Richard Saul Wurman has little respect for the convention of conventions. That’s why, in 1984, he spawned a series of successful events that are the opposite of the typical conference. The best known of these is TED, or the Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference, which he sold in 2002. Now retiring from that business, Wurman threw his final event, eg2006, this year in Los Angeles. There, an audience of just under 700 invitation-only attendees—including actor Sidney Poitier, artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, and EarthLink founder Sky Dayton—heard and mingled with the likes of DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, producer Quincy Jones, inventor Dean Kamen, biologist Jeff Corwin (who brought a giant python onto the stage), MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. In this edited conversation with HBR, Wurman spoke about what it takes to create a memorable meeting. Conferences are part of the lifeblood of sales and marketing departments and specialty firms. Entire calendars revolve around them. What’s wrong with that? The conference business—comprising the total spending on meetings, events, shows, exhibitions, and everything under that heading—is huge. The average company spends 20% of its marketing communications budget on event marketing. Consider what a company like IBM or Johnson & Johnson spends on a single event—including flights, hotels, speakers’ fees, and so on—and do the math. To me, this is an enormous waste of participant time and corporate money. The conference business is a profligate economy of its own. The truth is that many people go to these gatherings only to network and play golf. They don’t come to listen to CEOs who, sadly, can’t speak the truth or be sincere about their vision of things because they are forced into insincerity by their PR departments and have to protect their companies’ stock value. Marketers attempt to draw people to these events by paying high fees for speakers who give canned, predictable talks. Panel discussions are often sequential, unrelated ten-minute speeches. Nobody gets inspired; everyone suffers from bad backs, hangovers, and overamplified air-conditioning. After the conference is over, nothing sticks. What would you propose as an alternative? When I welcomed audiences to my events, I always said, “Welcome to the dinner party I always wanted to have and now can.” When you plan a great dinner party, you consider carefully whom you will invite—not everyone in your address book but people who spark smart conversations with and among each other, and who don’t spend all their time in their own little cliques. You want people to trust your taste and intelligence. You ask guests to talk about the delicious and unusual ideas they have that no one has heard about yet. You begin all the conversations with questions. You look for the cracks between disciplines—particularly finding out similarities and differences—because that’s where good, inspiring concepts come from. At my conferences, the best speeches were always by brilliant, vulnerable individuals who could tell a fresh story about their passions, ideas, and failures. They don’t spoon-feed information or talk down to the audience. They let people taste and experience their ideas for themselves. And the audience creates its own intelligent connections among all the different ideas presented. That sounds lovely, but corporations aren’t going to dispense with traditional conferences. Correct, but if I were a CEO, I would take a few standard events off my roster and replace them with such dinner parties. I would start building my speaker list by embracing my own curiosities as far as they could go. If I played golf—a horrible thought—I might invite a biologist who could explain how grass grows, a physicist who could explain the way the ball flies, and ask what the connection between those is. I don’t want to do research; I just want to be in a receptive state and ask unrehearsed questions of people who know about these things. I don’t want agendas; I want to be surprised. And hopefully, the attendees would talk about my dinner party for years afterward.
