The First and Last Order of Business: Growing Closer Together

This was the year the House of Beautiful Business truly became a home for many, and thanks are in order.

Susan Celia Swan, the executive director of V-Day, had the following to say about 2020 in our Living Room Session last week: “A door is opening that could have been closing.” 

So true. Despite the ongoing pandemic and the misery it caused, we at the House of Beautiful Business (the think tank and community I co-founded in 2017) were lucky to have the opportunity to open some doors, too, by creating community for thousands of people around the globe, through experiences whose future is, without doubt, hybrid.

We grew a lot over the past 12 months, not just as a business, but as people, and for that I’m incredibly grateful.

We are having the final all-hands call with our team today, and as we’re nearing the end of this crazy year, I wanted to take a moment and thank them.

They rose to the challenge when things looked doomed in the spring and we had to suspend our in-person gathering in Lisbon, replacing it with a hybrid virtual and local festival, The Great Wave, which swept us all away (in a good way) this fall and is still rippling on. They pitched in with all their energy and enthusiasm when we decided to host online Living Room Sessions at least once per week for several months this year to foster a sense of community during trying times, showing that we can make distance beautiful indeed. They worked tirelessly to create more content than we had ever pulled off in one single year: countless articles on the Journal of Beautiful Business, a book, and – new territory – a batch of podcasts (with our partner Porsche), audio journeys, and short films.

They thought long and hard about new ways to grow the House community, through a new membership structure and many new formats we are going to launch in the new year. More on that in January!

And they produced, above all, indelible memories. There were masquerade balls; 15 Toasts dinners; an infinite number of hours of content (and an even higher number of goofy outtakes); desperate attempts to (again) try using Trello or Slack (fail); a never-ending exploration of video conferencing tools (“Hey, tried Whereby?”); joyful House Concerts; lasting moments of silence; many dead end streets, but all worth walking down; and ebbs and flows (and tears) of exuberance and sadness, before, during, and after The Great Wave. 

This was the year in which we became, for lack of a better word, a “platform.” We launched our membership program in January and shifted our business from a pure events play to a forum for connection, content, and collaboration that is open and vibrant throughout the year. 

You could also say this was the year in which the House truly became a house: a brave new space for everyone wanting more from business and life; a home to everyone seeking community and deep connections in a time when everything is in flux; and a “promised land” for those aiming to reinvent business, their organizations, and themselves.

All of this would not have been possible without our amazing team:

• Thank you, Adam Richardson, strategist, for the wonderful collaboration on a couple of research papers. So nice to be working together again since the good old frog design days.
• Thank you, Alexie Sommer, for being such a smooth, calm-in-the-storm showrunner during The Great Wave.
• Thank you, Viola Ketelsen, and Honor Dansie, for rescuing the masquerade ball and so much more!
• Thank you, Xylia Buros, for adding some serious communications power to the team.
• Thank you, Marcia Mihotich and Rachel Hunt, for designs that are both beautiful and thoughtful.
• Thank you, Mari Moeller, our work student, perhaps the only one who portrays the 21st century version of Marlene Dietrich one day and the next helps design our CRM system.
• Thank you, Nora Hunger, for rocking our social media channels, mastering Zoom like no one else, and not shying away from the intricacies of content management systems.
• Thank you, Guido Radel, partnership lead, for bringing the House to new companies and boardrooms, never tiring of questioning and honing our relevance.
• Thank you, Linda Murphy-Ericsson, creative operations manager, for the can-do spirit and always showing up when it’s showtime.
• Thank you, Massimo Sanfelice, chef-in-residence, for creating belonging through food. 
• Thank you, Monica Ribeiro, event producer, for holding down the fort in Lisbon and making sure that our presence in our spiritual home remains strong.
• Thank you, Eva Talmadge, senior editor, for the eagle eye and mastery of chats on all platforms.
• Thank you, Jimena Markowicz and Jesse May Palmer, for being the House’s first filmmakers and motion graphic designers, combining artistic vision with fast turnaround (rare!).
• Thank you, Mark Aanderud, musical director, for giving us the music and creating a worldwide community of musicians-in-residence.
• Thank you, Marizanne Knoesen, research analyst and writer, for nurturing our community and producing an abundance of intelligence for special reports and our newsletter every week.
• Thank you, Susanne Westermann, head of operations, for looking after everything and everyone with great persistence and warmth.
• Thank you, Megan Hustad, for being the smartest and kindest managing editor there is, making us all write and think better. 
• Thank you, Morgwn Rimel, our creative director and executive producer, for enhancing quality across our brand and impressing the importance of rigorous thinking and aesthetic intelligence on us.
• Thank you, Monika Jiang, our head of content and community, for leading us into new spaces, holding them with generosity and perseverance, and going above and beyond “above and beyond” in making the House such a lively home.
• Thank you, my partner-in-crime, Till Grusche, co-founder, for daring and caring, on the great rock’n roll stage and the tiniest corner of our kitchen.

I feel very lucky to work with such a group of outstanding professionals, to learn from them, grow with them, and shoot for the stars with them, always.

With something as solid and at the same time amorphous as the House of Beautiful Business, it is hard to discern where the team starts and ends. There might be the ones named here, but there are hundreds more, from the volunteers who helped us make The Great Wave happen; the hosts of the Chambers of Beautiful Business, 36 local hubs running smaller gatherings worldwide; to the hundreds of speakers, performers, and collaborators: they all shape and make the House.

The same is true for our partners whom we feel privileged to work with, providing them with inspiration and impact, from strategy and vision to story and experiences. They include companies such as BCG, Google, Grupo Ageas Portugal, Indeed Innovation, Otto Group, Porsche, pur’ple, PwC, SAP, Syzyzgy Group, and SYPartners, among others, and nonprofits such as the IEEE or the National Head Start Association. Thank you for your continued trust and partnership!

At the heart of everything we do lies one core belief: business-as-usual is dead, but the desire for a more beautiful life, at work and beyond, is stronger than ever. 

We hope to help everyone who visits and stays in the House of Beautiful Business to transform, which is corporate speak but essentially means nothing else but bringing more love into their organization and the world. 

Sounds woo-woo? It isn’t. Wait until we make it even more concrete next year! ??

Ps. But before that, join us for the very last Living Room Session this year, a very special one indeed, on New Year’s Eve: A Love Is Born.