As divisional dean and chair of the Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism, and Sports Management at New York University, Lalia Rach is frequently invited to speak on trends, branding, and marketing strategies. This month, for example, she'll lead discussions about leadership and strategy in tough times with some of the world's top hotel executives at the 31st Annual NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference.

But Rach's personal hero and mentor comes from closer to home: her late grandmother, who with Rach's grandfather ran a bar and restaurant in Spring Green, Wis., where Rach grew up. Her grandparents' business, Eulalia's Restaurant, was so popular during the 1930s and 1940s that it served 300 to 500 meals every weekend - in a town with a population of only 800.

And yet, Rach said during a recent interview in her office at NYU, her grandmother never took success for granted. In the 1960s, as customers' tastes and habits changed, she taught herself how to make pizza and added two pizza ovens in the bar. "I can't cook to save my soul, but what I really learned from my grandmother is to know your customers and understand how they are changing," said Rach, who came to NYU after serving as dean of the University of New Haven School of Hotel and Restaurant Management, and before that managed hotels and restaurants in the Midwest. "She cared about her customers. She had a third-grade education, but she understood the business of hospitality as well as anyone I've ever met in my life."

Early last year you predicted that 2008 would be a rollercoaster ride for the hospitality industry - and you were right on the money. What's your current forecast?
What the rollercoaster signifies is constant change. This is not a V recession; this is a very, very, very broad U, meaning that we are going to reach bottom and very, very gradually see improvements. That isn't what we want. We want to go back to what it was - and it's not going to. It is, as the CEO of GM said, a reset.

For most of us, while we understand that we have to put our priorities in order, and we can see that our priorities perhaps weren't in the right order - we kind of liked that life. But it's not coming back. Our lives are changing, and that is a very harsh reality. Our confidence both as consumers and as professionals is under attack. The entire meetings and events industry is under attack. But in so many ways it is the bedrock of business, and now it is being said that it is frivolous and inappropriate and worse.

It's as if the industry was down, and then it got smacked around. At the same time, it concerns me that business will have a kneejerk response. You have to have relationships. If you are withdrawing from the arena that has your clients in it, what are you saying? You are adding on to the problem.

What are your strategies for coping with the new reality?
Well, this is not the time to be timid. As a professional, this is the time to retool, so that if you've been stuck in the 20th century, it's time now to recognize we are fully in the 21st century - and there are differences. To pick just one: social media. And that is very different than technology. As a meeting professional, as an event professional, what are you doing to utilize social media to move yourself and your business forward? It is different than traditional media. In retooling, you learn about it - whether you attend conferences, you go back to school, network with people. However you do it, there is a great opportunity so that your business and you as a professional are better coming out of this. That's one.

Two, I am a firm believer that, in this environment, you need to take risks. The risks have to be reasonable - I am not suggesting that people jump off cliffs. But you have to be able to innovate. How is this downturn going to change how we do business - and it is. What does it mean for how you do business?

And the third thing I suggest to people [in the hospitality industry] in times like this is to really reflect on the basics. What do you do well? What have you ignored? How well do you really know your very best customer or client? How often do you connect with them? It's interesting - we find ourselves getting busier and busier and busier, but we neglect the basics. And there is no one who doesn't appreciate outreach. I am not talking about phone spam, or e-mail spam. I'm talking about calling someone, setting a time in advance, and asking: "What do you want to talk to me about? I want to catch up." I don't mean a hard-sell call. I mean a "You are important" call.

The Tisch Center offers undergraduate and graduate degrees and certificates in hotel, travel, tourism, and sports management. Where does the meetings and events industry fit into the curriculum?
We are redoing our graduate curriculum in tourism, and we are looking very strongly at a graduate certificate in events management. We don't have that yet, but we are exploring the possibility. I see that as [evidence] of the very fact that this industry is evolving. It is reflective of the changing reality, and that is that meeting and event management, as your readers know, has always existed. It just wasn't always valued. It was pushed to the lowest rung. As companies began to realize that training, sharing of information, networking, exposure to new ideas was of value - and as much a value as anything they did - then they understood that the settings in which those opportunities existed needed to be as professional as possible, in order to garner the biggest return on investment.

If you look at the evolution of whoever was charged with planning the meeting, you can just see them moving up the corporate organizational ladder. And now today, we sit here and we realize that standards, planning, budgeting, purpose, and vision - all of the aspects that are expected in any successful business come into play in meetings and event management.

You're an expert on branding. What advice would you give to a company that has positioned itself as a luxury brand in the last few years?
I would not run away from it. The backlash is not about the specific word or specific aspect of the industry. That backlash is about the individuals who seemingly caused this problem. We want someone to blame.

But what is happening, really, is helping people to understand the difference between a want and a need. Some of the things that happened were incredibly outlandish. That does not make it bad, unless there is no fiduciary responsibility. That doesn't make it bad, unless you are ignoring the other needs of your company and organization. What we are coming to as businesspeople and professionals is [analyzing] "Do I really I need that? What am I going to get as the return for that?" And that is a very different approach to take.

What this is saying to meeting planners is: Be more professional. I'm not suggesting [that meeting planners] are not. But when we talk about why are we holding this meeting, in very specific terms, how should we be able to measure what will define a meeting's success quantifiably? Are people able to sell better, if that's the point of your meeting? Are people able to communicate better? Do people have a better understanding of the inner workings of a new product?

Another thing meeting planners have to be able to discuss is what is the cost if we do not have this meeting. Again, not just the intangibles. I am not discounting the intangibles, because it's important that the culture of an organization be present in their meetings. But we are in an era of quantifiable measurement. And that is something that many meeting planners have not given their full attention to. That does not mean I think meeting planners should become widget counters. But those that are in the profession should be able to speak the professional language and be able to measure and demonstrate after the fact, clearly, this is what this meeting has meant to a company, an organization.

How should people approach thinking about social media?
Don't think you ever understand it, because the minute you do, something new is going to come. Facebook is about eight years old. When it was started, it was pooh-poohed by business because it was for teenagers and college students. What nobody ever thought about is that those teenagers and college students were going to become professionals. Now that they are fully formed professionals, why would they leave behind something that works so well for them? Plus, what always happens, regardless of your age or experience with it, is that there is always an innovative group of people who are early adopters who envision, "Oh, it could be this." And that's what happened with Facebook. It has morphed. It is far more than what it began as eight years ago.

And what Twitter is doing is showing us so clearly that the conversation never stops. Twitter is showing that the consumers - whether it is business-to-business or business-to-consumer - want to participate and they want to have a voice. Whether you believe it is a business tool or not, it is a business tool.

The issue is, there are many more ways to connect today. If we think about it, we always try to connect. That is why there have been leaps in technology: We want to make [communication] more personal, more consistent, more timely. And now, in essence, we have a tiger by the tail - or the tiger has us by the tail. That is an issue we all have to be aware of with social media. How are you going to deal with that? You really have to study each of them and decide what is appropriate for your business.

A meeting planner can't get fixated on one aspect of technology or one aspect of social media. That doesn't mean you have to be an expert, but that you have to find a means to keep yourself educated on a variety of fronts. That almost brings us back full circle. Meeting planning has become a complicated, layered experience that requires the meeting planner to be far more than they have ever been. It's almost as if "Oh, and then, by the way, you have to have good people skills." I am not trying to put that at the bottom of the barrel, but that was always at the top. You need to broaden it out and make more room at the top for more skills and abilities.

Barbara Palmer is senior editor of Convene.