MPI Aloha Chapter : THRIVE During MeetDifferent 2009

If you’re looking for ways to meet different, Meeting Professionals International will be holding its MeetDifferent annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia, February 7-10, 2009. Under city lights and southern nights, MPI will be continuing their successful meeting concept launched in Houston, Texas 2008. Formerly Professional Educational Congress, MeetDifferent is an innovative model to meet out of the booth, out of the norm and out of the box.

In 2009, MeetDifferent will inspire you to THRIVE despite the economic crisis. MPI is confident of the meetings industry resilience and believes together we will get thorough this challenge not by surviving but by thriving.

MeetDifferent kicks off on Saturday at Georgia Aquarium, the largest aquarium in the world. An 8 million gallon tank, a school of innovative planners and suppliers combined with delicious food catered by Wolfgang Puck, this conference is sure to create new ways of doing business.

Don’t be a wallflower, meet your peers!
Calling all new members and first time attendees to attend Your MPI a session designed to educate and introduce you to peers from around the globe. Then walk the tradeshow floor at the MeetDifferent Expo and experience what it truly means to meet out of the booth. Designed to elevate the member conversation this tradeshow removes the trappings of a standard booth and gets you out where and with whom you want to be.

Book it to the Book Club
MPI manages to find interesting books to make your professional life as close to a Hawaiian vacation as possible. Here’s one I found interesting.
Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: No Schedules, No Meetings, No Joke…the Simple Change That Can Make Your Job Terrific by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson.
Purchase the book there at the MPI Bookstore or buy ahead and read it on the flight over. You can then sit in on a discussion with industry experts.

Learning Never Ends
Each day during MeetDifferent you can attend educational sessions geared toward building a strong organization, another one of MPI’s strategic imperatives to build a rich global meeting industry community. A few I found interesting based on descriptions are Gen Y @ Work: How to Retain and Motivate Gen Y Employees and Save Money and Tweet Different: Social Networking & Microblogging.

Then try an Unconference Session: The MPI Solution Room. This is your chance to discover what unconferencing is all about. Participants sit in groups at round tables where topics and moderators are not predetermined. The goal here is to allow free flowing ideas to be expressed without the confines of an agenda.

If you have Georgia on your mind, go to MeetDifferent and find out more about MeetDifferent 2009.