There are two kinds of conferences in the telecommunications industry--and likely every other industry--where trade show mania has taken hold. Flying home from one of them yesterday at 30,000-plus feet, where the wine hits you the same in a pressurized cabin as it does when you're drinking it out of the box in your fridge--but unlike the way it hits you while you're sucking thin air at 10,000-plus feet up in the Rocky Mountains, which is where this event was--I was finishing the last pages of a short biography on Francis Crick. It's from the Eminent Lives series from Atlas Books. Even got choked up at the end. Must have been the wine.

Francis Crick, discoverer of the genetic code, was a talker. He was a conversationalist. He worked out many of his greatest ideas while performing his own scientific Socratic dialogue with experts he hand picked for just such an exercise. (I say scientific because he abhorred philosophers.)

Crick talked and questioned and cajoled and sometimes bullied his way to full comprehension of a topic. Later, he would verify through reading and experimentation, but for the most part, what worked for him was dialogue. Get the smartest, most knowledgeable people in a room, focus on a specific topic and talk--and keep talking until a new idea developed or an old one was discarded--then go back to the lab and experiment, or, as was often the case with Crick, go back to the lab and get someone else to experiment.

One of his dialogue partners was molecular biologist Sydney Brenner, who said of Crick, "Conversation was his grand stimulus."

It's a rare intelligence that can maintain such extended trains of thought verbally. Most people can't begin to compare to Crick in this regard. It seems like a lost art.

But as I slowly disqualified myself as a responsible possessor of an exit row seat on the airplane with my next glass of wine, I realized the art form wasn't completely lost. It was on full display at the 2006 CoBank Executive Forum from whence I had just departed.

This was the other kind of conference, not the flashy, Vegas- and Vaudeville-inspired events comprised of booths (and their babes) and soon-to-be-released product demos. This was an event, simple by no means, but one where conversation ruled the day or days. Serious discussion by like-minded but uniquely positioned and challenged rural telecom companies and other interested parties continued for 48 hours. They talked about their businesses and the things they're trying to accomplish and the things they're struggling with. Out of that came several suggestions on how rural telcos can better compete and work together.

All the group is missing is someone like Francis Crick, whose specialty was listening to all that conversation, rising above the cacophony and making sense of it all.

E-mail me at tmcelligott@telephonyonline.com