The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference. This is not true of all conferences, but for the JPMHC, and many other major conferences, that is the entire point. It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals.
Funds pay thousands, often $10K+, per room at the nearby hotels, often spending hundreds of thousands to book over a dozen hotel rooms to use as makeshift conference rooms. The hotels often don't even allow people to sleep in the rooms, only to use them strictly as conference rooms.
All the real action happens in those hotel rooms, at private events, private receptions, etc.
> The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference.
In a lot of the corporate-sponsored conferences I go to - the networking and discussions happen around the talks - some talks are good, but they are not targeted towards the decision makers: the real discussions happen in the corridors, the meeting rooms, in the parties, the after-parties and, mostly, the after-after-parties.
I would strongly agree. Having been to a lot of industry conferences all over that world it's just the same.
Part of the problem is that the conference organizers open up panels to press and panellists (including me) are then very restricted on what we can say. The panel becomes a hash of corporate sound bites which no one likes.
To counter this increasingly panels are being requested to be under Chatham House by the companies paying to attend and sponsor.
Agreed. I go to many industry conferences and rarely step foot on the conference floor. It's a great way to get everyone I need to speak to in one place for a few days.
Similar thing happened to me at a surf competition at an anon place. People were flown in from everywhere, my surfboard arrived too late because the plane sucked.
But as me, everybody just gathered at the hot tub, nobody took part at the real sports event, we just fooled around and were happy to meet people from all around the world. Brazil, Hawaii, Germany, Canada, US. Really nice event. No idea if there even was a winner at the event. Maybe they did put something onto the web page, but nobody cared.
I've been told personally by the organizer of one of these conferences in the retail industry that illegal non-compete agreements and price-fixing agreements are made in the hallways. It was 10 years ago, and the whole conference existed for this reason.
> It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals.
It's not efficient. It's plausibly deniable.
People want to be able to meet and gauge interest in the most speculative stuff, discuss the far out future of industry, and discuss all manner of other things with other industry people, etc, etc, without a bunch of talking heads and twitter comment section screeching about "OMG the C-whatever-O of X met with the C-whatever-O of Y" and it being reported on and markets moving.
Of course there's business happening and it will be publicized in the normal ways. This is completely tangential to all the business not happening and all the other sharing of information that's not set in stone enough to be creating a paper trail over.
Like you can't just schedule a conference call with a bunch of important people at your competitors for the purpose of bitching about suppliers or something. You can do that at a conference.
Some people advocate keeping the team inside and telling them it's raining. But how far does that go? Are you keeping them in an underground bunker? Or is it a room with a window? A skyscraper with floor to ceiling windows surrounding them?
I'm of the mind that if it's possible, the team needs to be outside in the shit rain while protected by the shit umbrella. But they need to FEEL the weather, not just see it or vaguely know of it, but still protected enough to be able to get to where they need to go.
Of course, what if the shit storm is overwhelming and coming in sideways, or if it's flooding shit, so that even with protection, everyone is stuck in a quagmire? Well, obviously, don't actually let them go outside, but 1) the company has much bigger, likely existential problems it needs to deal with, and 2) the team REALLY needs to know.
Needless to say, this all applies more to decently high functioning organizations, but not to completely dysfunctional ones. When it's a nuclear winter outside, everyone is bought into the idea of staying in the bunker and just keeping calm and carrying on regardless of how bad it is outside. There's nowhere to go, you're there just to survive.
After deploying your transparent shit umbrella, your next problem is your own shitty boss or your boss's boss who will get pissed off you are using a transparent umbrella once that transparency starts blowingback on them. Because once your team learns that it's raining shit outside, they will want to know what you're doing to mitigate, reverse, or sidestep the shit. Some of the time, the things you confide to your team in the course of this feedback will piss off adjacent teams or some people up the ladder once they get wind of it (your opinion of some decisions, or the perceived negative consequences of your mitigation strategy on said people) Hence your umbrella being transparent makes what people euphemistically call "managing up" much more fucking annoying. I don't claim that there is an alternative, just that it's a fact of the principled life (one result being getting fired, often ironically for not being a "team player"). I don't have a fix, but would like to hear some if anyone has any.
Yeah, show the storm, explain it, let people participate in navigating it. But if I walk away from a meeting understanding the situation less and sleeping worse, something went wrong
You're being intentionally dense. No, people don't accidentally post pictures but they often do post them with the intention of showing a certain thing, e.g. profile picture, something for sale, something related to hobbies, household repairs, whatever. All of thse are posted with intent to include a certain object but may include background info that the poster did not consider.
But if you visit NASA space center, and have the means, definitely do the VIP tours.
The depth, the quality, the passion of the guides, are an order of magnitude better than the generic tours they offer.
The regular ones are often lead by young inexperienced hires, mostly reading from a script, and you go through extremely curated exhibits.
On the VIP tour, we had a 30 year veteran who was on first name basis with the last few directors. We did things that made you think “I can’t believe we’re allowed to do/touch/see that” over and over again.
It would seem that Sapporo did not do enough diligence when they bought Anchor. Anchor's facilities are far too small, their infrastructure and their team not setup to brew at that sort of scale. Stone is a much better fit for what they seem to be trying to do.
I mean they had an entirely unique process. That was their whole shtick.
They had a big multistory warehouse type brewery with fields of open air swimming pools fermenting. That's what made it steam beer. Their setup isn't like any other brewery at all. No vats for brewing!
Anchor Steam brewery is as similar as a concrete plant to other breweries.
So if Sapporo bought this for $143million thinking they could make other style of beer there and didn't even do a brewery tour omfg.
They started selling at scale 1 or 2 days after prohibition ended. This is logistically impossible if they were truly shut down during the entirety of prohibition.
If you plan on being a Walmart lifer, sure. But what about your next job if that isn’t true?
Better to be central to where the majority of companies and candidates are, where your ex-colleagues, parents of your children’s friends, and casual acquaintances (proverbial bowling league) all are part of a broader and accessible network for future job prospects.
It also keeps you culturally (professionally) more similar to your next job’s culture.
I know someone who had a non-technical corporate management role in Bentonville. The company basically decided to eliminate the group and he needed to move somewhere else to even job hunt because there sure wasn't anything else locally.
Of course MBBs and others have expertise. It's just that most of that expertise is not in the industry domain.
They have expertise in crafting and creating compelling arguments, in selling ideas. They have expertise in maintaining an industry-wide view and synthesizing general trends across the industry (or across industries). They have expertise in parachuting in as third-party and the politics that are associated with that.
These are VALUABLE skills. Imagine if everyone in your organization was an expert in crafting narratives, in putting forth concise arguments, in maintaining the larger context beyond their own area of practice.
The problem with strategy consultants is that they are not hired to be objectively valuable to an organization, an industry, society, etc. They are mercenaries who apply their skills to be valuable to specific people. And because they know how to be more compelling, even if they are not actually correct, it becomes deeply problematic over time, or at scale.
> These are VALUABLE skills. Imagine if everyone in your organization was an expert in crafting narratives, in putting forth concise arguments, in maintaining the larger context beyond their own area of practice.
That would certainly be valuable to those people; would it actually help the organization though?
For professional office workers, there are short term and long term benefits to all individuals (entry level, middle management, executives / younger, older) and to the company as a whole. There are also short term and long term detriments to all the same parties.
For individuals, the costs and benefits are easier to grasp, though the net benefit is likely higher than for companies. This makes it harder for companies to make a case as to why it's worth it, especially since the longer term costs and benefits for companies is incredibly difficult to prove in the short run, and without concrete evidence, it's very hard to convince people to give up the more tangible benefits they are seeing as individuals.
Then there's overall societal impact as well. Things like the economic impact on neighborhoods surrounding business districts, residential districts as people shift where they spend their time. Things like changes in civil engineering needs as commute and travel patterns change. But even more broadly, the impact of spouses spending more time together, parents spending more time at home with their children, home duties being more evenly taken care of across parents, etc.
In my mind, the level of complexity and decision making issues is akin to something like outsourcing manufacturing from the United States. There were short term and long term impacts on individuals, on companies, on industries, and on society as a whole that were known, that were debated. But how much import we placed on each, how much each factor was weighed in the moment, versus the broader impacts we are finally realizing and grappling with now, decades later, is just an absolute mess.
Funds pay thousands, often $10K+, per room at the nearby hotels, often spending hundreds of thousands to book over a dozen hotel rooms to use as makeshift conference rooms. The hotels often don't even allow people to sleep in the rooms, only to use them strictly as conference rooms.
All the real action happens in those hotel rooms, at private events, private receptions, etc.
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