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December 30, 2009 (FinancialWire) (By Dr. Susanne Trimbath) — No, British Airways (LSE: BAY) (OTC: BABWF) isn’t suing Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). But they are taking on all comers in a head-to-head battle over business meetings. In an effort to “make business personal again,” British Airways (“BA”) commissioned a survey by the Harvard Business Review to find out if professionals think that face-to-face meetings are essential for sealing the deal. Naturally, British Airways believes this is true — after all it is their business to bring people to places where they can meet each other across the same table. The results of the Poll supported their idea — 95% of HBR readers said that face-to-face meetings are the key to developing successful business relationships.

En garde AT&T (NYSE: T) because teleconferencing just isn’t good enough for business meetings anymore! Look out Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) because even online meetings are not enough for most business executives! In a promotion that started last summer, BA awarded about one thousand businesses round-trip flights to anywhere in the world that they wanted to go in order to meet with existing contacts, to visit potential investors or to introduce new clients. Three entire planes were chartered just to ferry the winners of the competition first to London for business forums and then onward to the destination of their choice. STP Advisory Services, LLC was among the small and medium-sized businesses awarded a place on the flight that originated in Chicago in mid-November. (Other flights originated from New York in September and from Los Angeles in October.) We elected to fly on to Hong Kong, where we were able to present and extend the corporate governance research published on Investrend Weblogs in April through June 2009.

I had a chance to talk to BA Executive Vice President for the Americas, Simon Talling-Smith in London. Mr. Talling-Smith told me that there was one more part to BA’s strategy for this grant program — telling the success stories of the one thousand or so small business that received grants. In addition to two roundtrip tickets, the grants included a day of business forums in London. In the afternoon of the day of our arrival in London, we were treated to a briefing from Lord Alan Sugar (star of the BBC TV series The Apprentice) at the Orangery in Kensington Gardens.

The final part of the BA promotion — keeping tabs on the winners and keeping them connected to each other and BA – may inevitably bring some business to the likes of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), whose iPod Lord Sugar famously predicted would be a passing fad by Christmas 2005. Social networking groups have sprung up on LinkedIn.com and StartUpNation.com for the winners of the competition to continue their business connections.

A follow-on competition will be awarding “a year of business class travel and a suite of valuable services to grow their businesses” to an additional 100 companies. That competition is closed now but the names of the winning companies will be announced early next year (at http://businessgrants.ba.com/). There was also talk in Chicago of opening a similar competition to Canadian businesses next year.

Dr. Trimbath also contributes regularly to Investrend Weblogs (http://www.investrendweblogs.net/strimbath), and invites readers to connect with her via Twitter (http://twitter.com/SusanneTrimbath).

Susanne Trimbath, Ph.D. is CEO and Chief Economist at STP Advisory Services, LLC (http://www.stpadvisors.com/). She was Senior Research Economist at Milken Institute and Senior Advisor on a USAID-sponsored capital markets project in Russia. Her early career included financial services operations at national clearing and settlement organizations in San Francisco and New York as well as at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She also worked on Wall Street at the Pacific Stock Exchange and Depository Trust Company. A multi-published author, co-author and editor, Dr. Trimbath holds a Ph.D. in Economics from New York University.

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