What size should our conferences be? Here’s an interesting quote from John Sculley, the former CEO of Apple, that gives us a clue.
“The other thing about Steve was that he did not respect large organizations. He felt that they were bureaucratic and ineffective. He would basically call them “bozos.” That was his term for organizations that he didn’t respect.
The Mac team they were all in one building and they eventually got to one hundred people. Steve had a rule that there could never be more than one hundred people on the Mac team.”
—John Sculley (former CEO of Apple) talking about Steve Jobs
There’s that number one hundred again, the same number I use as an upper limit to the size of the conferences described in Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love. We need to remember that large meetings are the exception rather than the rule. Hospitality data indicates that, for ~80% of the meetings held today, if you want a participant-driven and participation-rich conference, the book’s meeting design is all you’ll need.
In addition, you can extend the methodology described in the book to larger events. I share how to do this in the free supplement to the book, available here.
So what size should our conferences be? My answer is: no bigger than necessary!
Keep reminding us on the power of 100 as it applies to our events, Adrian. We have some deep grooves of past practices we need to overcome.
Pretty cool to see that Steve Jobs supported this metric, too. For conferences with thousands of attendees, creating experiences with smaller like-minded clusters drives better connections, richer and more meaningful conversations, and at the end of the day, stronger event ROI.
Sometimes there’s nothing else one needs to say except: I agree!