"The greater the challenge, the greater the resolve." J. Stephen Perry, president and CEO, New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau (NOCVB), has lived by those words since Hurricane Katrina touched down in 2005.

Who has had the biggest influence on your life?
Without any question, it was my father, James Perry. He was a father, best friend, and brother all wrapped in one. I had a culturally and intellectually rich childhood, growing up on the campus of Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, where my father was a professor and dean. He was the first person in his family to even go to junior high school. He grew up in a north Louisiana farming family, incredibly poor. My life would have been radically different if my father, like all of his other family members, had ended school in sixth grade and worked at the mill or farm.

What would people be surprised to learn about you?
My background: I've done fieldwork in the Arctic; I was a professional archaeologist; I taught at LSU; I specialize in 19th-century Russian literature - and I was a typical '70s radical college student. I do a lot of public speaking. People see the outgoing, extroverted personality, and are surprised to learn that I love to write. I could live in a thatched roof cottage on the coast of Scotland and write novels and not have human contact for weeks and weeks - the opposite of what I do every day.

Has your background in anthropology helped you in hospitality?
Having spoken French and Russian, and being a voracious reader, plus my background studying and teaching anthropology - with its central tenet being the acceptance and understanding of the differences between us - has been helpful. Anthropology is the study of man, culture, language, religion, and race and all of those things that seem to separate us, yet end up unifying us. Anthropology, more than any other discipline, teaches us to be non-judgmental, to lose the ethnocentrism so many of us have growing up in the United States.

Sure, we have difficult things to deal with in this industry, like negotiations, the sales process, but none of these things are nearly as tough as getting dropped by helicopter above the Arctic Circle with a rifle and a pack and living out on open tundra … hoping your helicopter pilot remembers where he left you when he comes back weeks later. We were doing work in an area where there had never before been humans. It took a great deal of self-sufficiency and mental discipline to make it on these expeditions.

How did you segue from anthropology to government?
I was on my way to the University of Chicago to get my Ph.D., when I found out I had a new baby on the way. [Perry has two children, a 30-year-old daughter, Bronwyn, who is a registered nurse, and an 18-year-old son, Ian, who will be following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by attending LSU this fall.] I went to work for the Louisiana legislature. When I was 27, a new governor came in, and I was offered the chance to become deputy secretary of the department of culture, recreation, and tourism. I fell in love with tourism and politics. I then decided to go into private business in New England and lived in the Boston area and southern New Hampshire for seven-and-a-half years. Then it felt like the right time to come back home to Louisiana. I was intending to start a sales and marketing company in Baton Rouge, but then the Louisiana Senate offered me the opportunity to come in and do some work with them.

I met Sen. Mike Foster, who was running for governor. He asked me to help manage the campaign, and we won in 1995. He offered me the opportunity to be his chief of staff. My passion was higher education, economic development, and culture, and we put all kinds of money in those things. We accomplished so much.

I got to know everyone in the New Orleans tourism industry, because during that time we expanded the convention center, built the New Orleans Arena, PGA Tour golf course, and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. I was the primary negotiator for the state for the long-term deal to keep the New Orleans Saints in New Orleans, very active in Super Bowl and Final Four negotiation, and lead negotiator for the state in recruiting the Charlotte Hornets and bringing them to New Orleans. When Ed McNeill retired after 30 years with the CVB, the search committee did a national search. They didn't find what they were looking for, and turned to me. I had been the governor's chief of staff for seven years, the longest-serving chief of staff for any governor in the prior 35 years. I assumed I'd go back to a university, but the prospect of leading New Orleans' largest industry was incredibly exciting.

What were the goals you set?
I started in 2002, not long after Sept.11, a challenging time in the industry. We moved ahead, and 2004 became our all-time biggest year. Heading toward 2005, we were planning on breaking those marks by more than 15 percent … and then the storm came. My goal when I started was to change the way we did business. New Orleans was so busy in the late '90s, early 2000s, that many told us we had lost some of our edge with customers. We become a little more difficult to work with. We launched a number of programs to become the most meeting-planner-friendly city in the country. We put together one of the most effective national customer advisory councils in the country, created the New Orleans Commitment, that included help with our Web site, public relations, attendance building, and the "We're Jazzed You're Here" campaign to welcome groups.

I then did something no one else in the country had done: I recruited one of the top meeting planners from one of the largest U.S. associations to join us, Donna Karl, who had been with the American Academy of Pediatrics as director of meetings and conventions for 18 years. I wanted a highly regarded association planner in house who would be vice president of client relations - who would speak the language of the customer, and understand their issues. Having all these pieces in place gave us tremendous capability when the tragedy occurred.

What was it like to be heading up the bureau when Hurricane Katrina struck?
The first days were emotionally and intellectually overwhelming. As a New Orleanian, I saw things that should never ever have happened to any American city. We saw the complete failure of the U.S. government that so many of us thought was invincible. The government's complete failure to be able to help its own citizens was staggering.

In the immediate aftermath, our team spread out over 10 to 15 cities. I set up with a core team in the state capital, Baton Rouge. New Orleans had no power, no Internet, no electricity, no phones. Within 72 hours, using text messaging, our team had been able to track down all of our staff and managers and talk to every single customer we had from that moment through the end of the year to make sure they understood we would have to cancel the meeting and help them relocate. Within the 72 hours following that, the team got to the next group of customers who were meeting from January through May of the following year. The fact that our team - with many sleeping on floors and couches, staying with friends and relatives - communicated with all our customers was extraordinary. We were the only organization in New Orleans that was actually functional at that point. We had backup hosting for our Web site in California, Arizona, and Florida. So even though our server went down in New Orleans, we still had a completely functioning Web site. Our team had trained me in HTML. I made a commitment starting the day after the storm that five times a day, from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., I would update our Web site myself with information on what was happening on the ground.

I didn't realize the extent to which our customers came to rely on these updates. As it turned out, the site was also used by the national media.

I don't know if any CVB in the country has ever had the challenge we had: having to cancel nearly $3.3 billion in booked business. And for a year-and-a-half after that, we were also taken out of the natural selling cycle we would have been in.

One of the great advantages we had was my years of government service. I knew all the government leaders and they knew me. We even hosted President Bush. I think we might be the only CVB that has ever had the President in its building conducting meetings.

We got the New Orleans tourism industry back on its feet faster than anyone could have dreamed, given the level of devastation. The amount of area flooded and damaged was equal to the size of Great Britain in square miles. Yet - in literally eight months - we had this city functioning again, and the tourism industry became the focal point of the recovery. Six months after Katrina, we put together a Mardi Gras with a half-million people in attendance. At the end of the next spring, we had the convention center back open … and then the American Library Association (ALA) came back with its annual conference in June of 2006. All through that fall and spring, we had some of our biggest customers come back, like the National Association of Realtors, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, and the American College of Cardiology (ACC). It was not easy for them - Debra Rosencrance of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, Sue Sears Hamilton at ACC, Deidre Ross from ALA - but they knew they were making a difference. For us, it was a time of incredible challenge and great pride.

Frankly, by 2007, we looked better than we did before the storm. We have more restaurants opened now in the tourism and downtown areas than we did prior to Katrina. Our hotels have had hundreds of millions of dollars of freshening and refurbishing and renovations.

Our single biggest challenge is acquiring enough resources to tell the true story around the world of how restored our city is. There were billions of dollars of media coverage of what went wrong; we don't get billions of dollars of coverage showing that we're now better than before.

The French Quarter looks cleaner and better now than it has in my entire lifetime. We're back and doing extraordinarily well. We had a spectacular opening this year with the Sugar Bowl sold out, the BCS national championship game of college football. Those two were worth nearly $400 million to us. In between the two of them we hosted the American Economic Association, a citywide, plus the NBA All-Star Game (seen by 600 million all around the planet). It was like a three-hour commercial for New Orleans. We have more business on the books for 2009 than we had for all of 2007. It just feels incredible to be normal again, better than normal.

The city clearly is going to have some challenges in those outlying neighborhoods. And even though people who come here want to take tours outside of the city to see some of those damaged areas - and we encourage them to - convention attendees and exhibitors are going to be hard-pressed not to agree that the city is revitalized and their experience is better than before the storm.

What are the qualities that make a good leader?
I've actually thought about this a lot because of what we went through. First of all, in a time of crisis, a leader has to be calm and confident, to have the attitude that everything is going to be okay and that we will head back in the right direction. It was important to me to never let other people see me down. Even though you may have doubts in the back of your mind, they're for when you are lying in bed at night.

Although you must deal with things that are operational and tactical, they must be wrapped around a strategic vision of where you are trying to go, so everyone can be part of getting through the difficulties by thinking of the grand vision. Do this with a smile and a sense of confidence, and never let your team feel that this is going to come out any other way than really good. I cast post-Katrina - difficult as it has been - as an opportunity for us to reinvent one of the great cities of the world.

A person in a leadership position always has to inspire, be visionary, work harder than anyone else, and make sure every person knows that what they do really matters in the grand scheme of things. I could not have been more proud of a group of people. About 40 percent of our team lost their homes and every personal belonging they had. Can you imagine losing your home, your clothing, your wedding albums, your pictures of your grandparents, things you could never replace? And in spite of this, they were on the phone taking care of customers. They inspired me as much as I did them.

What helped?
This was not business. This was life. You felt it deep in your soul. I wondered if we would be able to keep recruiting and building our team. It's in fact gotten even better after the storm as we've been able to build what I think is the deepest CVB team in the country in terms of sales, public relations, and communications.

One of our taglines after the storm was "Soul Is Waterproof." In my talks, I often say that when you come to New Orleans you feel like your molecules have rearranged a little bit. New Orleans is a different place. It is not an ordinary city. It is a melting pot of Africa, France, Spain, United States, and Caribbean, and has a culture that bubbles up from the street. The unique culture is critical to the fabric of the city. The soul of this culture is what has allowed us to bounce back.

Our organization is not only recognized as being at the top of its game, but we feel like we are on the mission of our lives and what we do matters every day to the lives of the people who live in our city. The amazing thing is our association clients feel the same way.

PCMA SUPPORTS NEW ORLEANS

PCMA's 53rd Annual Meeting will take place in New Orleans, January 11-14, 2009, at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

The premier event for meetings and event industry leaders, this meeting attracts approximately 3,000 meetings industry professionals.

"Never before has the timing of the PCMA annual meeting had so much meaning both to the organization and to the city hosting it," Perry said. "By convening in one of the most renowned, authentic, historic cities in North America, PCMA becomes an actual part of its rebirth. The national industry will be able to see firsthand that the Crescent City looks better than ever before."

Andrea Doyle is Convene's senior writer.