I fully expected to be snowed, if not put to sleep, by Jeremy Siegel, this morning's PCMA general session speaker and financial expert. But he was really understandable, and even better, he agreed with me about what the ultimate cause of the economic meltdown was. More later on all that, hopefully, but it comes down to being driven by short-term thinking instead of being willing to take some short-term fallout for long-term gains. And he puts the majority of the blame on CEOs, followed by Alan Greenspan/the Fed, then the usual suspects. Anyway, lots of charts and graphs, but really informative. Nothing specifically to do with meetings, but I didn't see many folks walking out before he finished, so I'd say it was holding everyone's interest anyway.
Also, the session I just came out of on crisis management was terrific, even though the audience was pretty quiet. If you've never had to deal with a tornado striking your hotel, or union workers striking outside your hotel, or war being declared while your meeting was going on, well, I wouldn't wait. There were lots of resources mentioned, which I'll try to link to later, but the biggest message was to get your act together now, because once something's going on, you do not want to be in reactive mode.
Cutting this short because I must go eat lunch. You have to have priorities at these things, you know...