The latest on purposeful events
Essay excerpts from the book, the people behind it, and gatherings in the news — as they happen.
At the same time everyone is talking about artificial intelligence replacing, accelerating, summarizing, generating, automating, or reshaping knowledge work, a global business-events company is being sold for about $1.8 billion. That is worth sitting with for a moment. The Financial Times reported that Hyve, a major organizer of business events, is being sold to Hellman…
A badge in a drawer. A wristband kept for years. A program someone cannot quite throw away. A smell, a phrase, a song—and suddenly the whole gathering comes back. Every event ends. The lights come up. People drift toward rideshares, airports, hotel elevators, inboxes, school pickups, and the ordinary gravity of life. The venue resets….
One post-COVID virtual event reached more people at far less cost than its in-person predecessor. On paper, that looked efficient. More reach, lower spend, easier access. The spreadsheet seemed happy. Then the people it was built for said it “sucked, sucked!” That phrase matters because it cuts through the temptation to measure only what is…
The 2026 World Cup has not yet begun, and already one of its stories is about what it costs to be there. Reuters reported that the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey subpoenaed FIFA over ticketing practices for matches at MetLife Stadium, including concerns about seat categories, high prices, and dynamic pricing. The…
At Dell World, Brocade became known for throwing the party everyone really wanted to attend. Eventually, the party became so popular that it had to become a “whisper party,” because the official host understandably did not love watching people slip away from the sanctioned program to go somewhere more exciting. That is a barnacle event….
There is never enough money, space, or time. There is, however, a nearly unlimited supply of ideas and demands. Everyone has something they want added: another session, another reception, another sponsor benefit, another feature, another city, another speaker, another dinner, another moment that feels indispensable to them.That is why scarcity is one of the central…
Bill Gates was on stage demonstrating Windows 98 when the machine crashed into the now-legendary Blue Screen of Death. You can feel the room in the video. The moment lands, the audience reacts, and everyone knows something has gone wrong in public. Then Gates smiles and says, “We’ll fix that bug before we ship.” The…
At a pharmaceutical training we built a gamified testing system intended to measure individual learning. Gamification was all the rage at the time. The idea was clever. The sales representatives could answer questions, test knowledge, and generate data about what they knew. Then they did something wonderfully human. They figured out how to beat they…
For one pharmaceutical launch, we did not begin with the product. We began with a husband, a wife, two doctors, and the shrinking of a life under chronic illness. We began with what the disease did to ordinary days: the fatigue, the fear, the appointments, the narrowing of possibility. Only then did the product enter…
The London Festival of Architecture chose a deceptively simple word for its 2026 theme: belonging. Not skyline. Not innovation. Not resilience. Not density, sustainability, mobility, or growth. Belonging. That choice matters because architecture is one of the places where abstract human needs become concrete. A doorway can invite or intimidate. A plaza can linger or…
At a major event in New Orleans, I once asked taxi drivers to walk into the venue and tell me where they thought they were. Every one of them could identify the convention center. Not one of them could really tell me whose event it was or why it mattered. That bothered me because place…
Every event has a cast, whether or not anyone calls it that. A board meeting has a cast. A fundraiser has a cast. A worship service has a cast. A customer conference has a cast. Someone is hosting. Someone is guiding. Someone is explaining. Someone is carrying the emotional weight. Someone is trusted. Someone is…
Two pharmaceutical sales cultures were being asked to become one. On the surface, they seemed similar. They sold in the same broad industry. They understood customers, products, territories, numbers, incentives, and pressure. But underneath the surface, they were different tribes. They dressed differently, spoke differently, valued different kinds of proof, and carried different stories about…
I once watched someone enter a steering committee with a beautiful, fully baked presentation and the wrong understanding of what the room was for. He thought he had come to present. What the room needed was for him to think with us. That difference matters. A steering committee is not merely a checkpoint, a ceremonial…
A senior leader once put the problem in beautifully human terms. If a sales kickoff lands on your daughter’s birthday or near Mother’s Day, he said, it “better be freaking good.” That line stayed with me because it cuts through the romance of gathering. Yes, events matter. Yes, shared time can do things email, dashboards,…
One of the more interesting stories in the future-of-work conversation is not that older executives want people back in the office. That story has been told so often it has become predictable. The more interesting story is that some younger workers may want, or at least need, more of the office than we expected. Recent…
A former CMO once told me he had a quiet way of judging meetings. He listened for how much of the conversation was about the past and how much was about the future. The present, he said, was implicit: the decision in front of us, the issue on the table, the work to be done…
In the musical Brigadoon, a village appears in the Scottish mist for one day every hundred years. For that single day, it is complete: people, streets, rituals, love, danger, memory, and song. Then it disappears again. That has always felt like one of the best metaphors for events. Before a great gathering, there is silence….
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events an important and valuable book.
When I joined Microsoft, one of the first surprises was how hard it was to answer a few simple questions: How much were we spending on events? Where were we showing up in person? What was the objective of each gathering? No one was hiding the information. It was simply scattered. Product groups had event…
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events an important and valuable book.
At Taipei’s Bangka Longshan Temple, some BTS fans recently did what people have done for centuries when something mattered more than logic could comfortably hold. They brought offerings. They made wishes. They asked for help. In this case, the help they wanted was not a marriage, a cure, a child, or a safer passage across…
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events an important and valuable book.
Rod Stewart has been on the cover of Rolling Stone. More than once. And yet one of the most delightful lines attributed to him is that he would rather be on the cover of Railway Modeller than Rolling Stone. The line works because it reveals the seriousness of passion. Stewart spent more than two decades…
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events an important and valuable book.
“ITSM.” “PRO!” That call-and-response echoed through a ServiceNow sales kickoff until it stopped being a gimmick and started becoming identity. Kevin Haverty, leading a five-thousand-person sales organization, did not ask people merely to remember the new emphasis on ITSM Pro. He gave them a role. Every time someone on stage said “ITSM,” the audience answered…
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events an important and valuable book.
A friend turns a year older tomorrow. No party, exactly. He’s going to sit at a pub for a stretch of the afternoon and let friends wander in if they feel like it. Come for one drink, come for three, don’t come — all fine. This has the feeling of a tide pool to me:…
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events an important and valuable book.
Years ago, I did not attend Macworld, but I still remember one of the most important things I saw there. A small group of people walked the expo floor with cameras and posted short videos for those of us who were not in the room. They were not the keynote. They were not the official…
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events an important and valuable book.
My mother belonged to a small circle of culturally curious friends who called themselves the “Gypsies.” Once a month they would go somewhere new together: a museum, a gallery, a theater, an artist’s studio, a special restaurant. On paper, it was simple. Pick a place, pick a date, and show up. But that is not…
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events an important and valuable book.
Take an ordinary object: a plastic banana, a chipped horseshoe, a small trinket you might pass at a thrift store without a second glance. On its own, it is almost worthless. Add a story, and something changes. The object has a past. It has a human connection. It becomes a little vessel of meaning. That…
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events an important and valuable book.
We have all been in the meeting that ends in applause and changes nothing. We have all seen the conference that dazzles for a day and disappears by Monday. The lights were right. The room was full. The slides were polished. And still, somehow, nothing moved. That is because real change does not happen through…
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events an important and valuable book.
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events a valuable and reflective book.
The first time I watched thousands of enterprise salespeople stand up and sing “Sweet Caroline,” I remember thinking: this makes little sense. These were serious people responsible for serious revenue. They were not at a neighborhood bar or a ballgame. They were at a corporate event. And yet the pianist hit the opening chords, arms…
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events a valuable and reflective book.
One of the most memorable, meaningful, magical events of my early life should have been my college graduation.
I did not go.
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events a valuable and reflective book.
For anyone who has ever seen the classic film The Graduate, there is one image that never leaves you: Dustin Hoffman pounding on the glass of a church during a wedding. He wasn’t on the guest list. He wasn’t there to toast the happy couple. He was there because that room contained the one person…
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events a valuable and reflective book.
Essay 1.1 | Acts of Humanity “My Humanity Is Bound Up in Yours,For We Can Only Be Human Together.” Desmond Tutu Grand Central is one of those places that seems less like a building than a living organism. On a normal day, it holds a choreography of commuters, tourists, vendors, workers, police officers, families, students,…
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events a valuable and reflective book.
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events an important and valuable book.
Kai Ryssdal, host of Marketplace — one of my favorite programs — got stopped by a number. On a recent episode, Ryssdal and Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz discussed Fritz’s article, “The $50 Movie Ticket Has Arrived.” The example was Regal charging $50 for advance seats to Dune: Part Three in 70mm IMAX —…
Meet the Contributors who helped make Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events an insightful and amazing book.
ANNOUNCEMENT My book Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events will be released in August 2026. Pre-release orders are open now at your favorite bookseller (links here) or at www.actsofhumanitythebook.com. (There is even a Limited Edition available from the web site.) Overview:Human beings are not just social creatures—we are relational creatures. Events – large…
LinkedIn recently noted that job postings mentioning “storytellers” have doubled over the last year. Around the same time, its 2026 skills analysis for media and communications listed “Brand Storytelling” among the fastest-growing skills in that field. That is interesting not because storytelling is suddenly new, but because organizations are now naming it more directly. …
Recent coverage highlighted a Barbie-themed immersive experience in Florida where families arrived to find something very different from what had been advertised. Reporting from the BBC and others focused less on any single misstep and more on the difference between what people expected and what they encountered once they got there.
