Sizing Up The Buzz: What Could Be More Obvious?

I just finished reading a book called "Outrage," by famed prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, which is an explication of why and how O.J. Simpson got away with murder. Bugliosi has an incredible talent for driving home his points; paragraph after paragraph, page after page for hundreds of pages, he rails about how mistakes made by the judge and prosecution, illogic spewed by the defense, and wrong conclusions drawn by the jury "couldn't have been more obvious."

To Bugliosi, everything is obvious. And as I kept reading his refrain, I started thinking about how I feel exactly the same way about many topics currently the focus of great debate in the meetings industry.

There will be plenty of people, I'm sure, who will disagree with some (all?) of the points I'm about to make. Good, send me a letter. To me, they're obvious. Guess I should have been a prosecutor.

1. SMI has no valid claim. The industry is buzzing about the patent claim by Software Management Inc., which is looking to take credit for the idea that people can use the Internet to help them plan or attend a meeting. This notion should strike any thinking person as so absurd as to not be worth the breath it takes to belittle it. What could be more obvious? Of course, I don't have to convince anyone in the meetings industry; we're all outraged at SMI's gall.

When it comes to legal proceedings and government decisions, however, not much is obvious. I'm not going to be shocked to death if the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office signs off on at least a few of SMI's silly claims. Well, at least it'd be a great story.

2. Mandatory fees ought to be disclosed up front. The lawyers who recently filed lawsuits against three big hotel companies, claiming they've done wrong by not adequately informing guests of resort fees at the time of booking, should prevail. What could be more obvious? How could anyone, with a straight face, suggest that someone should not know the price of something as they're buying it? (Call it an add-on fee or a surcharge or whatever you want — if you have to pay it as a condition of staying at the hotel, then it's part of the price.)

I hope these same lawyers go after car rental companies next. Unless you ask, you're often not given a full accounting of what all the charges are going to be until you return the car. The companies say it's their policy to disclose everything, but I can assure you that the front-line people you deal with — the reservationists and the counter agents — often don't.

3. If you kill someone while driving drunk, the fault is yours alone. I was glad to see that Intelsat, the Washington, D.C. company that is being sued for damages after an attendee left a company party drunk and killed a pedestrian, was cleared of any liability. I happen to think that laws that have the effect of making servers and meeting planners, among others, potentially liable in such cases are bogus. If you kill someone while at the wheel, no one else should have to share the blame.

What could be more obvious? How is it any different from killing someone with a gun? Is the store that sold you the gun, assuming it did so legally, held responsible if you kill someone with it? Why is it legal to serve drinks, and then suddenly it becomes illegal if someone drinks too much and drives? At most industry events I attend, there are multiple drink stations; it's not reasonable to expect a bartender to evaluate the sobriety of someone he has contact with for only a moment.

4. Antitrust laws that keep people from discussing pricing are needlessly restrictive. I know consumers need to be protected, but the application of that concept can be ludicrous. Take the setting of prices by independent meeting planners, a topic about which there recently was a raging debate on MIMlist, the email-based meetings-industry discussion group owned by Meeting News' parent company. The fact is, if three or four independent planners are having lunch, and they start discussing what their hourly rate is, they're violating federal law.

Now, how is applying that law to this scenario going to protect anyone? The independent planning niche isn't exactly the airline industry, where there are a few major players that completely dominate the market, and a price-fix by two of them can rule the day. There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of independent planners, and you'd have to get a whole heap of them to agree before there would start to be any impact on overall price levels.

Never mind that everyone could charge the same price, and yet the value derived from paying that price would never be the same in any two instances. That's because every group, every meeting, every planner's level of experience and ability, every destination and every venue are different from one another. Seventy-five dollars an hour for this planner and this meeting would not be the same value as $75 for another planner planning another meeting. What could be more obvious?

5. Groups shouldn't meet on Sept. 11. It's too late now to be saying this, of course, since even the most short-notice meetings scheduled to be held that day have already been planned. But while I don't want to root for meetings not to happen, organizations that require or even encourage their employees or members to travel — or frankly do work of any kind — on that date are displaying an unsettling degree of insensitivity.

Many people will have other things on their minds that day. Some will want to spend it in solemn reflection. A few may even be afraid to leave their houses. (Such a fear is irrational, but people are entitled to it.) What could be more obvious? A meeting can be held another day.

Sorry if you feel insulted that I've characterized something as "obvious" while you hold the opposite opinion. Who knows, maybe you're right. Of course, there are people who think O.J. Simpson was framed.