For EA Global, I have a couple additional worries that I’d love your thoughts on:
It seems like organizing the events itself will be another large difficulty. I understand that previous EA summits required a fairly large push from Leverage; I’m guessing Tyler Alterman will be able to command at least some of the same resources, but potentially not all of them (at least, that’s what I infer from him explicitly being in charge and not Geoff Anders). Meanwhile, if costs are lower, the events could be even larger and more difficult to organize, especially for those without such extensive experience as Leverage.
If there are a number of different summits going on, some of which are less-officially organized but under the same “EA brand,” it seems like this increases the potential for damaging that brand if something weird happens. I think this was a decent risk factor even for the 2014 summit as it was run, for instance.
Do you have any plans to deal with these? Sorry to ask so many questions, but I’m hoping they’ll be useful to other people as well!
If there are a number of different summits going on, some of which are less-officially organized but under the same “EA brand,” it seems like this increases the potential for damaging that brand if something weird happens. I think this was a decent risk factor even for the 2014 summit as it was run, for instance.
I think the probability that some negative event happens increases as we add more different locations for events, but I think the total risk to the brand decreases. If something weird happened in 2014, it would mean that something went wrong at the only EA gathering of the year. If something weird happens at a single location this year, it’s more plausible to explain that it was an isolated incident than that it is representative of all of EA.
That said, I’m vetting people running the events carefully and focusing mostly on finding experienced event runners. I plan to exercise more extensive oversight for areas of managing the event that could damage the EA brand.
It seems like organizing the events itself will be another large difficulty. I understand that previous EA summits required a fairly large push from Leverage; I’m guessing Tyler Alterman will be able to command at least some of the same resources, but potentially not all of them (at least, that’s what I infer from him explicitly being in charge and not Geoff Anders). Meanwhile, if costs are lower, the events could be even larger and more difficult to organize, especially for those without such extensive experience as Leverage.
There’s no doubt that EA Global is an ambitious project and I agree that the size and scope of the plan creates an opportunity for failure. But, I have a few tricks up my sleeve that make me think this is manageable: 1) we’re planning to hire an event planner to help with coordination and logistics, freeing up more of my time to focus on strategy and marketing; 2) I’ve been consulting with Nevin and Cathleen regularly and am benefiting from their experience; 3) We’ve scaled down some aspects of the events themselves which will reduce the number of components that might go wrong.
For EA Global, I have a couple additional worries that I’d love your thoughts on:
It seems like organizing the events itself will be another large difficulty. I understand that previous EA summits required a fairly large push from Leverage; I’m guessing Tyler Alterman will be able to command at least some of the same resources, but potentially not all of them (at least, that’s what I infer from him explicitly being in charge and not Geoff Anders). Meanwhile, if costs are lower, the events could be even larger and more difficult to organize, especially for those without such extensive experience as Leverage.
If there are a number of different summits going on, some of which are less-officially organized but under the same “EA brand,” it seems like this increases the potential for damaging that brand if something weird happens. I think this was a decent risk factor even for the 2014 summit as it was run, for instance.
Do you have any plans to deal with these? Sorry to ask so many questions, but I’m hoping they’ll be useful to other people as well!
I think the probability that some negative event happens increases as we add more different locations for events, but I think the total risk to the brand decreases. If something weird happened in 2014, it would mean that something went wrong at the only EA gathering of the year. If something weird happens at a single location this year, it’s more plausible to explain that it was an isolated incident than that it is representative of all of EA.
That said, I’m vetting people running the events carefully and focusing mostly on finding experienced event runners. I plan to exercise more extensive oversight for areas of managing the event that could damage the EA brand.
There’s no doubt that EA Global is an ambitious project and I agree that the size and scope of the plan creates an opportunity for failure. But, I have a few tricks up my sleeve that make me think this is manageable: 1) we’re planning to hire an event planner to help with coordination and logistics, freeing up more of my time to focus on strategy and marketing; 2) I’ve been consulting with Nevin and Cathleen regularly and am benefiting from their experience; 3) We’ve scaled down some aspects of the events themselves which will reduce the number of components that might go wrong.