In Lisbon and Online, It's Time For Concrete Love

The House of Beautiful Business is gathering again.

Not even two weeks to go until we open the doors for this year’s main gathering of the House of Beautiful Business, and I’ve never been more anxiously awaiting an event that I had the privilege of co-curating (together with my colleague Monika Jiang, our team, and many members of our community).

Concrete Love is the response to the forces, innovations, and burning questions that will define 2022 and everything thereafter. It will take place from October 29 through November 26, 2021 in Lisbon, online, and at local events worldwide, and will explore the structures, practices, and emotions of a new kind of business that is more imaginative, playful, sustainable, and inclusive—in other words: more beautiful.

In two parts (ACTS and ACTIONS), five main-stage sessions, conversations,?workshops, performances, art installations, and social outings, you will experience the inspirations that matter now and from now on, and bring them to your workplace and life.

Concrete Love is a conference, a concert, a dance, a play, a movie, a game, a learning journey, and most importantly, a gathering to energize and grow our community and invite more people across all walks of life to become part of it.

Concrete Love is philosophical and practical, about the here and now as well as the long-term future. It is the only event where you’ll engage with melancholy and NFTs, Kant and Deep Tech, fragrance and leadership, the erotic and the pragmatic, and other unlikely pairings.

And yet, the whimsy never gets in the way: at the House, we are keen to explore the many meanings of business, but we always mean business.

There are a few things (and firsts) at Concrete Love that I’m particularly excited about:

We’re back in Lisbon for the first time since 2019!

A lot has changed since the pandemic hit. On a personal note, I moved to Lisbon a few weeks ago, and we’ve established and grown a local team here, which makes the city feel even more like the home of beautiful business (if not, the capital of beautiful business). Lisbon is where they’ll meet: river and ocean, old world and new, nostalgia and futurism, tradition and innovation, temptation and resignation, idealism and pragmatism, desire and belonging, art and craft, ethos and eros. It remains the next frontier for modern-day explorers: entrepreneurs, artists, and especially those who are both. If work is love made visible, then Lisbon is love made concrete.

Begin again!

This year and next, we will begin again, not just as a species, as societies, organizations, and individuals, re-animating and re-activating our senses, re-building our social muscles and re-designing our workplaces, but also quite literally with regards to the program of Concrete Love itself. After the closing ceremony on Sunday night, it ain’t over: after the final ACT, it is time for ACTIONS—a four-week long online-only encore that gives you the opportunity to deepen connections and conversations, and apply some of the ideas and insights from ACTS to your work and life.

The program

It will feature more than?100 speakers, more than 100 sessions, and five main acts—basically, the content of a year-long learning journey compressed into a month.?But no worries—you can take part at your own pace and convenience, whether it’s one day or every day!

Concrete Love will comprise two parts:

ACTS (Friday, October 29 - Monday, November 1, in Lisbon and online) is a?festival of ideas, a high-level map for business that wants to be more beautiful.

ACTIONS (Monday, November 1 - Friday, November 26, online only)?sets you up for traveling through the actual territory, together with fellow members of the House community. Over four weeks, we’ll gather to put beautiful business into practice and provide the?connections, collaborators, and coaching?you need to make the change yours.

View the full program here

The experience

Concrete Love is?a communal and deeply personal experience. House Resident Joe Fletcher once described House gatherings as “an experience that I wish my entire life could be like.”

To give you a flavor of what’s in store at Concrete Love:

-?We curate small WhatsApp groups, mixing virtual and Lisbon attendees who travel together through Concrete Love.?

-?We facilitate?Irrelevant Business Conversations. Irrelevance is important, irrelevance is beautiful. By which we mean that the most compelling insights emerge from the least expected encounters. Trust our human algorithms as we match you for a mystery meetup with a fellow attendee with whom you may have a lot or nothing in common.?

-?At our main venue, we’ll set up a?Tunnel of Love?for delicate performance art and workshops including “Ask Me Anything” with Esther Blázquez Blanco, “A Sex Education” with Alejandra Welsh, and a concert by the House String Quartet (world premiere!). Plus, a sound and paper installation by Brazilian artist Kleber Kubrick.

-?NFTs are an abstract concept, but we’ll make it real! Art curator Gabrielle Aruta and visual artist Jonathan Rosen, famous for The Biggest Drop at Times Square in New York City, invite you to?co-create a?Concrete Love NFT?with them that will be sold by auction house Phillips (proceeds going to charity).

-?Our musical director Mark Aanderud has assembled an amazing ensemble of?local and international musicians. They’ll perform on site and remote, on and offstage, unplugged and plugged.

-?On Saturday night, we’ll swarm out to?dinners around town in Lisbon, with groups of 8-12, hand-curated by us. Bom apetite e bom conversa??o! And online, we’ll join a?livestream from the New York Chamber of Beautiful Business?and host?The Climate Dinner?with?author Paul Greenberg.

-?Sunday is the day when you’ll get to work, for real. Play our beautiful football game or flex all kinds of muscles in?workshops and masterclasses. Stretch, regenerate, escape, and brace yourself for a?one-of-a-kind social experiment?on the eve of COP26.

-?For our Lisbon attendees, we added an overflow day, a?Day After Day,?on Monday, November 1. We’ll return to one of our previous venues in the heart of Lisbon (hint: stunning river views) to take stock of it all and begin again.

-?Meanwhile, all virtual attendees will already move on to ACTIONS! Four more weeks of content, conversation, and community: with a?Beauty Shot?every Monday, daily online lectures, and a?How to Begin?session with master coach Michael Bungay Stanier every Friday to conclude the week with the whole House community.

The speakers and performers

More than 100 authors, policy-makers, executives, scientists, and artists will present at Concrete Love, in person or online. They include bigger names and lesser-known ones (both will surprise you, promised!). Some of the speakers will come by bike from their home in Lisbon, others will travel all the way from India, like Nigerian philosopher Bayo Akomolafe, to be with us. Some have been rehearsing for months; some have written entirely new material that they are sharing for the first time. We’re incredibly grateful to all of them for their extraordinary passion and generosity.

To name just a few:

-?Katherine Maher, the former CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, joins us to discuss what it will take?to restore trust in tech and the internet.

-?Hiwote Getaneh, a podcast producer who has worked with Esther Perel and Priya Parker, and is planning her own series on Black Joy, makes you close friends with audio.

-?Cathy Hackl, the tech futurist and “godmother of the metaverse,” helps you navigate the promise and perils of that space.

-?Jonathan Rosen, the visual language-based artist of Times Square Drop fame, will bring?his Dream Machine Mirrors to Lisbon and invite?you to co-create the Concrete Love NFT collection.

-?Masahiro Sugiyama?of the Institute of Future Initiatives at the University of Tokyo?will argue that solar geoengineering is the most viable technology to mitigate climate change.

-?Pa Sinyan, managing partner at Gallup, has the data to prove that workplaces are broken—and some concrete ideas for how to fix them.

-?Michelle Kaufmann, head of R&D for the built environment, and Sophie Kleber, head of UX for the future of work, both at Google, show you how the tech giant envisions the future workplace.

-?Luke Burgis, the author of?Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, reveals what we’re really looking for at work.

-?Buse ?etin, AI researcher, makes the case for intersectional AI as key to our wellbeing.

-?Matthias Steger, co-founder and CEO of Rejuveron, discovers drugs that make us live forever.

-?Fabien Riggall, the creator of Secret Cinema, wants you to get lost in order to find yourself again.

-?Priya Parker, facilitator and author of?The Art of Gathering, shows us how we can meet meaningfully after all this.

-?Mia Birdsong, community curator and author of?How We Show Up, teaches us how we reclaim family, friendship, and community.

-?Paul Greenberg, author of?The Climate Diet, proposes 50 steps on how to eat, work, and live in a planet-friendly way.?

-?Michael Bungay Stanier, coach and author of?The Coaching Habit, helps us to begin, every Friday, four weeks in a row.

-?Justin Maguire, chief design officer at Salesforce.com, shares ideas on how to design our relationships.

-?Tim Alexander, CMO and CXO of Deutsche Bank, wonders: Can you love a bank?

-??MIT researcher?Kate?Darling?and philosopher?Tobias?Rees?discuss whether we can love robots (and be loved back).

-?Artist?Sougwen?Chung?draws with them.

-?Robotics engineer?Alessandra?Capurro?makes us fall back in love with the Earth by venturing into outer space.

-?Jacqui Lewis, theologian, activist, and author, insists on?Fierce Love.

-?And multi-instrumentalist and singer songwriter?Peter?Broderick?confesses: “Music is my lover.”

Plus: psychotherapist and bestselling author Esther Perel; afrofeminist Minna Salami, author of Sensuous Knowledge; philosopher and writer Charles Eisenstein; bestselling author and Quiet Revolutionary Susan Cain; immersive art collective Meow Wolf; dancer Ahmad Joudeh; activist investor and CIAM deputy CEO Anne-Sophie d’Andlau; geopolitical advisor and author Parag Khanna; Exponential View founder Azeem Azhar; The Sadie Collective co-founder Fanta Traore; Legatum Group CEO Mark Stoleson; management scholar Margaret Heffernan; leadership coach Alisa Cohn; business thinker John Hagel; and musician and recording artist Dino d’Santiago.

And many more...

The Lisbon venue(s)

Most of Concrete Love in-person program will take place in Marvila, Lisbon’s former industrial port neighborhood that is now up-and-coming and home to many startups, artists, and makers. Our main venue will be a 3,000 square meter abandoned warehouse that is both black box and character, featuring the aforementioned Tunnel of Love, several social spaces and art installations, a cafeteria, an online and a live-studio for additional programming (as well as our House Clinic with a team of nurses assisting with all required Covid testing). In addition, we’ll host sessions at nearby satellite spaces, including an art gallery and a community center. And the Tagus River is always just around the corner if you want to give yourself a break and enjoy a relaxed stroll along the promenade.

Zoom fatigue? Not for us!

There is a place for it. We’ll aim to prove that one can create intimacy from a distance, enabling us to learn while feeling connected. During the first part of Concrete Love, ACTS, we will use Zoom to convene our remote audience, and follow and discuss what is happening on stage in Lisbon and at local events worldwide (including some special only-online programming). During ACTIONS, the second part, Zoom will become our main medium for all attendees (aside from Clubhouse and select IRL activities), featuring lectures, in-depth conversations, and every Friday’s How to Begin session.

Hybrid for real

We will connect and integrate the 400 attendees in Lisbon and the thousands taking part online in entirely new ways. The in-person and online experience will each be distinctive, and yet interwoven throughout Concrete Love. You will stare at each other, compete with each other, dance with each other, meet fast and furious, and have “quality time.” ACTIONS will then unite all audiences.

Our global community

What an amazing group of people! Some members of our community have run local hubs, Chambers of Beautiful Business, across the globe for the past couple of years, and they will host local events in Kyoto, Johannesburg, New York, and (virtual) across Australia as part of Concrete Love. Also check out some of the work done by our House Work groups: members (House Residents) who embarked on self-organized initiatives to explore topics such as “Ingredients of a Beautiful Work Life,”?“Beautiful Business Fund,” “Making Social Media Beautiful Again,” “The Metrics of Beautiful Business,” and “10 Moral Questions for People Designing Tech Products.”

Our partners

They include BCG and the BCG Henderson Institute, forward31, futurehain, Grupo Ageas Portugal, IEEE, Indeed Innovation, Salesforce, SAP, SYPartners, ustwo, BMW Foundation, Global Peter Drucker Forum, Global Shapers, More in Common, mui Lab, NOVA SBE, The Coterie, and TheDive. Their support is congenial, critical, and much appreciated.

The team

Work is our love language (albeit not the only one, thank God). From all-day sessions in cold, grey, rainy Covid Berlin this past winter at Erchy’s coffee shop in Prenzlauer Berg to WorkHub (and Delta Coffeehouse) in breezy Marvila to urban tree house retreats, stuffy co-working spaces in Neukoelln, remote farmhouses in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern; from hosting Living Room Sessions in hotel rooms and Airbnbs in Munich, Lisbon, and Berlin; writing and editing 40 Beauty Shot issues since January; and experiencing cyberdelics together on the floor of a Santos gallery, to partying together in Monsanto park, it’s been quite a ride. Our journey ends soon, and a new one will begin.

Dance!

Never before have we had so many dancers in the House. There’s a reason for it that only became clear to us after we had already invited several dancers somewhat intuitively. In times of great uncertainty, the best thing is to put one foot forward and simply move in one direction. Transformation happens when you give up control. So let’s trust our bodies and go gaga!

Love

Ever since I wrote The Business Romantic, I’ve been intrigued by the importance of emotions in business. But I’ve always shied away from love. It seemed a bit too squishy, too grandiose, too banal, and at the same time too complicated. Not anymore. The pandemic has taught us to cut to the essence. Love is the essence of quality. “Love is the only story,” Concrete Love speaker Duff McDonald claims. Damn right.

Let’s talk about love, feel it, and make it: the heart of beautiful business.

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The House of Beautiful Business will host Concrete Love from Friday, October 29 to Monday, November 1, 2021, in Lisbon, at local events worldwide, and online, and from November 1 to November 26, 2021, online.

Due to the easing of Covid restrictions for events in Portugal, we were able to add a few more spots for the Lisbon gathering. Email us at [email protected] if you’d like to join in person. Or buy a Virtual Pass here. See you at Concrete Love!