It’s probably safe to say that the majority of attendees at the 2019 BIFMA Leadership Conference, hail from the upper Midwest. When signing up for the event they had no idea that those dates would coincide with the “polar vortex” that swept into the U.S. from Canada and Siberia. But as luck would have it, on January 28th-30ththey were in in Scottsdale, AZ, when that arctic blast hit.
By Arizona standards the weather was not that great, but to those traveling from Grand Rapids, Chicago or Detroit, it must have seemed providentially warm and wonderful. On the other hand, when it came time to go home there were rearranged and cancelled flights and all sorts of problems.
I can remember when the BIFMA conference was a golf junket planned specifically to get the mostly Michigan executives and their wives out of the winter weather.
But those days are long past. Year after year the BIFMA Board and executive staff line up an exceptional array of inspiring speakers from surprisingly diverse fields of expertise. In this year’s line-up, for example, we had a Wharton marketing professor, a Stanford neuroscientist, an economist, a branding consultant, a futurist, two interior designers, and a veteran of our own industry who’s found life after office furniture.
Not only has the agenda become way more intense; the cadence of the conference has become way more aggressive. We used to arrive in time for cocktails and networking on day one. This year the first speaker started promptly at 3:00 p.m. on arrival day and not only that, there were two speakers before we’d had our first gin & tonic. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining. In fact, if anything I’m bragging. This is a serious conference with serious speakers on a 360O range of topics that broaden the perspective of industry leaders and get them outside the confines of the day-to-day pressures of running a business.
Day 1
Martin Flaherty of Pencilbox, Inc. is a consultant to BIFMA on a variety of marketing, branding and communications issues. Last year he was asked to act as the Master of Ceremonies, and he did such a fine job he was invited back.
Mr. Flaherty kicked off the conference, as I said, promptly at 3:00 p.m. on Monday the 28th, introducing the keynote speaker, Dr. Jonah Berger, author and marketing professor at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. He has written widely on the topic of the subtle, often invisible influences that drive consumer behavior. And his talk at the conference fleshed out that theme. For example, word of mouth is much more powerful than advertising for building sales, but it is much harder to build. Dr. Berger discussed some practical tips to assist in doing so with interesting examples from companies that have been successful at it.
The second speaker on Day 1 was Byron Reese a self-described futurist and perpetual optimist. He is the CEO of Gigaom, a technology research and analysis company that focuses on helping business leaders understand the implications of emerging technologies and their impacts on business, media and society.
After giving a greatly abbreviated history of the rise of technology from the days of Australopithecus to the present and onward into the future, he assured the audience that there is nothing to fear in the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence. As a perpetual optimist he made the point that throughout history people have been afraid of the destruction of old ways that advances in technologically would bring. And yet, the numbers show that globally the current era has the highest standard of living, longest life expectancy, and is the richest, most peaceful time in the
history of the human species. Mr. Reese reassured the conference, saying we are on the cusp of even vastly more improvements to human life occurring at an even faster pace.
Day 2
Pam Light, Senior VP with HOK in Los Angeles, and Abby Scott, Senior Designer at HDR in Omaha, started the second day with what is becoming a popular tradition – a look at the industry from the interior designer’s point of view.
In a series of back and forth turns speaking, the duo called attention to the fact that they represent a wide perspective insofar as Ms. Light began the practice of interior design in the 80s while Ms. Scott was still in diapers, and Ms. Light was first made a vice president when Ms. Scott was in the 6thgrade. But for all the distance between them, in age, experience and geography, in the day-to-day practice of workplace design most of the challenges they face are pretty much the same, even if their ways of meeting those challenges are quite different.
The unspoken question on the minds of most in the audience is, ‘How do I get information about my products to specifiers?’ Ms. Light and Ms. Scott each presented a screen capture of a week their schedule. What was obvious is that given the pressures of time (and billable time) under which they work, there isn’t a lot of time for schmoozing with sales reps. And yet their presentation also acknowledged the fact that sales reps from both manufacturers and dealers are a key source of product knowledge/awareness/access. For me, the takeaway was that the designers just acknowledged the old conundrum: how does a company break through those very real barriers and get its product specified.
To help answer that question, the BIFMA team arranged for the designers to host a workshop after the close of the general session on the last day. It was entitled, “Do this. Don’t do that.” Even though the session couldn’t solve the complexity and confusing, contradictory nature of the way things work, it did shed light on mistakes to avoid.
Tom Reardon, the Executive Vice President of BIFMA, addressed the conference with an update on the activities of the BIFMA Board and Staff. He stated that opinion research has confirmed that the ANSI BIFMA Product Standards represent that for which BIFMA is most widely known and respected. It has also been noted that some companies falsely claim to meet BIFMA standards, and no procedures are in place to police such claims.
Accordingly, Mr. Readon announced that the Board has decided to implement a policy that requires companies to provethey meet the standards through testing at certified test labs, and that BIFMA will maintain a database of certified companies and products that will be available to the industry’s customers. This represents a huge undertaking for both BIFMA and industry companies so the timing and specifics will be announced in due course.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology, neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University. His talk was entitled, ”Behave, The Biology of Humans.” He explained how scientists using tools like functional MRI along with more traditional experimentation on lab rats and such has allowed scientists like himself to better understand which areas of the brain control various functions, including behavior.
While I found the presentation extremely interesting, it definitely fell into the realm of “diverse areas of expertise” I referred to above. While shedding some light on the heritability of epigenetic traits, his talk did very little to answer questions about how a wallcovering company can better get its product information to the design community. So in speaking with members of the audience after his talk, the response I most often got was, “Huh?” Perhaps a different way of expressing it is that his presentation did little in the way of exciting the secretion of dopamine in the brains of most attendees.
Matt Rollins is a consultant on branding whose work builds brand stories that are cohesive in terms of how the story of the brand is told, how that connects the company to its customers, and how the message is packaged in terms of look and feel. His talk was entitled, “Hardwired for story: How Brands Can Deeply Connect with Customers.”
He gave numerous examples of how he has helped clients from the International Olympic Committee to IBM to Coca Cola articulate cohesive stories that convey the heart of their brands.
My takeaway was that people like stories, and they like brands whose stories resonate with them in some way. The trick is figuring out what your story is and then communicating it in a manner that is consistent, both verbally and visually in all things you do.
When the speakers were announced prior to the conference, I was pleased and surprised to see Lynn Utter among them. A past president of the BIFMA Board as well as the former COO of Knoll and President of Knoll Office, she was instrumental in upgrading the Leadership Conference to the level it now enjoys. When she left the industry her farewell speech at the conference was much enjoyed, so it was with interest and a bit of curiosity that we welcomed her back.
After a quick update on her career, both before and after the office furniture industry, Ms. Utter’s talk focused on how companies can build and insure their future through coaching, training and mentoring the next generation of leaders. Her current role is Chief Talent Officer at Atlas Holdings, a private equity group with a “buy and hold” strategy rather than the “buy and flip” strategy more common among private equity groups.
She made the point that when it comes to successfully building and operating a company, Talent > Technology, and therefore, identifying and developing talent within the ranks is vital to a company’s future.
She advocates the use of multiple means of identifying talent, including professional personality profiling along with the usual observations and recommendations of managers. Once a group of high potential employees has been identified, it is necessary to develop specific programs to increase their exposure to ideas, concepts and theories outside the realm of their day-to-day activities. For plant or company based office workers, such programs may involve visits to other manufacturing sites or to customers or vendors, etc. The idea is exposure.
At Atlas Holdings, Ms. Utter has identified 64 high potential leaders in the group’s 18 companies and developed a training scheme that exposes them to best practices and people other than those they would normally encounter. The program makes sure they have the tools needed to succeed and then gives them 360 feedback on a regular (annual?) basis.
During the Q&A at the end of her talk, the idea was mooted that perhaps such a training program could be developed as a function for BIFMA. For smaller companies to pull it off alone is nearly impossible since scale is so important for these kinds of programs.
Day 3
Marci Rossell is an economist with Delphin Investments and a star on the speakers’ circuit. Her specialty is business, government and the economy, and how those three interact in the milieu of culture and the media. She has served as an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, as Chief Economist for CNBC and as the Corporate Economist for the Oppenheimer Funds. She spoke at the 2017 BIFMA Leadership Conference and was invited back by popular demand, and she did not disappoint.
Dr. Rossell has the gift of being able to explain economics in terms we can all understand. She also has a way of letting you know she knows her stuff by wheeling out the technical terms and data that underlie her conclusions.
Her rapid-fire delivery presents so many facts and concepts that different people may latch onto entirely different bits. My takeaway from her presentation is that she doesn’t think there will be a recession in 2019, despite the trade war with China, the uncertainty of Brexit, and choppiness in the stock market.
She believes that the trade war is ill advised since tariffs simply tax the American consumer through higher prices for imported raw materials and goods and are ineffective in stopping the migration of manufacturing jobs to countries with low cost labor.
So, as you can see the 2019 edition of the BIFMA Leadership Conference was packed with interesting and informative presentations, laced with plenty of opportunities to mix and mingle. In my view it was a big success, and I continue to highly recommend it.
