What a great idea!

By Selwyn Parker

If you have ever recoiled at the thought of yet another conference on, say, ground-breaking paradigms for management in the new millennium, but you feel you just have to go in case you miss something, this booklet might be for you.

It is a guide on how to work a conference to your advantage. Written by sometime New Zealand-based Canadian, Ed Bernacki, a consultant on innovation and creativity, the booklet is called Wow, That's A Great Idea!

The book is a navigation guide designed to make conference-goers avoid all the usual pitfalls like making notes but never looking at them again, missing great ideas there for the taking, forgetting to network, suffering excruciating boredom during seminars, making too close an acquaintance with the bar staff, and exercising too little.

"I decided to replace the knowledge tool most conferences hand out - the blank pad of paper - with a new concept," explains Bernacki, who divides his time between the US, Australia and New Zealand. A tool designed to help conferencees extract their fee's worth, Wow, That's A Great Idea might have saved one poet from the despair he experienced at the thought of yet another conference: "Oh for just one more conference regarding the eradication of all conferences."

* Contributing writer Selwyn Parker is available at wordz@xtra.co.nz