Written by

Chris Capossela

former Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft

I grew up in an Italian-American family in Boston’s North End, in the kind of multi-generational setup where “work” and “life” aren’t separate categories. We lived upstairs, the restaurant was on the ground floor, and my grandparents were in the apartment in between. Three generations stacked like a layer cake.

At one point, our restaurant was big — big enough that it wasn’t just feeding a neighborhood; it was the center of it. It came with an origin story that still makes me smile: my dad got the money to start it from the manager of the rock band Boston. That meant we were pulled into the music scene early. When bands played the Boston Garden, there was a good chance they’d end up at our place afterward—and “they” never meant four people. It meant the band, the crew, friends, hangers-on, whoever happened to be part of the orbit that night. We’d shut down part of the restaurant, and at one in the morning, a crowd would roll in like it was the most normal thing in the world.

So, there I am when I was little, meeting Aerosmith, David Bowie, and KISS—because my dad would come upstairs, wake us up, and bring us down to work. You’re shaking someone’s hand, you don’t really know who they are, and yet you can feel it: this is unusual, and it matters. If you grow up around that enough, you start to understand something about gatherings before you have any adult language for it.

My mom had her own version of the same thing. She ran cooking classes in the restaurant—sometimes for a lot of people—and she engineered the room so the audience could see what was happening at the stations. We weren’t using cameras back then, so she hung these big mirrors from the ceiling over the work areas. People would watch the work reflected in the mirror. It sounds like a small detail, but it’s stayed with me for decades because it was a quiet lesson in hospitality: if you’re going to invite people into a room, you take responsibility for their experience. You don’t just open the doors and hope.

That’s why Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events landed with me.

It’s also why I was interested in talking with Scott Schenker when he asked to interview me for this book. Scott and I worked together at Microsoft, and I got to see how he thinks about gatherings in the only way that really matters: not as one-off productions, but as part of a broader system—how they fit together over time, and what they signal about priorities and care. That perspective shows up throughout this manuscript, and it’s a big reason I think it’s worth reading.

If you’re holding this book, there’s a decent chance you think of “events” as a professional category— something other people do for a living. And of course, there are people who do it brilliantly: teams who can bring thousands of people together, make it feel effortless, and somehow leave everyone feeling like the experience was made for them. But Scott Schenker’s point is bigger and, honestly, more accurate: gatherings aren’t a niche discipline. They’re one of the main ways human beings build meaning and trust, mark transitions, and remember who they are.

Reading the manuscript, I kept recognizing how many “events” I’d been part of long before I ever had a professional title. In my childhood, the restaurant was a constant reminder that gatherings are not just entertainment or commerce; they’re social glue. Later, as technology entered our lives, my dad bought a computer after reading about Lotus 1-2-3 in the Boston Globe, handed it to me, and essentially said: “Figure out how this applies to the restaurant.” I did what kids do when they’re lucky enough to have a real problem to solve—I became obsessed. I wrote a reservation system, sold versions of it to other restaurants in the neighborhood, and learned early that helping someone run their “room” better can be surprisingly meaningful.

Eventually, I left Boston for Seattle and joined Microsoft, and I spent most of my career there across a variety of roles. The setting was different, but the human dynamics were familiar. People would talk about strategy, brand, values, culture—all important things—and then you’d watch what happened when the company gathered customers, partners, press, and employees in a room. It becomes clear very quickly what’s real and what’s aspirational.

In my interview for this book, Scott asked me a question that seems simple until you try to answer it cleanly: “What is an event, in human terms?” I told him I think an event is “a finite, time-based experience that is unique in some way to your daily and weekly and monthly life that brings you together with other people and fills you with joy and inspiration and emotion.” I still like that definition because it’s not about production vocabulary. It’s about time, uniqueness, other people, and the feeling you carry out with you.

And that last part—the residue—is what I’ve come to think of as the real test. A great event has “legs,” as I put it in our conversation. You’re thinking about it after it’s over. It stays with you. In some cases, it changes what you do next—maybe not dramatically, but tangibly.

Toward the end of our interview, I said something that I’ve also found myself saying to organizations when they ask me for marketing advice. People will want to talk about “brand marketing,” and I’ll often ask a question that surprises them: “Can you send me a video of your latest product launch or event?” They’ll ask why I want to see that, and my answer is: “Because that’s your brand.”

What Scott does in this book is broaden that instinct beyond business. If you want to understand what you—personally, organizationally, communally—really believe about people, about time, about attention, about care, then look at how you gather. Look at what you design, what you prioritize, what you tolerate, and what you protect. Look at whether the room feels designed around people or designed around throughput.

Along the way, Scott gives the reader a few pieces of language that stuck with me because they describe experiences most of us already recognize. One is Kairos—those moments that weigh more than the minutes they contain. Another is Brigadoon: the metaphor of gatherings as temporary places that appear, intensify, and then disappear, with impermanence as part of what gives them meaning. You don’t experience a gathering the same way when you realize that this particular alignment of people and time won’t happen again.

There’s a story later in the book that many people have seen as a video from the late 1990s. I was there, and I was part of it. I won’t retell the story here, because Scott tells it the way it deserves to be told in the book, but I’ll offer the lesson I took from it: what happens in the room is only half the story. How you respond becomes the story. The audience is watching for competence, yes, but they’re also watching for humanity—and the best gatherings are the ones where those two things come together.

If you’re an event professional, this book will feel like someone finally giving your craft its full weight—not only the operational complexity, but the responsibility that comes with asking people to give you their time and attention. But if you’re not an “event person,” and you’re tempted to assume this isn’t for you, I’d argue you’re exactly who Scott had in mind, because most of the gatherings that shape our lives are not run by specialists. They’re run by leaders who suddenly find themselves responsible for a room, a moment, a transition. They’re run by the person organizing the offsite, hosting the fundraiser, shepherding the customer summit, pulling together the community meeting, planning the family celebration, or simply trying to make a group of people feel less alone for a few hours.

Scott’s book isn’t trying to turn you into something you’re not. It’s trying to help you see what you’re already doing—what you’ve probably been doing for years—through clearer language and more intention. It’s a book about gatherings, yes, but more than that it’s a book about what we owe each other when we gather.

I grew up in a restaurant where a room could change in an hour, where strangers could become “us” for a night, where hospitality wasn’t a slogan—it was a practice. I watched my mother hang mirrors so people could be included. Acts of Humanity is, in its own way, another mirror—held up to the way we gather—and it has a way of making you notice what’s happening in the room, what it means, and what you might do differently the next time you’re the one holding the moment.

Chris Capossela