Scott’s journey: from global events to meaningful gatherings

Let me start the way I would if you had wandered in and we had not yet met. I’m Scott. For most of a career I built the experiences where people come together, and I loved every creative, engaging, high-pressure minute of it.

I came up through two of the great experience agencies, Jack Morton and George P. Johnson, learning the craft of gatherings from the floor up — across clients, industries, services, deliverables, and running offices across the Western United States and in Hong Kong and Singapore. Later I moved to the enterprise side as the global head of events at SAP, then Microsoft, then ServiceNow, where the portfolio of events grew larger, the stakes grew higher, and the work grew, if anything, more absorbing. I loved the energy and challenge of thousands of people engaged in a single purpose — and the student of business, and of how the brain works, in me could never resist taking an experience apart to see what made it land.

Retirement, a few years ago, finally handed me the opportunity to explore the work I had done for decades in a new and different way. It turns out I had a few things to discover.

That exploration became three books, each entering the same question — how do people find meaning? — through a different doorway. Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events, written with my friend and collaborator Bryan Rutberg and out this August, makes the case that purposeful gatherings are among the richest ways we build trust, belonging, and meaning together. Kairos Mindsets, the one I am deep in writing now, is about the decisive moments that cannot be scheduled, repeated, or recovered once they pass – like many events. Patrons & Patronage, still ahead of me, looks at meaning of a third kind — the sort we find in what, and in whom, we choose to support and associate with.

Between the books there are essays, which is really where I think out loud. I have always read a room best from its edge, and that turns out to be a fair place to write from as well.

Personally, I collect more fountain pens than any sensible person needs, I have been researching my family’s legacy and migration from Eastern Europe in the mid 1800’s, and I will cheerfully argue that “early-bird discounts” rank among the small insanities of modern life.

That is the short version. The longer one is scattered across the rest of this site — the books, the essays, and the people generous enough to vouch for me. If any of it resonates, stay a while and read around. I’m glad you found your way in.

— Scott