimately it comes down to these two primary lessons: there are just so many ways to prepare chicken, and conferences and their trade shows/expos sum up everything you need to know in one tidy package. So pay attention.

One more important note that deserves equal attention: even if you never attend a conference trade show, what follows still applies to you and your organization. For those of you who are regular meeting attendees/exhibitors and for those of you who are not, I strongly urge you to think about your company and trade shows as an app. Like a trade show booth an app is a microcosm of your business all condensed into one small space. In a trade show, your competition can literally be just feet away. Online, your competition is even closer, just a finger-swipe away.

A Lot of Hats

My perspective on how Everything You Need to Learn About Business Can Be Learned in the Trade Show has been informed by more than just having collected nametags. I have attended most of those conferences as not just an exhibitor in the trade show (for three companies), but also as a news reporter and editor covering the financial services industry and the $1.5-trillion credit union community in particular, having reported on and interviewed countless business and organizational leaders and making the evolutionary journey from typewriters to word processors to laptops to churn out several thousand stories as a result. I have also had the honor of being a host and conference organizer, a speaker at many meetings, and on occasion I’ve even played all four roles at the same conference.

Of those four, the real value has been in two: the exhibit hall representative and the reporter covering the conference speaker agenda. It’s a chasm bridged by few, and while I’ve heard more than a few presenters who weren’t worth their lavaliers, I’ve also been fortunate to hear first-hand from innovative, successful and even world-changing leaders in what are now known as their respective verticals.  What I have frequently experienced is the folks working the corporate exhibit booths almost never sit in on any educational sessions during downtime (and they have more free time than a bridge-tender, although to be fair, vendors are often barred from the educational program), while attendees typically dash through the exhibit hall for selfish reasons that have little relationship to the reason their employer is paying for them to be there. Instead, they star in their own Amazing Race competition that’s all about the free food and tchotchkes.

There’s a reason conference organizers force you to trudge to the back of the hall to find the bars and buffets, and it has to do with vendor-pleasing traffic, not helping you burn calories. These manipulators know if there’s even a rumor of a gratis blinking luggage tag to be had, attendees will traipse through three pairs of shoes to find it.  Sadly, they will not expend a fraction of the same energy to look around and gain the kind of takeaways that could really benefit them and their organizations.

During my career, I’ve worked booths and slogged through trade shows in forums ranging from narrow, fire code-violating hallways in EconoLodges jammed with tabletop displays (Hey, whattayasay we save a few bucks by not reserving a room for the vendors), to cavernous convention centers in Las Vegas and Orlando (with all the authenticity for which both are known), and from Sydney to Barcelona. Without fail, the one thing I have learned is the size of the table, booth or continent ultimately doesn’t matter––the same core success attributes consistently separate the living from the walking dead. The solid ROI from the DOA, the post-mortem meeting on all the new business leads from the autopsy as the stack of T&E invoices start hitting Accounts Payable.

It doesn’t matter to what point on the globe you’ve traveled, there may be no greater distance at a convention than the light-years between what the business experts will share from the stage and what actually takes place on the trade show floor—and one must assume, the office back home.

It Gets Me Every Time

Sure, crime scene investigators may have a decent argument to make, but I’ll posit there are few ingredients more likely to bake a cynic than news reporter/exhibit hall booth representative. And yet even after those 500-plus conferences, I still fall for it almost every time. Why? Why does it always begin with such anticipation, excitement even? After a day of travel, the Promised Vendorland gleams beneath the bright lights, its entrance festooned with balloons and banners and sometimes even fronted by a band, as it seductively beckons those blessed to have secured that coveted coin of the realm, that plastic name badge, to gain admission into its beguiling realm. Did I call it a conference? Pardon me, my mistake—who besides the Amish would even dream of hosting a plain old conference anymore?" Conference, schmonfrence. Today’s event-planners go deep into the thesaurus for superlatives to rebrand their forums with the kinds of titles that demand exclamation points, seducing you with EXCITE! and ALIVE! and ENERGY! (always followed by the year the event is taking place); names that Microsoft Word auto-capitalizes because even it’s pumped about all the hyperbole.

The EXCITE!ALIVE!ENERGY! shows are capitalism’s City on a Shining Hill, Adam Smith’s orgasm. And all hermetically sealed in an air-conditioned/heated cocoon of commerce, with escalators and moving walkways and even arrows the size of dinosaur paw prints on the floor, all to more easily feed you directly into the open mouths of these Meccas of mercantilism.  I can’t speak for you, I can only admit that in my case, I have had to kick myself for falling for it again and again. Why does the EXCITE!ALIVE!ENERGY! trade show hold so much promise when we suspect—hell, even know—it will be populated by so much disappointing mediocrity? It’s yet another parallel between the trade show and the retail buying experience in the larger marketplace outside.

An Indisputable Fact

What remains an indisputable fact of life is whether it’s a quaint group of quilters at the Holiday Inn who are sharing a double to save money or the gaggle of geeks burning through investors’ money for a penthouse suite at some hotel as part of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the trade shows share one common characteristic: they are a microcosm of the great American Arena of Commerce. With the exception of the big brand names, all of the companies are for the most part condensed into 10x10 booth spaces like stores in a strip plaza, but in this case, tidily wrapped inside a blue-curtain-bordered reenactment of their respective industries.

Once you’re past the balloons and the bands you’ll find in those booths–not that anyone ever seems to notice–every business book ever published being brought to life or put to death; every business doctrine ever espoused being practiced or malpracticed; every fundamental on display or utterly absent. Like a commercial-grade shadow box, inside the convention expo you will find the Blue Oceans, the Purple Cows, the Green to Gold, and the black and the red ink. Jim Collins’ Good to Great may have been a best-seller, but stroll the exhibit hall floor and you’ll discover most companies seem quite content with Fair to Middlin’.  Simon Sinek urged companies and organizations—very often during remarks inside convention center ballrooms immediately adjacent to the exhibit hall––to Start With Why. Mr. Sinek appears to have nailed it, because three days in a trade show will most certainly have you asking, Why did many of these companies spend their money on this? and Why does no one listen to some of the great strategic advice and direction shared here?

If you’ve paid attention, you should also be asking questions about your own organization.

Just like the companies that sent their employees to these conferences and expos, under the roof of the trade show you will find all the established major players/corporate brands, the entry-level start-ups, and the great middle market. You will encounter companies on their way up, on their way down, and those unsure where they’re headed and just treading water (if you’re at all unsure where your organization falls, it’s the latter). Hidden among the booths and food stations are the subjects of the business school case studies, the disruptors that will turn their industries upside down and become market leaders, but even they spend much of their own lives in paranoid uncertainty over whether they will disrupt the market or be disrupted themselves. And here is all of it for your consumption in less than half a week, where all you need is a bit of awareness and a comfortable pair of shoes.

The exhibit hall is home to the descendants of those who were once the carnival barkers, shills and traveling medicine show hucksters, beckoning us as we pass and tempting us with all sorts of tantalizing three-headed cows and World’s Most Amazing Spreadsheets. And pardon me for even having used the antiquated terms, as those companies once known as vendors and which once sold products are so last century. Today, in a country in which we just swallow oxymoronic (emphasis on moronic) euphemisms such as pre-owned car, now they are partners offering solutions and problem-solving for your company’s every need, even resolutions to problems they can create for us on the spot as part of our journey. The best of the salesmen, sorry, collaborative evangelists, are so engaging, empathetic and enthusiastic (it’s all about the EQ now) about their solution we readily surrender a business card, even though in the back of our minds an alarm is screeching that we’ve just turned on an email spigot and an unwanted LinkedIn request.

The Big Lesson & Sad Truth

But here’s the big lesson and sad truth of the trade show that also reflects the broader marketplace: those types of people may be cheesier than Wisconsin’s Official Wayne Newton Polka Tribute Band and a leading reason to never make eye contact again, but at least they are actually driving (some) value back to their companies––or trying to.  The sad reality here is they are the exception to the trade show rule, as most company representatives are indifferent and disengaged, wasting their company’s money and, on those occasions when they do make some attempt at connecting with an unfortunate passer-by, wasters of that person’s time, too. In the great, wide middle are companies that can tip either way, and as I said earlier the one critical lesson––better known as takeaway on the speaker presentation side of the meeting––is that it isn’t a larger or interactive booth or a trinket giveaway that is the arbiter of your future, it’s just doing the basic