IMEX25 Frankfurt Recap: Dr. Goldblatt's Session Transcript

Professor Joe Goldblatt is considered one of the foremost authorities in the global events industry. As the founding president of ILEA and author or editor of 40+ books—including the first textbook in event management—his work has shaped the profession for over four decades. He also founded the CSEP in 1997. He held the world’s only professorial chair in planned events at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh and has produced events for U.S. Presidents, popes, and global dignitaries. His legacy continues to influence the field through his research, writing, and mentorship. Miss Dr. Goldblatt's speach at IMEX? Check it out here! ILEA Presents the Magic of Live Events and our Boundless Future IMEX Frankfurt, Germany

21 May 2025

Guten Morgen, Buenos Dias, Bonjour, Buongiorno, BomDia, Kalimera, Dobro ranku, Dzien Dobry, Boker tov,Sabar alkhar …

Good morning in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portugese, Greek, Ukranian, Polish, Hebrew, and Arabic and thank you madam President and dear ILEA friends from all around the world for this warm welcome.

Mille Failte ghu IMEX ILEA! This is the Scots Gaelic pronunciation for a thousand welcomes to IMEX and ILEA!

I wish to dedicate this talk to all former and current presidents of ILEA and ISES and also to the blessed memory of Bob Graves, who had the original idea for ISES and to so many others who have sacrificed so much so that we could freely assemble today.

When I was a much younger man producing events often until the wee hours of the morning my wife and I would arrive home just prior to sunrise and our four year old son would inevitably burst into our room, jump on our bed and shout “Good morning Mama! Good morning Papa!”and we would groggily reply “Good morning Sam.

However, Sam was always ambitious and he would jump even higher and shout louder “It is not a good morning, it is a GREAT morning!” We replied slightly louder, “Great morning son, now go back to sleep.”Sam would have none of this because he was just like ILEA members, he was always reaching higher and demonstrating boundless enthusiasm for every new day.

He then leaped over our bodies and said “It is not a good or great morning, it is a GRAND morning!”

Well, by then we were fully awake.

So how about you? I shall say good morning again and you shout “GREAT MORNING”.

Good morning? GREAT MORNING!

Now I shall shout great morning and you, if you are able, please rise, raise your hands, and shout three times GRAND MORNING! GRAND MORNING! GRAND MORNING!

And what a grand morning it is!

Please be seated.

This morning I promise this talk shall end on the same day it begins. That is some promise from an old retired professor.  

I wish to first share with you the roots and shoots of ISES which became ILEA, the eras that have defined our profession from the age of invention to today’s age of irresistible, the five lessons I have learned from great leaders m about creating an enduring legacy, and what I believe is the boundless future for today and tomorrow’s event leaders. And along the way we will explore the trends, technologies and mindsets of our guests and clients that will inform our decisions so we may achieve event greater success.

But first, I am often asked by new ILEA Members, “How did it all begin?”

So, let’s get started …

In 1988 Special Events magazine hosted a conference at the posh Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. One of the events was held off site and I was sitting in the front row of the coach when a tent rental expert said to me “Do you see the opportunity ahead?” I looked into the horizon and failed to see his point. He then turned to me and said “We need more than this conference. We need a  professional association!”

Nearly forty years ago, there was a soothsayer sitting to my left named Bob Graves who was the owner of a large party rental firm in Philadelphia. He supplied major marquees for families such as Malcolm Forbes who owned Forbes magazines and other similar very wealthy folk.

I asked him how we might create an association and he said “It is already happening. Look behind you, there are 50 folk following us right now into the future!” God bless Bob Graves. He was right.

With the encouragement of Special Events magazine and their pioneering editor, the indefatigable Carol McKibben, we announced an exploratory meeting would be held the following year in Dallas, Texas. About ten people expressed interest in attending and I set the small room for five people. Over 50 people tried to squeeze into the room and many more listened from the hallway. At this meeting we appointed temporary officers and I pulled out a $100 bill and placed it on the table and said, “It requires funding to achieve our dreams. Here is mine. Will you join me?” 

We raised $1000 in very short order and away we went.

Six short months later we met in Atlanta and to help defray the expenses of the new leaders and attract a crowd that I offered to give a free speech for the staff at a local hotel in exchange for 15 complimentary hotel room nights and free food and drink.

I have never been paid so much for a speech since that free one because at that hotel we elected our officers, hired our executive director, and I scrawled on a flip chart in large letters C S E P! I had no idea what those letters would become. But it became something priceless!  ISES and later ILEA was born!

From that weekend we continued to meet often and then, at our own expense, we traveled all over the USA urging the formation of chapters. 

And like a thousand flowers, chapters bloomed everywhere and soon internationally as well.  During this time we had experienced severe economic recessions (some of you will remember Black Monday of1987 when the stock market crashed and nearly 2 trillion 

US dollars disappeared over night). The the tragedy of September  11, 2001 when terrorism suddenly halted all live events and this was followed in 2008 by a global economic recession and then the Covid 19 global pandemic that threatened to crush us, and now there is further economic and international insecurity.

And through it all, we kept going, we triumphed and continued to grow in strange and unusual ways.

Do you remember when the term hybrid only referred to plants?

You see, I have always believed that the best live events have a final layer of icing on the very rich cake layers of research, design, planning, coordination, and evaluation of something I call “magic and mystery”. Throughout human history we have witnessed the fact that it is impossible to complete predict the behaviour of human beings. 

In fact, in the Jewish Yiddish phrase “Der Mansch Tracht, Un Gott Lacht" which means “Man plans, God laughs!”Human plans are often subject to unforeseen circumstances and unexpected changes, often making it so that our best laid plans cannot always come to fruition in the same way intentioned. 

The proverb highlights the unpredictable nature of life and the importance of being adaptable to change.  

Throughout my nearly sixty years of producing live events I have witnessed many different eras or ages of development within our very old craft and relatively new profession.  

I have described these eras in the field of events management as stretching from the age of discovery and invention when we began to use the term special events in the 1950’s to the 1980’s which became the age of growth due to a strong economy and the growth of the corporate events sector, to the early 1990’s and the age of research and education through the growth of world wide courses and degrees in events management, and then the age of reinvention following the global resetting that was necessary after September 11, the worldwide recession, and Covid 19.

Now, we are entering what I define as the age of irresistibility where humans cannot no longer resist, refuse, or avoid live events. Thanks to all of you  and your forbearers, events are simply everywhere and in an age of increasing division and even distrust, now more than ever before, events are the magnetic force that brings us together for what I believe is the greater good.

The Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner who studied indigenous people all over the world said “All human society celebrate their joys, their triumphs, and their sorrows.”

I discovered this myself when I conducted research in the area known as the Mountains of the Moon in Uganda with a tribe of 100 Batwa pygmies.

When I asked the King of the Batwa Pygmies why they continue to practice these rituals he said …

“To bring us together to live life more fully and pass along these experiences to our future generations.”

How and why did this happen? I believe it was, is, and will be because of what is described by scholars as stoic leadership.

Stoic is derived from the Hellenistic Greeks and it refers to a porch where philosophers like you and I would gather to scan the horizon and discuss the great issues of our time. And they did this by practicing the five virtues or values of first always aiming for the highest good, views based on knowledge. Secondly, realising that wise folk must live in harmony with the divine laws of nature. Third, they must act reasonably (also identified with Fate and Providence) to govern their nature. And finally, fourth and fifth, they must be indifferent to the vicissitudes of fortune whilst experiencing both pleasure and pain.

Knowledge, Reason, Nature, Fortune and Pleasure.These five values I  believe also govern and provide a road map for a more sustainable and future proofed live events industry.The first leadership secret value is of course knowledge and that is why the CSEP has been so important for nearly 40 years.

Event leaders are not solely skilled in research, design, planning, coordination, and evaluation they also must demonstrate the ability to seamlessly transit through all five phases of event production naturally and with unyielding confidence.

This is what I call the precious and all powerful intersection of event leadership knowledge, nature,and reason.Increasingly and due to many external economic and social changes in society event leaders must also be prepared to seamlessly experience both pleasure as well as pain whilst demonstrating stoicism in order to hold on, to advance, and to eventually rise once again.

You and I have witnessed this over and over again through terrorist attacks, financial calamity, and the scourge of a global pandemic.

Through the ages, Europe has certainly been no stranger to many historic shocks brought on by warring nations, unhealthy living conditions, and economic uncertainty such as the introduction of Brexit.  

And through it all, we have over and over again turned to live events to recover, refresh, and reinvent our world.

This year we have recently celebrated the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.   Did you know that this historic milestone was celebrated with the creation of one of the world’s largest and most well loved events?   Sir Rudolf Bing, the famous opera director desired “To build a platform for the-flowering of the Human Spirit” and in my city of Edinburgh, we now have 12 annual festivals and seven of them take place in August. Over 3.5 million were sold last year making our cultural festivals in the same attendance league as the Olympic Games and the World Cup.  However, our festivals are held annually while the sports events are held every four years.

In order to practice what I preach in terms of increasing one’s personal knowledge and remaining relevant, In my retirement years, I continue to attend monthly continuing education sessions.

My classroom is a small table at the Balmoral Hotel where I invite festival directors, international leaders and others who are half my age to lunch so I may benefit from their experience and wisdom. Together we try to make sense of the past, understand the present look into the future. I suppose that table is for me, now a well practiced stoic, my personal porch.

Over the past 20 years and nearly 500 luncheons I have surprisingly learned that those leaders who are most successful and happy are also the most stoic. They never stop learning and they do not fear new technologies such as AI, rather they reasonably evaluate trends and the changing mind sets of their guests and then continually adapt their practice of events leadership to insure their events remain at the highest quality and are always relevant for their guests.

And through both pain (such as the global pandemic)and pleasure (the successful out comes of their events), they use these experiences as equal learning opportunities to insure that they practice the mantra that skilled sailors have used for many centuries to reach their destination … “Steady as she goes.”

Perhaps this is one of the secrets of success for our festivals .  Like an elegant swan upon our Scottish lochs there is the appearance of grace and peace above and upon the water whilst they are furiously paddling underneath, determined to reach their destination.  When our industry does experience dramatic shocks one writer described this as black swan theory.

The black swan is a rare and sudden disruption and may appear as it first did in Australia, creating a significant disruption.

According to the best - selling author Nasim Taleb who is a mathematical statistician, we should always be prepared for these disruptive periods and when they appear we must also ask how we may use them to our further advantage. 

I believe this was referred to as pivoting  just a few years ago. I prefer to describe it as “rising”.

Human beings, similar to bread, are composed of chemicals and when heat is applied they may either collapse or rise depending upon the ingredients. I have always believed and continue to believe today, that event leaders such as yourselves are in fact composed it’ll of special chemicals that when feeling the heat of challenge and change, seek to rise and in rising create something more beautiful.

As Bob Graves taught me many years ago, it is important to always look to the horizon and I would add to also always look over your shoulder to be absolutely certain the right people are following you to that horizon to help you reach your next destination.

Throughout my lifetime, like many of you, I have worked with giants upon whose shoulders I now stand. Let me tell you about some of them.

First was my father ran for Mayor and lost by 200 votes.  A news reporter later said that he was a firefly, that bright flickering light that people would follow to see where it leads them.

Next was my wife Nancy who when I list my business and whined to her that I did not even have a desk to continue my work, she removed a door and placed it upon two file cabinets and said “Go to work.”  I went to work applying for a doctoral degree program and graduated three years later.

Finally, my clients, guests, students, and those who have encouraged and contributed to my research for over 50 years.

One example of this was when my doctoral supervisor told me to visit a local nursing home to interview older people about the events of their lives.  One 98 year old admonished me by saying “These are not events.  These are the milestones of our lives!”

And finally, well when an old professor says “finally” he does not necessarily mean immediately, however, today I do in order to save time for a few questions.

I confidently believe that future of live events is secure in your strong and capable hands.

After all, when a few people during the age of invention created ISES we hoped that one day we would smile with pride upon our descendants who helped usher in an age of irresistibility where live events cannot be resisted, refused, or avoided.

Therefore, we must all look to the horizon, then rise up to look even further, and always keep learning because knowledge is a virtue and virtue as we know from the Greeks is indeed a priceless value that is similar to fireflies, and creates magic and mystery wherever you go.

Dear friends, may you all go well and may all the days of your life be, as they should be, special live events!

Thank you.