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Maarten’s Manifesto

Keynote speaker at this year’s EIBTM, Maarten Vanneste has a manifesto for meetings change. Paul Colston reads and reviews some of the revolutionary thoughts.

Maarten Vanneste is a man on a mission, with a message and a meetings manifesto.

He set up his first company back in 1982 on April Fool’s Day. But, although Vanneste was only 19 at the time and, as he admits in the book, a little green in the matters of business, he is definitely no fool.

His book, Meeting Architecture: a Manifesto, puts him at the forefront of blue sky thinking on the industry, at least on the content side of meetings.

He calls his own company Abbit’s work ‘meetings support’ and, indeed, founded his Meetings Support Institute with the support of IMEX and Starwood.

Vanneste believes that too many innovative young companies who come in to the meetings industry are being lost to marketing.

It is a trend he worries about and says: “The key objective of the MSI is to create a welcoming environment for those innovators in the meetings industry.”

When Vanneste first started visiting industry trade shows in the late 1990s he says he saw only meeting venues among the exhibitors. “I saw nothing that related to my world… no educators, no AV companies, no production companies, no presentation specialists, meeting photographers. There was nothing about education, networking or motivation.”

He describes the feeling like being the little boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes and wanting to shout ‘the emperor is naked’.

He had, he explains, found a shell and was looking for substance.

“The 2008 meeting industry is proficient in creating the shell in which meetings take place. The only thing we have to do is look inside that shell, put in a grain of sand and, after a few years, harvest the pearl.”

While much is written about the economic impact of meetings, Vanneste laments that little is written on the real reasons why people organise meetings: the objectives of meetings. The “what to achieve in the minds of participants” part is not addressed, he believes.

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