Wish You Were There – Big Task Weekend 2008
What do Intimacy, Vulnerability, Candor and Accountability have to do with business as usual? Nothing and everything as you’ll find out later.
Just finished attending Ferrazzi Greenlight’s Big Task Weekend held on October 2-4 at The Four Seasons Hotel in Westlake Village, CA. Boy did you miss something.
This fourth annual event brings together CEO’s and other senior executives especially Chief Marketing Officers from Fortune 500 companies and national organizations such as: GE, Wal-Mart, Kraft Foods, Kaiser Permanente, Mars, Wellpoint, PhRMA, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, WebMD, Safeway, Abbott, General Mills, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, Participant Productions, William Morris Agency, CAA, Saatchi & Saatchi and many others. Together they form strategic alliances to serve the community on an urgent health related issue that they couldn’t do on their own while increasing shareholder value with a huge dollop of events to further all the attendees’ personal and professional growth so they can return to their companies with a spring in their step and “fire in their belly” to make a difference.
This year it led off with Hollywood icon, UCLA professor and more than that, deeply thoughtful Peter Guber. He gave an absolutely transformative talk on the power of story telling in business and in life. I am still a student of what he shared as you read through this story.
Now what about those big mouthful, multi-syllabic words: Intimacy, Vulnerability, Candor and Accountability? After the event I found them to be “full of sound and fury signifying everything.”
Sadly, business as usual squeezes out authenticity between individuals and then has the naiveté to believe that enthusiastic cooperation between people will happen without it. If however you give human doings living in siloed functions with a way to connect through a shared vision above and shared humanity below, anything is possible.
More than a few attendees shared that the most valuable part of the event was in becoming safely vulnerable. I think it gave everyone a taste of the human being that lives inside the human doing. That is something we all hunger for.
For more information about attending or sponsoring Big Task Weekend, please email info@bigtaskweekend.com.
October 7th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Hi Mark,
Nice post about a wonderful weekend, and it was great meeting you there! Stepping outside one’s comfort zone with a group of strangers is something we should all do more often. Kudos to Keith for pulling it all together in his usual style…
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February 17th, 2009 at 6:18 am
For Certain Wish You Were There – Big Task Weekend 2008 will beget tons of involvement but for the fact it is fascinating recital.