Debi Scholar, CMM, CMP, CTE, CTT Meeting and event services director
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Florham Park, N.J.

PAST A hospitality intern at Disney World during her college years, Scholar spent 20 years working in training and development at Westinghouse Furniture Systems, Dean Witter, and her own company. She started in the training realm at PwC but moved to the meetings department in 2002.

CRED With a policy dating to 1999, PwC was an early adopter of strategic meetings management. For the past two years, Scholar has been driving a Six Sigma project in PwC's meeting department to control spend and improve service. She is co-chairwoman of the National Business Travel Association's Groups and Meetings Committee and serves on the NBTA Foundation Board of Trustees. Scholar also participates on the Meeting Competitive Advantage Forum, a best practice and benchmarking team composed of 20 meetings-industry leaders from Fortune 100 companies.

SUCCESS STORY Applying SMMP in her present company: “I feel a huge sense of accomplishment from the millions of dollars we've been able to save in the last two years.”

FORWARD-THINKING In the past few years, Scholar's department has become PwC's central webconferencing resource. Moving forward, she would like to help the company's meeting planners become more comfortable organizing meetings in the virtual world.

MENTORS Fellow members of the NBTA Groups and Meetings Committee, in particular Kari Knoll Kesler, global manager of meetings and events at Honeywell, and Madlyn Caliri, CPM, director, global procurement at Reed Elsevier, have been valuable mentors to Scholar, both for what they have taught her about strategic meetings management and for what they told her they cannot teach her. “They said to me, ‘This is the way we do it, but you're going to have to figure out how an SMMP can work in your culture and environment.’ One size doesn't fit all,” says Scholar. In addition, her director, Kathy Murray, helped her to navigate through PwC stakeholders and is the executive sponsor for the SMMP.

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