Time to Revisit Ethics

One of the many good things about having new people join your team is that they remind you of the way you saw things before you became jaded.

One of our recently hired contributing editors, Diane Taylor, attended an industry meeting last month in Las Vegas, where she spent quite a while getting to know the transportation providers seated at her table. She called me the next day alarmed about some of the things she learned.

Did I know, for instance, that not just drivers, but owners of transportation companies would pay percentages of their bills back to hotel staff in exchange for the hotel staff recommending their services?

Shocking.

A Chicago native raised with staunch ethics in response to the corruption being uncovered in the city during her childhood, Taylor expressed an interest in doing a story on ethics in the meetings and exhibition business.

So, I thought I'd better bring her up to speed. I told her that paying tips and commissions to everyone from union workers, to venue operators, to show managers in exchange for speedier service, “preferred” vendor status and other favors was common practice. I encouraged her to think about when this amounted to simple sales incentives, and when it was something more sinister - and warned her not to expect too much cooperation.

The trouble is, as Taylor pointed out, if such things are going on, and everybody knows it but nobody does anything about it, the tradeshow industry looks bad. Her surprise, she added, came not from naivete, but from the fact that she thought a business conducted in such a public way would have cleaned up its act long ago.

I recall a long feature story on corruption that appeared in one of the industry monthlies several years ago, not long after I started working at Tradeshow Week. Less an investigative report than a how-to article (i.e., how to avoid sketchy tipping), the story created a minor stir at one or two industry meetings and then faded into oblivion.

With the current leadership of the Intl. Assn. of Exhibitions and Events looking into drug testing in the workplace, maybe the time is ripe to bring up the question of ethics again. So, if you get a call from one of our reporters, don't be surprised. And if you care about the reputation of your industry, give honest answers.

Heidi Genoist is senior editor of Tradeshow Week and editor of TSW Las Vegas. She can be reached at hgenoist@reedbusiness.com.