There is still another reason for the mystery surrounding meeting expenditures: the entrenched, secretive culture of meeting planning, which is too often a parallel universe of financial fiefdoms. Consequently, the real-world working environment is usually reflective of a recent American Express study's conclusion: that meeting planners are unusually resistant to change.

To their defenders, they have good reason to be in the current environment. In their quest to get a handle on meeting expenditures, many companies have adopted a new approach known as "strategic meeting management programs" (SMMP). At its core, that means unprecedented levels of scrutiny and process improvement.

SMMP represents a sea change for corporate meeting planners, many of whom fear that it will eviscerate their long-established ways of doing things. Certainly, it means that CFOs and procurement managers will hold a great deal more sway over how they do business. At the very least, SMMP will have a profound impact on their jobs, forcing them to make the transition from a tactical function -- booking hotel rooms and airline flights, deciding the banquet menu, hiring the keynote speaker -- to a strategic function: understanding and addressing the underlying business objectives of meetings, then assessing their effectiveness.

With meeting planners at many companies already facing budget cuts, staff reductions, and increasing outsourcing of tactical capabilities, SMMP is a brutal form of accelerated evolution that will, in all likelihood, lead to the extinction of the traditional logistical planner. In response, many of those planners have dug in.

In terms of evolutionary fitness, the most astonishing revelation about the attitudes of meeting planners surfaced earlier this year in "FutureWatch 2007: A Comparative Outlook on the Global Business of Meetings," a report sponsored by American Express. While acknowledging a trend toward virtual meetings as a way to reduce physical attendance and costs, only 29 percent of planners said they are likely to position themselves as the go-to resource for such meetings. Even more perplexing at a time when planners clearly recognize the shift from tactics to strategy, the least-sought-after new technologies, they said, are those that match attendees with relevant courses, vendors, and peers at an event; facilitate networking; share conference content; or provide more cost-effective alternatives to participation in live meetings, such as webcasts or DVDs. Such lack of interest is analogous to a caveman declining to master the use of fire.

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