CleanTech Forum: A Good Show Diminished By Terrible Manners

The CleanTech Forum in San Francisco this week exemplified a dilemma faced by  many conference organizers.  The folks who run this show want good content that will please the people who paid good money to fly here and attend.  But the sponsors, who put up their own money, want to be part of that content; in particular, they want more than signage to make people aware of their generosity; they want the opportunity to speak to the audience.

That, in and of itself, is generally not a problem, since sponsors normally have the basic decency and self-restraint to minimize their sales message and deliver real value to that audience in the course of the presentation. But a funny thing happened on the way to this Forum, namely, astonishingly poor judgment along these lines.

There were other egregious examples as well, but the topper was Ecolab, who delivered a 30-minute “keynote” (of all things) that had identically zero educational content on cleantech, and 100% corporate propaganda, all of it totally irrelevant to the captive audience who clearly grew more frustrated with each syllable.  And it couldn’t have happened at a worse time, in the last hour of the show, but right before the last speaker (Amory Lovins), whom everyone wanted to hear.

It was easy to see that most of the audience was as irritated as I; a few of the people standing near me at the back of the room were looking at their feet, shaking their heads and muttering cuss words in disbelief that anyone would show such wanton disregard for the implicit rules of the game. A guy from Shell Oil standing next to me began to applaud after a few minutes — and encouraged us all to do the same — in an effort to shoo the presenters from the stage.

Again, I sympathize with the organizers. How explicit do we think we need to be about something that should be obvious to anyone living in polite society? With people like Ecolab, I guess we need to roll up our sleeves.