Earlier this summer I co-hosted DreamChange, Inc.’s inaugural Love Summit – an unconventional business conference created to show how using love in the workplace can improve operations, increase sales, and ultimately help solve the underlying cause of the wide range of problems we face in the world today.
The Love Summit debuted at Wieden+Kennedy headquarters; the largest independently owned advertising agency in the world. They’re the guys that came up with Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign, and the creative work for many other world-changing brands such as Dodge, Chrysler, Verizon, Procter & Gamble, and Coca Cola.
It was a big deal for a small nonprofit like DreamChange to have the support of Dan Wieden, co-founder of Wieden+Kennedy. Despite Dan’s initial reservations about calling a business conference “The Love Summit”, he courageously hopped on board with his friend John Perkins, NY Times bestselling author and founder of DreamChange.
I recognized that The Love Summit was not business as usual or business as most of us knew it, and was fully prepared to use concrete reasoning to neutralize the preconceived notions that come with using the word “love” in business. In fact, it was rewarding to find the hard-evidence and objective reasoning (that especially men craved) to back up my case. This helped a lot of people, who initially resisted the concept of love in business, to begin to understand why The Love Summit was so important.
But at the end of the day, it wasn’t my portfolio of research that changed Dan’s mind; it was a personal experience he had with his own employees. In the weeks leading up to The Love Summit, Dan began to prepare for his talk and decided to interview some of his staff. The interview question he chose to ask was whether his employees felt love played a role in the workplace at Wieden+Kennedy. Their unvarnished answers were then turned into a (hilarious), mind-bending short video, which Dan presented during his Love Summit speech.
To Dan’s surprise, each one of his employees answered that love was not just a prominent force at Wieden+Kennedy, but that it was what made their work so enjoyable. Despite the fact that Dan already prided himself on the fact that Wieden+Kennedy was totally unique to other advertising agencies, he never realized that what set it apart from the others and made them so successful was love.
You can watch Dan Wieden’s talk here (if you only have a few minutes, fast forward to 16:38 for the video of his employees). And be sure to check out the 7-minute Love Summit highlight video for some serious inspiration. As you’ll see, some incredibly influential men, from Dan Wieden to Dan Price to the Mayor of Portland, have already begun to embrace love in business. Won’t you hop on board?
*DreamChange is scouting corporate venues in Europe and the United States as plans are being developed for Love Summit business conferences in 2016. If you would like to join the DreamChange millennial fundraising team and/or the movement of individual and corporate sponsors who help make The Love Summit a reality, please contact [email protected].
