Meetings Still Mean Business
Edward P. Salek, CAE, Executive Director | TLT Headquarters Report June 2016
Twenty years after my first STLE meeting, personal connections remain important.
IN 2016 I AM MARKING TWO PERSONAL MILESTONES: 20 years with STLE and 20 years of attending our annual meetings.
My string of annual meetings started in May 1997 in Kansas City and includes four meetings in Las Vegas (1999, 2005, 2010 and now 2016), three in Orlando (2001, 2009 and 2014) and a dozen other meetings in various locations across the U.S. and Canada.
While 20 meetings is nothing to sneeze at, I have been around this organization long enough to acknowledge that we have an extremely loyal membership—especially when it comes to our annual meeting. There are attendance streaks stretching back 30 years or longer.
Looking to the future, will the STLE Annual Meeting still command this sort of sustained participation or will it become a casualty of the digital age? While this is not a new question, current research confirms that face-to-face meetings and conferences will continue to thrive for some very sound business reasons.
Meetings Mean Business, an advocacy coalition created by the U.S. Travel Association, earlier this year surveyed 150 senior executives from a variety of fields and industries about the connection between face-to-face meetings and positive business outcomes. The results were overwhelmingly positive. According to the research report, “Every executive interviewed believes that face-to-face meetings are important to their business. Four in five believe they are very important.”
The business leaders pointed to two primary benefits of meeting participation. Benefit No. 1 is a bottom line issue. “Meetings and events deliver profits, help win new accounts, serve as education platforms and allow colleagues and partners to come together to innovate and achieve results,” the study observes.
Creating personal connections is the other primary benefit. According to the report, “Personal relationships are at the core of every business decision, and face-to-face meetings provide professionals with that personal interaction that leads to deeper relationships.” Our research bears that out. More than 97% of attendees at STLE’s 2015 meeting in Dallas reported making a new friend or business contact there.
STLE’s strategic plan emphasizes our desire to capitalize on this point of view by making the annual meeting a signature conference event for the tribology and lubricants field. The results are encouraging. STLE’s average attendance during the past three years is up 21% from the average attendance of the prior three-year cycle. Exhibits and technical presentations have increased at a comparable double-digit pace.
Also notable is the fact that the STLE Annual Meeting has become the place where industry leaders gather to shape the future of the field. There’s evidence of this trend at the 2016 meeting in Las Vegas. STLE is cosponsoring a workshop in support of a Tribology Opportunities project being conducted by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).
The report, which will be delivered to ARPA-E at the end of 2016, will spotlight tribology research projects which, if funded through the program, could enable huge energy savings. At the Las Vegas workshop, experts will discuss, develop, critique and quantify ideas relevant to this important topic and in support of the upcoming report. To learn more about this report, see “Can Tribology Save A Quad,” an article in the May TLT by Dr. Rob Carpick and an esteemed group of co-authors.
STLE’s leadership appreciates the support from corporate and individual members for the annual meeting. In addition to being perhaps the most important aspect of STLE’s organizational mission and strategic plan, the annual meeting also is a significant source of revenue and enables the society to pursue activities that are important to our members and the industry but which are not necessarily revenue generating.
We look forward to the Annual Meeting being the place where the tribology and lubricants industry does business.
You can reach Certified Association Executive Ed Salek at esalek@stle.org.