Three years ago, I sat in a hotel lobby in Lucca at 11pm, manually cross-referencing forty survey responses against a spreadsheet of activity options, trying to figure out why half my group wanted a cooking class and the other half wanted a hike. It took me two hours and a glass...
Most retreat agendas fail before anyone even boards a plane. Not because the flights get delayed or the venue falls through, but because someone built a schedule instead of an experience: nine bullet points spaced out over three days, each one labeled "Strategic Alignment...
A practical guide to building a corporate burnout retreat around slow hill towns, olive groves, and long meals in Italy and Portugal, with notes on group size, pacing, and what a small-group operator can take off your plate.
Three years ago I sat in the courtyard of a five-star resort on the Algarve coast, watching a waiter carry out trays of imported Evian for a corporate group that had, according to their opening presentation, just committed to a 40% carbon reduction target by 2030. The flowers on...
Most executive offsite budgets are wrong before anyone books a flight. Not because the numbers are miscalculated, but because the sequence is backwards. Companies pick a destination, then a hotel, then start filling in line items until they hit a number that makes the CFO wince....
A CEO I worked with last spring described her leadership team as "aligned on paper." Eleven executives, one strategy deck, zero disagreement in meetings. Six weeks later, three of them were executing completely different versions of the same initiative. Nobody had lied. They'd...
I once sat through a executive offsite in a Frankfurt airport hotel where the conference room shared a wall with the breakfast buffet. Every session smelled faintly of bacon. The team, twenty-two people from a mid-sized logistics company, spent three days making decisions about...
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Here's a number I keep coming back to: most companies spend 40-60% more than they originally planned on their first corporate retreat. Not because they're irresponsible with money, because they didn't know what they didn't know. The venue deposit went down, then came the catering minimum, the AV...