A few days ago I attended a technology forum for the SMB (Small & Medium Business) segment. This was hosted by a leading magazine and sponsored by a telecom company.
The guest speaker spoke 20 minutes rapid-fire, touching everything under the sun that needs to be fixed. The next speaker spoke for 30 minutes on the 10 things an SMB must do to grow. All great stuff, all ‘cutting edge’, all things even ‘right’. The audience was shell-shocked into silence.
A couple of ‘sponsor’ sessions later, the bar opened and most people promptly forgot everything that they had heard.
Why does it happen, more often than not, that the money and effort that everyone puts into such ‘events’ result in only a hangover? I remember an interesting cartoon of a congress leader speaking into a banana repeatedly saying “humko desh banana hai…” (translated – we need to build the nation)…
Today I attended a meeting of the IPMA. Many suggestions came in on the things that IPMA could, should & must do. After listening to them all, one gentleman made an extremely sane suggestion – that all meetings, gatherings, seminars MUST result in actionable learning – what he coined (as I later learnt, on the spot) Micro-actionable learning. If, he said, that the audience cannot go back and immediately implement at least one thing in their work, then such gatherings become intellectual discourses – full of boardroom statements.
He likened this idea to micro-finance – someone hungry for a dollar approaches a lender and gets that dollar as a loan. That is all he needs to get his business rolling..
When people take time off (even pay) to attend such events they are often looking for some solutions, or doable pointers, to issues that are bothering them. Leave them with global ideas and you have lost them, often forever.
The next time we speak to an audience, even if the topic is as big as Global hunger, can we provide several action items that can be immediately adopted – like the dollar that gets put to use immediately, instead of asking poor men to take up an MBA course?
Sunil Gupta's Blog 
Sunil, you have hit at the right place. It’s not just the seminars (paid or otherwise), even training programs have to address the real needs, not just glorifying the various features of a product or qualities of a person.