Philadelphia 2007: Doing Well by Doing Good

Angelo DeNisi, President-Elect,
Tulane University

The 67th Academy of Management meeting took place in Philadelphia, PA with the theme, “Doing Well by Doing Good”.  Once again, AOM had a record number of submissions and meeting participants.  The result was a quality program attended by 9,372 people, representing over 75 different countries.

We previously recapped the conference statistics in the June 2007 Newsletter. Below is a quick statistical overview of the Philadelphia program.  We had a total of  3,300 accepted papers, 462 accepted symposia submissions and 351 Professional Development Workshops.  From the 5,556 papers submitted, 3,300 papers were accepted for the Philadelphia program and placed into 1,712 sessions.  On average, there were 90-100 concurrent sessions going on at any one time in the program.  There were a total of 7,962 people involved in the program which was produced in four months. Amazingly, the review process took place in 30 days and involved 4,900 reviewers from around the world.  

For the first time, the Academy of Management chose an Executive of the Year, A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble. Mr. Lafley addressed the Academy membership at the Annual Meeting Convocation. You can retrieve Mr. Lafley’s speech or the Q&A session via the links, below:

  Read the transcript (PDF)

Listen to the speech (MP3) [60 Mins. / 55MB]

Listen to the Q&A session (MP3) [36 Mins. / 33MB]

Philadelphia proved to be the perfect setting to represent our them of “Doing Well by Doing Good” because this city occupies a special place for our members from the United States, featuring historic sights, great ethnic neighborhoods, and those steps that Rocky ran up as he was training for his big fight with Apollo Creed. The many volunteers and organizers of this year’s meeting expanded upon this prime location for scholarship by creating an annual meeting with record breaking attendance. Allen Bluedorn handled the proposals and implementation of All Academy Symposia, Soo Min Toh coordinated the Interactive Paper Sessions, Arup Varma managed the Caucuses, and Fernanda Garcia arranged the Visual Village. Last, but certainly not least, Jim Walsh organized an innovative Professional Development Workshops program for this year.

I also want to acknowledge the superb work by Denise Potosky and Eric Stein (Pennslyvania State University), our Local Arrangements Committee Co-chairs, their team and the onsite volunteers.  They were tremendous ambassadors for Philadelphia. The Local Arrangement Committee assisted in providing information about things to do in Philadelphia and tips for some wonderful places to eat.  Through their hard work, the meetings ran smoothly and easier for members to enjoy the sessions and the company of one another.
This year, several initiatives and innovations come to fruition.  We’ve launched a PDW registration solution to help divisions handle the many events for which sign-up or special fees are required. Seventeen divisions/interest groups with seventy-seven events participated in this pilot registration program. We hope to include all the divisions with more events in 2008, and we encourage members to cross division lines and participate in events they never knew about. We also experimented with Podcasts in Philadelphia. The Academy continuously seeks to improve our online community building and meeting technologies with three goals in mind: extend the benefits and reach of our annual meeting to attendees, non-attendees and the media. Another innovation was put into effect to better serve our international members. Registrants from non-US locations were able to log in to a website to retrieve their personalized, automatically-generated Visa letter. We are working to facilitate the Visa process for internationl members. Finally, a huge success was the implementation of express check-in for registrants. This year we piloted an express check-in kiosk system at several hotels to facilitate badge pick-up for pre-registered members, similar to express check-in at the airport. This service allowed members who pre-registered for the meeting to pick up their badge at their convenience at the main hotels.
In closing, I thank the  4900 volunteer reviewers and all the division and interest group program and PDW chairs that made the 2007 Philadelphia meeting such a great success.  Lastly, I thank the AOM headquarters staff for really making these meetings possible.
For now, my job is done, and I pass it on to Jim Walsh who will be program chair for Anaheim.  I hope to see you in Anaheim in August 2008!  Please check the Anaheim conference webpage for information and updates related to the 2008 meetings.