Leadership Is the Events Industry's Secret
What Bowling Alone, two industry crises, and the longevity research all point to.
A note before the lede. This piece runs longer than the typical Substack post, which is deliberate. The argument I am making, that the events industry rests on a thin and largely unnamed layer of unpaid leaders, cannot be made by gesturing at the idea. It can only be made by naming the people. The eight founders of the Experiential Guild of America, the women who built the California Events Coalition, the state-by-state organizers who stood up the Live Events Coalition, the medical researchers documenting the longevity premium that follows from civic engagement: each of those rosters appears below in chart form, because the people are the argument and the argument requires that they be counted. Some of what follows is drawn from memory, with the standard concession that what is being passed down here is also oral history. Corrections are welcome. The argument does not depend on any single fact. It depends on the pattern. Read this one the way you would read a long magazine feature, in one sitting if you can, in two if you cannot.
Leadership is the secret. Not strategy, not capital, not luck. After Fourty-five years inside the events industry, I am increasingly convinced that the variable that keeps showing up across every crisis, every recovery, and every quiet stretch in between is the willingness of a small group of people to take unpaid roles that the institution needs filled. Last week I joined Rich Curran of Expo Convention Contractors on his Behind the Drapes podcast at the SISO CEO Summit on Kiawah Island.
He asked me to name the industry’s secret weapon, and I gave him the phrase I have been using in my own head for years. Leadership is the secret sauce. Not leadership in the LinkedIn-influencer sense. Leadership in the older, more boring sense: the willingness to take an unpaid role, in a moment when nobody is watching, that the institution needs filled. The decision to volunteer is the act. Everything else is consequence.
The book that put a name to this had been sitting on my desk for weeks before I finally picked it up. Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone in 2000, the same year I founded BizBash, and I am only now getting around to reading it cover to cover. The timing is humbling. Putnam was diagnosing, twenty-five years ago, a slow erosion that I have spent my entire professional life pushing back against without ever using his vocabulary. Memberships dropped across PTAs, religious congregations, labor unions, fraternal orders, women’s clubs, the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross. Putnam tracked the lines decade after decade and they almost all pointed downward. The number of Americans bowling went up. The number of Americans bowling in leagues went down. That was the metaphor. The underlying claim was that the country was losing the unpaid, off-the-clock civic infrastructure that holds everything else up.
The events industry, of all industries, ought to find Putnam’s diagnosis personal. Our entire commercial proposition is the league. From conventions and trade shows to user conferences, galas, and festivals, we are the people who build the rooms where strangers become colleagues and colleagues become alliances. And the structure of the industry itself runs on the same fragile civic premise Putnam said was crumbling: unpaid people, on top of overloaded schedules, deciding to chair the committee, sit on the board, take the call. I learned this twice, the hard way, in the two crises that bracketed my career inside this industry.
The first time was September 2001. The towers came down on a Tuesday morning, and by that weekend the entire New York events industry was in free fall, with conferences cancelled, travel frozen, and the Javits Center quiet for the first time in memory. Industry colleagues who had spent their careers filling rooms now spent their days on the phone trying to figure out whether their companies would survive the quarter. I had been running BizBash for less than two years. Richard Aaron, then my company president, and I went to NYC & Company, the city’s convention and visitors bureau and the place where the real heavy lifting on connecting with the people who could bring the city back was actually being done. We argued to Cristyne Nicholas, NYC & Company’s president and CEO, that the events industry was a foundational piece of New York’s economic and emotional recovery, that you could not bring tourists back to a city whose convention machine had stopped, and that someone had to organize the response. The result was the Convention, Exhibition, Meetings and Events Coalition, known as CEME, formed under Cristyne Nicholas and pulling in more than two hundred hotels, caterers, attractions, destination management companies, and other industry players. I co-chaired it. The work was granular and unglamorous. We placed three hundred thousand dollars in pro bono advertising. We built a CEME awards program to honor the companies that kept their meetings and events in New York that year, and we hosted those awards on a New York Harbor cruise, which had the added benefit of putting the city’s then-struggling harbor cruise operators back in business for the night. We worked the building inventory of the city itself. To convince Snapple to keep its national sales meeting in New York rather than move it to a competing destination, we got the Empire State Building lit yellow for the night to match the company’s logo, and we made sure the Snapple decision-makers saw it from the room where the meeting was being argued.
What I remember most clearly is not the strategy memos. It is a series of nights at Gracie Mansion as Mayor Bloomberg came into office in early 2002 and inherited a city still trying to find its footing. We hosted multiple events at the mansion that year, all of them powered by donated services from CEME members. Great Performances catered. Matthew David Events handled the decor. The Waldorf-Astoria, the New York Helmsley, and Millennium Hotels donated rooms for out-of-town guests. We had filled those rooms with leaders from every corner of the events world, the ones we had personally called and asked to come back to New York and stand with the city. At one of those evenings, a live musical group and a Broadway singer performed “New York, New York.” The room knew exactly what it was doing. It was an act of group contagion in the deliberate, useful sense. People walked out of those rooms and rebooked the city. None of the people in those rooms were paid to be there. None of the work that mattered most was billable.
Jaclyn Bernstein, who runs Empire Force Events and was one of the original mainstays of CEME, has stayed in the work ever since. Twenty-five years on, she is still organizing the official 9/11 commemorations at the World Trade Center site. I have volunteered for her at those events for many years. One year I worked alongside Michael Cerbelli of Cerbelli Creative at the bottom of the Pit, the original footprint of the towers, watching children who had just been born drop roses into a small pool. Many of them never met the parent they were dropping the roses for. None of the people running that commemoration are on a payroll for it. The volunteer infrastructure of remembrance has been held together by the same kind of leadership that built CEME in the first place. The work does not stop with the headline crisis. It continues, quietly, every September, for as long as someone keeps showing up.
The Second Time
Nineteen years later it happened again, in a slower and crueler form. The pandemic did not collapse the industry in a single morning. It collapsed it across eighteen months, with no Gracie Mansion to gather in, because nobody could gather anywhere. The leadership that emerged was the same act in a thousand different rooms, all over Zoom, by people who knew the industry was about to lose a generation of small businesses unless somebody stood up and explained why.
On March 19, 2020, Isaac Rothwell, a production-company owner, posted a Change.org petition asking the federal government for relief targeted at live events. It picked up hundreds of thousands of signatures inside weeks. Out of that petition the Live Events Coalition was formed as a fully volunteer-run 501(c)(6), with independent state and regional chapters quickly assembling themselves across the country.
Arizona: Live Events Coalition of Arizona
California: California Events Coalition
Colorado: Colorado Event Alliance
Connecticut: Connecticut Event Industry Coalition
DC, Maryland, Virginia: DC Events Coalition
Florida: Live Events Coalition of Florida
Illinois: Live Events Coalition of Illinois
Kentucky: Live Events Coalition of Kentucky
Massachusetts: Live Events Coalition of Massachusetts
Minnesota: Live Events Coalition of Minnesota
Nevada: Live Events Coalition of Nevada
New York and New Jersey: Live Events Coalition of NY-NJ
Oregon: Live Events Industry of Oregon
Texas: Live Events Coalition of Texas
Utah: Live Events Coalition of Utah
Washington State: WA State Wedding and Events Association
Partner coalitions: Louisiana, New Mexico, Philadelphia, Tennessee
Behind every one of those entries is a small group of people who decided that the industry’s national associations alone were not going to be enough. Dwayne Thomas in Oregon, a lighting veteran of forty years, co-founded his chapter and ended up chairing the national coalition’s government affairs committee.
Nancy Shaffer, the founder of BRAVO! Events in Washington and the elected president of the Live Events Coalition board, channeled the coalition’s energy into one of the most visually powerful protest installations the industry had ever attempted. On August 5, 2020, on the National Mall in view of the U.S. Capitol, Shaffer’s team assembled forty-eight tables and more than five hundred chairs in a complete event setup, fully lit at dusk, with no one seated. Each table represented two hundred and fifty thousand workers, for a total of twelve million livelihoods that had been put on hold. Similar installations had already gone up in Times Square and in Dallas. It took roughly one hundred unpaid live-event professionals to build the National Mall installation. The image of an entirely empty event in front of the Capitol, executed with the same production values as a presidential gala, was the kind of move that only people who knew how to build an event could have conceived. The industry’s creativity, in the absence of clients to serve, turned itself toward making its own invisibility visible.
In California, the response was particularly women-led. The California Events Coalition, formed in September 2020, built committees by county, drafted reopening guidelines, and pushed Sacramento for the recognition that a small private event was not the same thing as a stadium concert. Its founding cohort was a roster of agency principals running their own firms.
Carole Grogan, Bright Blue Events (Los Angeles)
Marcie Mauro, ILEA Los Angeles
Martha Henderson, San Diego Events Coalition and IAVM (San Diego)
Amanda Ma, Innovate Marketing Group (Los Angeles)
Heather Ferrai, All Set Events (Bay Area)
Jill Remy, Jill & Co. Events (Central Coast)
Suzy Drell, Suzy Drell Creative Design (Los Angeles)
Across California, more regional groups stood up wherever the state had failed to fill a void. Venues, caterers, decorators, AV suppliers, entertainment vendors, and independent planners all formed associations they had never bothered to build before. The infrastructure was being invented in real time.
The agency side of the industry organized around something else: a phone call. In the spring of 2020, Cara Kleinhaut at AGENC in Los Angeles called me to ask what we had done after 9/11, and I walked her through the CEME playbook. Out of that conversation, and the broader call of experiential-agency leaders that I helped convene shortly afterward, came the Experiential Guild of America, a not-for-profit incorporated by eight of the country’s most prominent agency principals.
Alexandra Rembac, Sterling Engagements
Austin Johnston (President), AKJOHNSTON Group
Cara Kleinhaut, AGENC
Carter Reese, Hatch.IM
Jack Bedwani, the projects*
Jeff Consoletti, JJLA
Justin Lefkovitch, Mirrored Media
Larry Abel, Abel + McCallister + Abel
They set up regular Slack channels and monthly meetings, and gave experiential marketing the kind of professional association the industry had never had. Where the California Events Coalition fought Sacramento for reopening guidelines, the EGA’s work was about giving a generation of premium experiential agency owners a peer group at exactly the moment when nobody was launching anything in person.
While the petition built from the ground up, the trade-association leadership built from the top down. Go Live Together pulled the heads of fourteen of the industry’s largest associations and operating companies into a single coalition.
David Audrain, SISO
Doug Emslie, SISO and Tarsus
Hervé Sedky, Reed Exhibitions Americas
Sherrif Karamat, PCMA
David DuBois, IAEE
Bob Priest-Heck, Freeman
Brad Mayne, IAVM
Paul Van Deventer, MPI
Larry Arnaudet, ESCA
Don Welsh, Destinations International
Amy Calvert, EIC
Jim Wurm, EACA
Susan Robertson, ASAE
Dasher Lowe, EDPA
They walked into Congressional offices and explained, often to staffers half their age, what twelve million American livelihoods looked like in real time. None of these people had to do this. Their day jobs were already a fire.
At BizBash, we did the third thing the moment seemed to require. We listened. GatherGeeks ran dozens of episodes across 2020 and 2021, recording in real time what the industry was feeling at a moment when most trade publications were still writing in the past tense. Thousands of people tuned in to hear the pain. A coalition is, before it is anything else, a group of people who have heard each other.
I notice, looking back, that the same names recur across both crises and across the long quiet stretches in between. The ones who said yes to CEME were largely the ones who said yes to Go Live Together, who chair the SISO sessions and run the PCMA committees and sit on the IAEE boards and take the call when somebody’s company has just been acquired and the new owners do not understand the industry yet. There is a roster, in this industry, of perhaps two hundred and fifty people on which everything rests. The size of it is small enough that I could write the names by hand at a kitchen table. Most of the industry does not know who they are.
What Putnam Could Not See
Putnam wrote in 2000, before the events industry had fully matured into an economic sector. He saw shrinking PTAs and Elks lodges and read civic recession. What he missed, or could not yet see, is that some categories of association did not vanish so much as migrate. Princeton’s Robert Wuthnow has argued that what looks like decline is in part a transformation, with looser, issue-driven forms of association replacing older structures. The events industry sits on top of an unusually thick layer of these descendant associations. The Events Industry Council, the global umbrella body headquartered in Alexandria, alone counts more than thirty-three member organizations representing one hundred and three thousand individuals and nineteen thousand firms across the meetings, conventions, and exhibitions sectors. The names familiar to industry readers include SISO, PCMA, IAEE, MPI, ASAE, CEMA, IAVM, ILEA, ICCA, HSMAI, SITE, Destinations International, UFI, and the Exhibitions and Conferences Alliance, with at least as many again sitting alongside them. The reason the names blur after the first few is that each one represents an act of organized leadership that somebody, somewhere, decided to volunteer for in the first place, and that somebody, somewhere, has to keep volunteering for or it goes away. The lights stay on because someone keeps paying the bill out of a budget that does not exist.
What you cannot see from a distance is how this volunteer infrastructure actually runs. Every year, every one of these associations elects a new slate of officers, board members, committee chairs, and chapter directors. The CEO seats are paid. The board seats are not. The member who agreed in 2024 to chair an audit committee, a young professionals committee, a women’s leadership forum, a certification standards working group is not on a salary. She is on an evening or two a month, a flight or two a year, and an obligation to make the calls when the association needs something done. Each association does this annually. The list of volunteer chairs across the events industry’s professional associations is far too long to print here. The Events Industry Council, the global umbrella body headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, alone counts roughly three dozen member organizations spanning every region and category of the industry: from SISO, PCMA, MPI, IAEE, IAVM, ASAE, and ILEA, to HSMAI, SITE, ICCA, RCMA, NCBMP, AMC Institute, AH&LA, Destinations International, U.S. Travel, and the Incentive Research Foundation, to international members including UFI, COCAL in Latin America, SAACI in southern Africa, COMIR in Mexico, and the League of Event and Activation Agencies of the Philippines. Each elects its own national board, its own executive officers, its own standing committee chairs. The largest run extensive chapter networks. MPI maintains ninety chapters across twenty-four countries. PCMA runs seventeen North American chapters plus regional communities across Asia-Pacific, Europe-Middle East-Africa, and Latin America. IAVM, NACE, ILEA, and HSMAI each operate chapter networks of their own, and every chapter elects its own annual officers and committee chairs. When the unpaid leadership positions across the entire EIC membership are totaled, board seats and committee chairs and chapter officers and foundation trustees and working group leads, the figure exceeds three thousand volunteer leadership roles filled across the events industry every twelve months. Each is succeeded annually by someone else, often after two or three years of unpaid preparation. The roster of two hundred and fifty I described earlier, the ones whose names recur across every crisis, sits at the apex of that broader volunteer base. The two hundred and fifty set the tone; the three thousand do the work.
Leadership Is the Glue
Both of the stories I have just told are crisis stories, which can make the lesson sound situational. It is not. Leadership is leadership. The mechanism that produced CEME and the Experiential Guild of America is the same mechanism that produces a working PTA, a credible standards committee, a Tuesday-afternoon industry chapter meeting in a normal year. You do not need a pandemic. You need a problem worth solving and one person willing to carry the unpaid weight of organizing the people who can solve it. The problem can come from anywhere: convention bookings collapsing, a category that has no professional association of its own, a neighborhood losing its grocery store, a magazine no one will run anymore.
The same logic operates at a smaller scale every working day, in every event the industry produces. Every event is an act of leadership in its own niche. The conference chair who programs the tracks and decides which voices the room will hear. The wedding planner who designs the seating so that two families that have never met will eat dinner shoulder to shoulder. The trade show floor manager who walks the aisles at six in the morning checking that the booth-build is on schedule. The corporate offsite producer who picks the room and the cocktail and the speaker order because the company’s senior leaders need a particular argument settled by Friday. Each of those people is leading a temporary community. The community will exist for ninety minutes or three days, and then it will dissolve, and most of what happened in it will pass without being recorded. The decisions they make in that window are what determines whether the gathering accomplishes what it was supposed to accomplish, or simply takes up an afternoon. The accumulated weight of those decisions, in this industry, is enormous. Every conference is a small act of civic engineering. Every gala is a small act of fundraising leadership. Every user conference is a small act of community design. The industry has roughly six million working professionals in the United States alone. Most of them lead, in some form, every working week.
A good example of what this looks like in calm times is the EventCamp movement. The first EventCamp was a one-day gathering in New York in February 2010, organized by event professionals who had met on the #eventprofs Twitter hashtag and wanted a low-stakes room to experiment in. It was unpaid, low-cost, volunteer-built, and modeled on the BarCamp unconference tradition. Within eighteen months EventCamps had been held in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Vancouver, the Twin Cities, Silicon Valley, and Europe. Each was designed by its local organizers and reflected what they wanted to learn. No funder built it. No association owned it. The hybrid-event experiments that filtered out of those rooms shaped how the industry eventually understood remote attendance. The facilitation skills practiced in the unconference sessions filtered into the leadership roles those same organizers took in associations, agencies, and operating companies a decade later. EventCamp did not fade because it failed. It receded because the people who built it had moved on to the larger leadership roles the rest of the industry needed them to fill.
The principle has a corollary I have spent thirty-five years watching people miss. If you are selling something, do not sell. Help solve a problem instead, and the selling actually happens. Every conference that punishes its attendees with podium pitches is failing this test. The people who win in this industry, who have always won in this industry, are the ones who treat their customers as fellow problem-solvers rather than as targets. The byproduct of that posture is trust, which compounds for thirty years and outperforms every account-management software ever built.
There is also a body-level reason any of this works. Ideas, when they are genuinely shared, do something to the brain that the brain registers as connection. Björn Vickhoff at the University of Gothenburg has shown that choir singers’ heart rates synchronize within minutes of unison singing, mediated by the vagus nerve and shared respiration patterns. Matthew Sachs, then at the University of Southern California and now at Columbia, has shown that people who get goosebumps from music have measurably denser white-matter connections between the auditory cortex and the brain’s emotional and social processing centers. Émile Durkheim called the larger phenomenon collective effervescence a hundred and twenty years ago, before there was an fMRI to confirm it. There is a simpler name for what he was describing, and it is goosebumps. That involuntary skin response, when a room of people is moved by the same idea at the same moment, is the underlying physical evidence that something is actually happening. It is also the signal that whatever just happened in that room is about to be metabolized by everyone in it as memory, alliance, and obligation.
The chapters of Bowling Alone that resonated hardest with me are the ones on the 1940s and 1950s, the period Putnam identifies as the high-water mark of American civic life. That generation built the postwar civic infrastructure that boomers and Gen-Xers inherited and then watched erode. What they had, beyond an unusually stable economy and an unusually integrated culture, was a particular posture toward leadership. They gave people goosebumps. They proposed the Marshall Plan, the polio vaccine drive, the GI Bill, the Rotary clubs at full membership, the Boy Scouts at peak, the volunteer fire departments, and the fundraising telethons that brought entire neighborhoods into a single cause for an evening. People looked up to the leaders who organized those efforts. The leaders, in turn, produced results that justified the looking up. That mutual feedback loop, leader and follower and concrete outcome, is what sustained civic life through that period and what has been thinning out ever since. The work in front of any leader now, in any field, is to rebuild the loop deliberately. The events industry has an unusual advantage in that work, because the rooms where the loop gets rebuilt are the rooms we already build for a living.
My friend Christian raised a point about Putnam’s argument that I have not been able to shake. Putnam attributes roughly half of the civic decline since the 1960s to generational replacement, the slow aging-out of what he calls the long civic generation. He celebrates that generation as the one forged by the Depression and the war into the most civically active cohort in American history. What he does not weigh as heavily is that the war that forged the cohort also reduced it. The numbers compound: roughly four hundred thousand American servicemen died in World War Two, another thirty-six thousand in Korea, fifty-eight thousand more in Vietnam. The cohort Putnam celebrates arrived already missing some of its most likely leaders. Each casualty was someone who would have come home to chair a PTA, run a union local, anchor a Rotary club, lead a small-town civic infrastructure that nobody outside the town would ever name. The thinning-out of American civic life since 1945 is partly a story of an aging generation. It is also partly a story of a generation that came of age already short of the people most likely to have built the next chapter.
The Longevity Premium
The medical literature on this is the most surprising thing I encountered when I started pulling on this thread. Civic engagement, by almost every measure researchers have built, extends life. Two decades of longitudinal research line up the same way. Volunteers for other-oriented reasons have a four-year mortality rate roughly a third that of non-volunteers, per Sara Konrath at the University of Michigan working with the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. Two hours of weekly volunteering meaningfully reduces both mortality and physical impairment in adults over fifty, per Eric Kim at the Harvard Chan School. High social engagement correlates with a forty-two-percent lower mortality risk in older adults, per UC San Francisco. Older voters show a forty-five-percent lower five-year mortality risk than non-voters, per Konrath’s latest.
Kara Swisher’s new six-part CNN series, Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, after a season interrogating the multibillion-dollar longevity industry the tech bros have built, arrived at the same place. The two things that actually move the needle on lifespan are preventive care and social connection. Bryan Johnson‘s $2-million-a-year supplement protocol is a footnote next to friendships, community, and showing up. Be in the room with other people. Repeatedly. For unpaid reasons.
What This Means for the Industry
If you spend any time inside this literature, the conclusion is uncomfortable for the industry I have spent my career observing. We sell the conditions of long life to other people. We build the rooms where social capital gets formed. And we are perfectly positioned either to widen access to that capital or to hoard it for the audiences who can already afford a five-thousand-dollar conference badge.
The choice is not abstract. It is who chairs the next SISO committee. It is who mentors the early-career producer who has nobody senior in their corner. It is who flies to Washington when the next Go Live Together has to be invented. It is who picks up the phone when an industry colleague’s company is in trouble and there is nothing in it for the picker-upper. The same logic extends past our industry into every neighborhood association, school board, and faith community in the country. The infrastructure of American life is held together by people who said yes when they did not have to. What Putnam got right was that this kind of unpaid civic labor, once it thins out, is hard to rebuild. The medical science says it will probably extend their lives. The historical record says it has saved the industry twice. The next yes is the one that matters.
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