“I hate panels” blogged Fred Wilson recently, riffing on a Mark Suster post about getting the most out of panels.

There are many conferences at Columbia Business School, mostly organized by student associations. I have been to the Retail & Luxury Conference, the Media & Entertainment Conference as well as Cyberposium at Harvard Business School, but there’s almost a conference for every industry club (PE/VC, Marketing, Brite, Social Enterprise etc).

The conferences’ stated aims usually include networking / recruiting opportunities for students, raising Columbia’s profile and in theory allowing for thought leaders in academia and the field to exchange ideas.
I can’t help but feel that none of these objectives are met very well. Perhaps it is time to rethink these formats.

Fred again:

All that said, I really hate panels. I hate watching them and I hate being on them even more. I think it’s a lazy way to participate in a conference. You show up, answer a few questions, sit up on the stage with a bunch of other people, and then go home.

I much prefer the 15-20 minute talk with Q&A afterward. I think I’d prefer even more a 10 minute talk with longer Q&A afterward.

I like the idea of programming a series of interviews rather than panels that allow for deeper explorations of a given topic. Perhaps a faculty member and an industry thought-leader, or two industry folk, or two competitors interviewing each other. The Q&A sessions can sometimes be the best part of these things, but here too there’s perhaps room for improvement. I like the idea of sourcing questions from students, faculty and attendees in the period leading up to the conferences and during the sessions, this can be done via twitter, facebook, sms, email etc and then the moderator or the conference team can select some of the more interesting questions to get conversations flowing.

I also like the Pecha Kucha / Ignite formats of constraining actual presentations to short and impactful and then allowing for in-depth Q&As to follow.

In terms of networking, small break-out sesssions, breakfasts and lunches etc with the speakers can be organized and students can apply to attend or a lottery system can be implemented (I think a combination of the two would result in the most passionate and interested students attending whilst maintaining fairness in the process).

The conference format as it is at Columbia is broken. I’d like to see us fix and improve it for next year’s round.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Cyberposium Harvard Business School (halleyscomment.blogspot.com)
• MBA Media & Entertainment Conference 2010. (shehabhamad.com)
• Panels (avc.com)