Hub Friday: Core Values

Brrr. It's so cold outside that we want to hunker down under a big down comforter with a detective novel and cup of tea and not move for a couple of weeks. At least until the temps climb into the upper 40s, anyway.
Hub Friday today is about our first core value, "Never Give Up."

Photo: JimboCyberDoc

We think winter, with its never-ending adversity and short, dark days, is a good time to explore this value. What does it mean to us as a conference facility and as event planners?

• There's always a solution. If a problem pops up, we don't stop looking at it from all different angles until we find a way to solve it.
• Stay positive. Because we know there must be a solution somewhere, we don't consider letting ourselves wallow too much when a hitch pops up. We think it's wasted energy.
• Team effort wins every time. We lean on our co-workers, our extensive collective knowledge, and good company spirit to do find the solution.

What does this core value mean to you?

EcoMonday: When does green make sense?

We've been turning this idea over in our heads: When an industry feels the need to go green, what is its biggest roadblock? What is its biggest impetus? The event planning industry is on the cusp of getting some green standards. APEX/ASTM is working hard to produce a set of standards that will cover everything from Audio/Visual to Food and Beverage. But hey, you say, it's 2011. In a time when everything from the car industry to the toy industry has environmental standards, why is the event planning industry just now getting around to this?
Part of it is the complicated nature of our business. And the other part is a question of whether the chicken comes before the egg: Is it the folks in our industry who have driven the need for a set of environmental standards? Or is it the leadership who's assessed and determined the need?
Either way, we're glad it's happening. But it does raise the question of how change really happens: Does it happen because our employees and the people behind our companies decide that CSR is critical to our company's health?
Or does corporate leadership need to step up and make it a point to lay down the rule?
We tend to think it's a mixture of both: If you don't give your employees ownership, or pride, in an idea or thought, then they'll never get behind it.
And if company leadership seems to be just following a trend for popularity's sake, well, that idea's not likely to go far either.
What are your favorite examples of trend-setting done right?