The House of Beautiful Business Announces The Great Wave—a Transformative, Global Business Festival

The Great Wave will feature virtual sessions and offline experiences in more than 30 cities around the world to explore how people can work and live more beautifully 

The House of Beautiful Business, a global think tank and community to humanize business in the age of machines, officially announces the full scope of The Great Wave, the first-of-its-kind hybrid business festival that explores how people can work and live more beautifully. Stretching across media and time zones, in more than 30 local hubs in cities worldwide, The Great Wave will feature a carefully curated set of online and offline experiences that draw from the arts and humanities, science, tech, and nature, and will inspire attendees to reinvent business, their organizations, and themselves. The Great Wave is scheduled from October 16-19, 2020, and tickets are available for purchase now.

The Great Wave will feature more than 100 speakers, performers, and filmmakers to initiate a movement to rebuild business, celebrating the full range of humanity and resulting in an actionable Playbook of Beautiful Business. Attendees will include thousands of business and nonprofit leaders, founders, technologists, artists and philosophers, humanists, misfits and mavericks, policy-makers and change makers, and scientists from diverse disciplines around the world. The Great Wave will facilitate connections between them through different media and technologies—including a pioneering cloud-based 3D virtual world—at a scale larger than any traditional event in the past.

“With The Great Wave, we aim to start an urgently needed dialogue. This year has been a global reckoning in the way we do business and interact with one another, so we wanted to distill that into an experience that leaves a lasting and positive impact,” said Tim Leberecht, co-founder and co-CEO of the House of Beautiful Business.

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Contributors to The Great Wave include:

• Kara Swisher, tech journalist, “Pivot” podcast host, and New York Times columnist
• Carola Rackete, the Sea-Watch captain who saved migrants at sea
• Suleika Jaouad, Emmy Award–winning writer, cancer survivor, and creator of The Isolation Journals
• Audrey Tang, digital minister of Taiwan
• Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media and the “conscience of Silicon Valley”
• Rebecca Henderson, economist and author of “Reimagining Capitalism”
• Emilia Roig, founder and executive director of the Center for Intersectional Justice
• Trevor Martin, co-founder and CEO of CRISPR start-up Mammoth Biosciences
• Maurice Mitchell, national director, Working Families Party
• Bruno Giussani, global curator of TED
• Rumman Chowdhury, global lead for responsible AI at Accenture
• Paulo Pisano, chief people officer at booking.com
• Denise Young Smith, executive-in-residence at Cornell Tech, former head of diversity and inclusion at Apple
• Martin Reeves, chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute
• Shohini Ghose, feminist quantum scientist
• Sky & Tami, TikTok stars

Attendees will challenge lofty ideas at the “Society of Skeptics,” form small groups or “Ripples” of discovery and learning virtually, try on different masks and identities, explore and experience new technologies, discuss incremental and radical measures of change, and co-create the new agenda for (beautiful) business. They will also be able totake part in dance and musical performances, sit quietly for a silent hour, take sound baths, dive—literally and metaphorically—into the ocean, and go on field trips safely. Following the event, they’ll take all the experiences and knowledge they obtained and bring it all back to their workplaces and lives.

“We’ve assembled some of the most brilliant minds for The Great Wave to drive discussions on the most pressing issues our global society is facing. We hope to inspire attendees to take home these learnings and use them—wherever they are—to make a transformative impact on societal progression,” said Till Grusche, Co-founder and Co-CEO of House of Beautiful Business.

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Beauty Can Save the World

The main topic, Beautiful Business, is a counter-movement and antidote to the new economism fueled by data-driven optimization and bottom-line pragmatism which may prove to be one outcome of the pandemic. Experiences on this theme will consider how an intuitive, emotional, and experiential sensibility presents the key to addressing the main challenges of our time, from human dignity to social inequality to climate change.

The New Social Contract in the Pandemic Age

The future of society will be largely determined by the future of work, and The Great Wave will host discussions surrounding policy ideas such as Universal Basic Income and develop a vision for remote work, or the hybrid workplace, that does not create new divides and empowers all workers to thrive. This thread will focus on a diverse notion of diversity, including neuro-diversity, emotional granularity, and a much more fluid understanding of our gender, sexual, and cultural identities at work and beyond.

The Future of Community? Making Distance More Beautiful

The Great Wave is a large-scale field experiment: the first hybrid—virtual and in-person—gathering of its kind, it will aim to prove that it is possible to create a communal, transformative experience without being together in person; that it is possible to be connected and feel a sense of intimacy without being physically close. Moreover, with experiences such as “The Society of Skeptics” or “Team Battle,” The Great Wave will create space for the playful facilitation of tension.

The House of Beautiful Business partnered with Stadiumred Group, a collective of some of the most successful specialist agencies in marketing and advertising, to drive the development and execution of The Great Wave for its first hybrid iteration this year. With vast experience in creating transformative experiences for the world’s top brands, including Disney, Nike, and American Express, Stadiumred Group was able to convert The Great Wave into a unique, global phenomenon that will set the standard for events moving forward.

“What the House of Beautiful Business is doing with The Great Wave is changing the way we see the world and facilitating a gathering of minds on an unprecedented scale. We’re honored to be their partner in amplifying that message during a time when it’s most needed,” said George Bennett, CGO of Stadiumred Group.

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