N. Lynn Ridzon, CTC
Director, global meetings management
Amgen Inc.
Thousand Oaks, Calif.

PAST Before her move to Amgen in May 2007, Ridzon was director of global meeting management at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., where she worked for 21 years. Before that, she spent 10 years as a meeting planner and travel consultant with Revere Travel and six years as a reservations agent with Trans World Airlines.

CRED Since the early 1990s, Ridzon has been pioneering meetings-consolidation models. First for meetings within the Squibb Pharma Group, and then after the merger with Bristol-Myers, she grew the program to include all U.S.-based meeting requests within the company for all business units. Before leaving for Amgen, her department had embraced a process called consumption and specification management, which assesses meeting and travel consumption patterns to identify needs and eliminate unnecessary expenditures.

FORWARD-THINKING Ridzon sees two items at the top of the meetings industry's “to-do” list: First, improve the technology supporting hotel/planner communication. (“Hotels are generally archaic in terms of how they are able to respond to meeting requests, especially allocation of meeting space.”) Second, create more clarity around strategic meetings management. “An SMMP means different things to different people,” she says, noting that the industry needs consistency in SMMP practices and definitions to create reliable benchmarks for success.

GIVING BACK With many years of experience to share, Ridzon is conscientious about making time to answer the frequent calls she gets from planners breaking ground on SMMPs. “I talk to and counsel a lot of people,” she says. She also participates in conferences as a speaker or moderator a couple of times a year. Ridzon is a member of ACTE and NBTA.

ADVICE “Don't set yourself up to be an order taker. Embrace the philosophy of a consolidated meeting environment and let others see you as a valued business partner.” And, she says, an SMMP “doesn't happen from the bottom up; it happens top down.” To get your ideas moving, you first need to be able to explain your rationale and relate that to your company's objectives.

Return to 20 Changemakers