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,…
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….
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…
