Member spotlight
A regular's view of the Winter Roundtable
Great Lakes Maritime Shippers Association executive director Wendell Szymanski has attended enough Winter Roundtables to watch the room change around him.
Wendell Szymanski, executive director of the Great Lakes Maritime Shippers Association in Cleveland, is one of the longest-standing regulars at the Great Lakes Winter Roundtable, the chapter's capped-at-40 gathering held every February at 55 Wacker Drive in Chicago.
A room that keeps changing
Szymanski runs a small shippers' association representing 85 companies that move cargo across the Great Lakes, work he does from a harbor office where freighters sit moored through the winter months. He's watched the Winter Roundtable's attendee list turn over gradually, with newer chapter members like Great Lakes Orchard Growers Association's Priya Ranganathan, now the chapter's chair, arriving well after Szymanski had already made the roundtable a fixture on his calendar.
"The faces change every couple of years, but the questions people bring to the table don't," Szymanski said. "Somebody's always trying to figure out how to renew a member who's gone quiet, or how to justify a dues increase to a board that hasn't seen one in a decade."
What keeps him coming back
The roundtable is capped at 40 attendees, a limit Szymanski said matters as much as the agenda. "Once you get past 40 people in a room, it stops being a roundtable and starts being a conference with round tables in it," he said. "You lose the part where you can actually finish a sentence to the whole group."
"I've had more useful conversations in the coffee line at this event than in some entire conferences I've paid to attend," Szymanski said.
Szymanski has attended nearly every Winter Roundtable since the chapter began holding them, missing only the years his own association's shipping season ran long into February.
Chapter chair Priya Ranganathan on long-time attendees
Chapter Chair Priya Ranganathan, deputy executive director at Great Lakes Orchard Growers Association, said attendees like Szymanski shape the roundtable's tone even without formally presenting. "Wendell doesn't run a session, but half the room ends up in a conversation he started," she said. "That's exactly the kind of informal mentorship the roundtable is supposed to produce."
For members considering their first Winter Roundtable
Chapter members weighing whether to attend for the first time should:
Register early — the 40-person cap fills before the event date most years
Come with a specific problem to raise, not just a general interest in networking
Expect the format to favor conversation over formal presentations, in keeping with the chapter's roundtable tradition
Szymanski said he has no plans to stop attending, and expects to keep showing up "until the shipping season finally wins one February."
A quieter kind of institutional memory
Ranganathan said long-time attendees like Szymanski fill a role the chapter doesn't formally assign to anyone: reminding newer members that the problems they're facing aren't new. "Wendell can tell somebody, 'I had that same renewal problem a while back, here's what didn't work,'" she said. "That saves people from repeating mistakes the chapter already made once." Szymanski said he doesn't think of it that way himself, he just likes the room, but he's stopped correcting people who describe him as the roundtable's unofficial historian.