Guest Post: Mark Goulston on Big Task Weekend

Mark Goulston wrote about Big Task Weekend on his site and was kind enough to let me repost it here. There are takeaways in it that apply to everyone, not just the CEOs, CMOs and other executives who attended the event.

Wish You Were There - Big Task Weekend 2008
By Mark Goulston

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 replace 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.

If you are in a company that is taking steps to work on a big health related task and want to find out more about Big Task Weekend and possibly attend next year's event, check out the web site.