I've decided to disguise the name of the conference company in question because there are people who work there i still like--
‘Moron Elite’ sits on the periphery of real business; the legitimate business world. They try desperately to –pleadingly, whiningly, wheedlingly– extend their slimy tentacles in order to tap into the free-floating millions that easily exchanges hands in the corporate universe. They are a parasite like many of the other 'conference production' companies that exist.
Let me explain how they do this: ‘Moron Elite’ and many other such companies offer what is known as 'Business To Business Intelligence'. An absolute contradiction in terms. Also a term that reeks of high-end business deals and even a little covert –but legitimately necessary– operation. As a matter of fact the whole corporate world is teeming with soulless, and pointless catchphrases, like 'market saturation', 'at the end of the day', 'synergies' (which to me is the mythic goddess from the 80's cartoon show Jem and the Holograms), 'simpatico', 'team-building', 'bouncebackability', 'upskilling', 'copasetic', 'vertical expansion', 'work flow', 'redundancy' (my favorite. Tell me, would you rather be fired or made redundant?), 'micromanage' etc. The list is endless with these corporate etymological farts which seems to be there for the sole purpose of creating a club and garbling directness with silly semantics. So that all the tie wearing chimps can grin at each other knowingly; assured that they all know exactly what the boss is talking about.
Anyway.
Business to business intelligence simply means making conferences. Which would be fine if they served some purpose, as they did with the Prague Society where I worked three years ago. At least ostensibly there was meant to be an exchange of information at the Society. ‘Moron Elite’ (henceforth ME) is purely a money making venture. This can be illustrated by the terminology used in the business: the marketed purpose of ME is 'B2B intelligence'. This is what they tell people on the phone and this is what it says on the website. Within the industry though it's a 'Conference Production Company' which is closer to the reality but less of a glamorous name. But when you get in the office it's no longer called a conference, meeting, gathering, whatever. It's called a 'product'. And what do you do with products? You sell them. It seems that the wool was pulled over my eyes as to the purpose of ME before I was allowed into the main room. Which they didn't allow me to enter until I'd finished training. I'll explain why this is in a bit.
I was under the impression that we were providing vital information to businesses to help them along their path. Something a little philanthropic to my idealistic, and slightly naive sensibilities. No, what they are doing is creating conferences that they were unqualified to make, that no one wants, that no one needs, and pitching them to real businesses in a variety of sectors. No one comes to ‘Moron Elite’ and asks them to create a conference. No one does, because ME simply don't have the expertise in a specific sector to pull it off.
This is the 'product' that they've hid under the professional veneer of the label 'B2B Intelligence'. Like many products it's mass produced in a factory. A colleague aptly referred to the ME factory as an 'intellectual sweatshop'.
I was working in the Oil and Gas sector. I was meant to create conferences concerning oil, gas and energy. The first step, after getting a briefing (which, by the way, included a topic already chosen by my conference director regardless of it's viability or relevance), is the 'Research Phase'. This means that without any knowledge at all about the industry I was expected to call top level officials in Shell, Exxonmobil, PetroCanada, what-have-you and ask them what sort of things they would like to see discussed at a conference on, let's say; Tightening Gaskets With Your Teeth; Good, Bad or Ugly? These people are busy people with real work. They don't have time to fuck around with some post-lobotomy, ignorant leaches who are then going to ask them to attend as an audience member at an exorbitant cost; or as a speaker at their own cost.
There is a fixed time frame for this 'research' portion. I don't remember exactly, but I think it's less than a week. These research calls are complicated by something else which I mentioned before… There is a reason why they don't allow you into the office until after the initial training. If you saw the room you would run from the place –yowling like a hyena with it's balls crushed between bricks– to the nearest unemployment office where you'd slit your throat with one of their dole forms.
The phrase 'circus', or 'carnival atmosphere' could not possibly describe the debacle of throbbing, screaming humanity contained in the main room. It's one large space filled with about 100 people, 70 of which are howling into phones with their 'Hard Sells' for 8 hours straight. To make matters worse every time one of the salespeople make a successful sell –which is about as rare as a computer not failing in a week (which they do because the computers we producers were using was designed in 1978)– they bang a gong. Yes folks, a goddamned Chinese Overlord style gong. The thing is loud. Following the brain rattling noise is loud cheering. How is anyone expected to conduct research –let alone think– towards creating a viable conference program in such an atmosphere? Analogies like NYPD Police Station come to mind when describing the 'office' ME operates. The kind of cop shop you see in movies with screaming drunkards, screeching hookers, and loudly gesticulating police officers.
Imagine that. You're straining to hear and understand the very technical terms being used by a person that has had experience in the sector for some thirty odd years when suddenly ‘GOIOIOIOING!’ followed by wild hooting and applause from the sales floor about 15 feet away. How the fuck are you supposed to be taken seriously under these conditions? More often than not the executive I have been talking to has interrupted their stream of verbiage to ask ‘What's that noise?’, ‘My apologies sir, I'm conducting research from a bullfight arena in Madrid. El Matador Juan Pedro Velasquez Ramirez was just thrown against the side of a moving van. There is much happiness and cheering… Ramirez was not well liked.’
After the research calls comes about three days of trying to put together your incoherent notes and make sense of the garbled techno-blather you've been listening to for the past week. This is called the 'Program Creation Phase'. It's all very regimented. Each ‘Moron Elite’ conferences is two days long with 16 topics. 8 topics per day. Each topic MUST have a minimum of 5 subpoints. This is done within the very strict confines of a deadline. The deadline must be met because there are three groups of people that must be briefed. People who know even less than you do about the topic. They are expected to work with the distilled version of information you've gathered to generate income. These three groups are divided into three categories:
1)The Sponsorship Team: Their job is to convince large multinational firms that they should foot the bill for the conference (venue, catering, accommodations, technical equipment, etc.) on the very oblique promise that their logo will get exposure to a large swathe of interested people in their industry. The problem is that the conference is in the *future* so the sponsorship team has *no idea* how many people will be in attendance, let alone what caliber they will be. It's a little like a palsy victim shooting at a pea from the hip.
2) The Sales Team: Essentially their basic activity is the same as the Sponsorship Team. They get on the phone to about 40 or 50 people over the course of the day and lie. The (aaargh…) 'target market' is different. In their case they are trying to generate an audience for the conference. To attend a ‘Moron Elite’ conference you must pay upwards of 2500€ *per person*. Again the sales person only knows the information that the producer has given them. Information which could probably be put to good use straining noodles or rice.
Now when I say 40-50 people I mean the people that they are actually able to speak to. As a matter of fact 40 contacted humans is quite optimistic. A good salesperson will call upwards of 100 people a day. The same people everyday; hounding, nagging, begging them to show up to the damn debacle for a ridiculous fee. This is the 'Hard Sell' it seems; endlessly annoying someone until they finally throw their hands in the air and say, ‘Fine I'll *go*, just leave me the fuck alone…’ Which of course is impossible because once you attend your name is on the ME database and you've signed your soul away to Telephone Hassle Hell. You will be bothered to attend, sponsor or speak at anything remotely connected to your industry for the rest of your natural born life.
3) The Marketing Team: These two people based in London, in my best estimate, do exactly the same as the Sales Team except via email. Basically the idea here is to spam a legitimate business person into oblivion.
Things are further complicated with one's position as Conference Producer by the fact that these three teams are often in completely different countries than you are. I'm confounded by this logic. Essentially all the briefings, rebriefings, and updates are conducted over the phone with people that you will never see. I'm sure I'm not the only person that finds it difficult to operate in this way when you consider variable lunch hours, holidays, and working hours between countries. Fine we're all EU, but we're no that much alike…Since all outgoing business is conducted on the telephone it's a crap-shoot whether you'll reach your man in Madrid, Amsterdam, or London in the first place.
I swear that in ten years down the road the jobs of the first two groups will be viewed with the same total disgust and horror that we view African silver mines where eighty-year-old women and three-year-old children strive to find the tiniest fleck of silver. Silver which will immediately go to the states where it will be used as garnish on some Manhattanite's dessert.
Those poor fuckers in Sales and Sponsorship seem totally blinded by the silly, pointless, corporate language and rhetoric. All the tie-wearing-polished-shoe-office-chatter-around-the-water-cooler shit seems to have distracted them from the fact that their basic wage if FAR below the minimum wage of the country in which they're working, at least here in Prague. The salary is merely a middling formality so ME can put something on the books to avoid national enquiry. They are expected to live on commission. A friend told me that in order to get yourself up to minimum wage level –which is piss poor in this third world country in the first place– you need to make at least six sales in a month. A very difficult thing to do when they are treated with the same disdain, fear, and abhorrence as you would a telemarketer, disease, or terrorist by the people they are trying to sell to.
It's an outright slap in the face… Or maybe these people are gluttons for punishment.
How can lying eight hours a day affect your psyche? What about the extreme rejection, insults, and derision thrown their way on a day-to-day basis? Not good. I personally have seen two people totally spin-out and have to be tossed, straight-jacket and all, into an asylum. One guy suffered an ugly, screaming, groin-hemorrhage from extreme stress. This same ex-colleague is on a cocktail of anti-depressants, and uppers to keep his head just above the surface.
Right. So after the afore mentioned 'Briefing Phase' come the most taxing, painful, ordeal of the whole 25 day cycle. That is the 'Speaker Acquisition Phase'. This is the part where you call all of the 200-odd names of experts on your excel spreadsheet and try to convince them that they should come at their own expense to speak on whatever amateur topic which you have created and designated for them.
There are a variety of factors that prohibit this concept coming into fruition: First of all, these people have *lives*. They don't have time to go and speak at a conference which was created by people that have barely scratched the surface of something they've been working with for years. Second. Why the living fuck would they want to go and share trade secrets with the competitor who is also (supposedly) going to be in attendance? Thirdly, I'm sorry, but the guarantee of 'free admission for the speaker' is not some magical discount which should encourage them to go. It's like my flat-mate saying, ‘At least I paid the rent,’ Of course you paid the rent; all your shit is here. Of course they should get free admission; it's their time and therefore their money they're losing. What kind of incentive is that? Fourthly. There are the very same conferences made by people *in the industry, for the industry* quarter annum, so why bother going to some slapped together fiasco created by people who know nothing?
Ultimately, when presented with all these arguments; why companies like ‘Moron Elite’ should not exist, and in fact are an utter waste of time, you are presented with the same final cockeyed justification over and over: Networking.
Ah… networking. As ingrained in the corporate vernacular as 'Amen' is to Christian praying, ‘Well we're providing *you* with excellent networking opportunities to hobnob with *key people* that *you* want to meet in the industry…’ It's the final bastion; the last stand of the beleaguered Sales Person, Sponsorship Team or Conference Producer. And in the case of ‘Moron Elite’ and most conference production companies the prospect of networking is complete and utter bullshit from the outset.
The fact to the matter is that in life, very rarely can anyone commit to anything. It's the same logic as nobody knowing anything beyond a reasonable doubt. As a result it's impossible to say that the people who say they will attend will in fact attend. And in the case of most industries the only people that are interested in networking are the service providers. I.e. the sponsors. Nobody in their right mind will go near service providers because they are only trying to sell you the same shit in person they were trying to sell you on the phone.
And what is networking anyway? This term that's so blithely strewn about when someone finds themselves cornered as to how and why they're spending their corporation's money. In my own humble opinion –if you negate the service provider factor– it seems to be putting yourself in a position where you can meet someone who can provide you with the information or contacts necessary to further your company's career goals, and by association, your own.
The thing here is that networking is only useful if you are meeting someone who is slightly or a lot higher on the industry pecking order than you are. You sure as hell aren't going to learn much from your competitor who is at the same hierarchical station. The only thing you can really go for is closing the totem gap between management levels. Let's face it no company –like ME– that's outside of the specified industry could possibly do that. Not to say that it doesn't happen, it does. But it's a fluke. The sort of networking that needs to occur to further one's own station in life needs to be done within the confines of that sector. Networking is not a service anyone can guarantee. It's too much of a crap shoot.
‘Moron Elite’ a purely money making venture –akin to a pyramid scheme– meant to line the pockets of someone that has too much money anyway. Merely a 'product', not a viable exchange of information towards a mutual goal, not 'B2B Intelligence'. It doesn't strengthen partnerships or increase business. It's just a another thing that you should buy with your company's excess cash… that you need to buy, which has a built-in mechanism for putting itself on your doorstep again, and again, and again.
Essentially what you have is a company that makes conferences on topics of which they know nothing about, that nobody needs, for experts who know far more than they do, at an improbably high attendance cost.
My own relationship with ME is regrettable. I was at odds with the whole thing from day one. The language bothered me, the tie-wearing bothered me, the regimented structure bothered me. The fact that I wasn't allowed to exhibit any creativity whatsoever. The fact that I had very little control because every single task was meted out to people in different countries and it was impossible to guide my program to it's successful fruition, thus getting the almighty mullah. No, 75% of getting a decent commission is based entirely on people who you've never met, who have other conferences to sell and are worried about their own income. Maybe that's why the whole operation is scattered throughout different countries; so we wouldn't always be at each others throats for fucking up someone else's hard work. I liken it to a network of terrorist cells that are designed to still operate even if the head is lopped off.
I do know why the most cerebral cog in the wheel, the Conference Producers, are located in places like the Bahamas, Cyprus and Prague. The business laws and economy in these places is in such a maladjusted state that you can pay people the least for the most amount work. The old silver mine thing again.
It's the goddamn speaker acquisition phase that was my undoing. Trying to hit the allotted deadline to get all 16 topics filled with speakers. Ultimately what ends up happening with most conference producers is that all pretence of designated speakers for specific topics gets tossed out the window in the mad scramble to fill the spaces. I'm not a salesman and cannot convince myself that something is worthwhile doing if I wouldn't do it myself.
I repeatedly failed to make deadlines. To top it off the powers that be kept bouncing my conference dates around and I found myself with the humiliating task of re-contacting, and re-re-contacting people to inform them of date changes. I had this carrot of huge commissional rewards dangled just out of my grasp. In the end I had two conferences to look forward to on my return from Canada in November. Conferences that looked to make ME and myself a large sum of cash.
Problem is they fired me while I was in Canada. Sorry… I was made redundant (I found out, by the way, when i returned to the office after my holiday and found my work station had been given to someone else). Sort of . You see, they don't like firing people at ME because then they are obligated to pay two months severance pay. What they told me was that they were going to offer me a Marketing position.
In retrospect they had no intention of any such 'lateral movement'. It was a way of neatly folding away my severance problem by putting me through a fresh interview procedure and then simply saying I didn't get the job because I didn't speak Russian. A key hiring point they failed to inform me of preceding the interview. The interview was a month after my return from Canada and involved me making a marketing plan which they told me was quite good. In addition, I was told by the Production Manager of the Prague office that because I had already been working for them I was a shoe-in for the position. All these factors lead me to the false assumption that I would have a job come January and therefore didn't need to find something else. A month of job searching was lost and by the time they got around to telling me that I wasn't accepted for the new position it was well into December. With impending holidays and a shortened month on the horizon nobody is hiring at this time.
I'm still reeling from the outright shadiness of how they dealt with me. The sick, unjust, connivance that came into play surrounding my firing while in Canada. Thus I was denied severance and the big fat commission due to me for the conferences I worked so hard at creating.
*********************
It's been a year since i wrote this thing. A year since i've left that corporate abortion. And everytime i think of them it really rankles... obviously... So why am i posting this now if i'm generally doing okay?
1) To remind them that i'm still out here and still think fondly of them
2) A warning to others
3) Giving some perspective to the people currently working there... if they can see past the king-fuck brainwashing they've had
Since writing this i've learned that the oil & gas dept. was shut down...Go figure...
I want my money you thieving cockroaches
You know who you are.
