Why I Started Mapping the Executive Leadership World
Why I Started Mapping the Executive Leadership World
I spend a lot of time in rooms full of senior executives.
Sometimes it is 10 people around a dinner table. Sometimes it is a larger gathering with speakers and an audience. Sometimes it is a group that meets repeatedly and gets to know each other over months or years.
We tend to use the same few words for all of these things.
Forum. Community. Summit. Roundtable. Network. Conference.
After a while, I realized I was using some of those words differently from other people too.
So I started writing the differences down.
That became the Executive Leadership Taxonomy.
You can see it here:
https://publish.obsidian.md/executive-leadership-taxonomy
This was not really intended to become a “project.”
I originally wanted a simple way to explain the different kinds of executive gatherings we run at Open Future Forum.
A private dinner is very different from a conference.
A roundtable is different from a panel.
A group of CFOs who see each other three or four times a year starts to become something different again.
The format changes what people are willing to say, who they meet and what they get out of the experience.
That matters more than the name on the invitation.
The room changes the conversation
One of the most interesting things I have learned from running executive events is how much the structure of the room changes the conversation.
Put 12 people around a dinner table and people will often talk about things they would never discuss on a stage.
Put 100 people in a room and you can introduce many more ideas and people, but the conversation becomes less personal.
Put someone behind a microphone and they become a speaker.
Put that same person around a table with their peers and they become a participant.
Neither is better.
They just do different things.
The mistake is pretending they are the same.
I am also interested in the language
There are certain words in business that gradually become so broad they stop telling you very much.
“Community” is one of them.
“Executive event” is probably another.
A community can mean thousands of people on an email list or 15 people who know each other extremely well.
An executive event can mean dinner with eight CEOs or a conference with several thousand attendees.
Both descriptions can be technically correct.
They are not especially useful.
I wanted a vocabulary that was a little more precise.
Not academic.
Just useful.
Most of this comes from experience
The taxonomy reflects things I have seen work and not work.
There are topics where a panel is perfect.
There are topics where putting a panel on a stage immediately kills the conversation.
There are groups that benefit from meeting regularly.
Others only need to come together around a particular issue.
Sometimes networking is the point.
Sometimes networking is the thing you deliberately try to minimize so people can have a deeper conversation.
You start noticing these differences after organizing enough rooms.
I wanted somewhere to capture them.
It is deliberately unfinished
I don’t think there is a perfect taxonomy for executive leadership.
The language will keep changing.
New formats will appear.
Some distinctions I think are important today may turn out not to matter very much.
And people who have spent their careers running associations, conferences, boards, membership groups and peer networks will see things I have missed.
That is part of the point.
I would much rather have something useful and evolving than something polished and supposedly definitive.
So this is an open notebook more than a finished body of work.
If you work in this world, I would be interested to know where you think the definitions are wrong, where two categories should be separated, or where I have missed something completely.
Executive Leadership Taxonomy
https://publish.obsidian.md/executive-leadership-taxonomy
I suspect I will be adding to it for quite a while.