For all the laurels he receives as one of the most brilliant innovators of our time, Steve Jobs once commented, “Picasso had a saying — ‘good artists copy; great artists steal’ — and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
Much has been made of that statement, particularly because Jobs and Apple sued numerous companies over the years for allegedly copying or stealing its intellectual property, including Microsoft and HP. One of Jobs’ last widely publicized battles was against Google and its Android mobile operating system.
“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
In 2014, journalist Dan Farber, at the time working for CNET, asked Apple executives about Jobs’ statement. “I think what he meant by ‘steal’ was you learn, as artists have, from past masters,” said Philip Schiller, Apples’ senior vice president of worldwide marketing. “You figure out what you like about it and what you want to incorporate into your idea, and you take it further and do something new with it.”
That’s a big part of the concept at BizBash, a company founded in 1999 to cover the meetings and events industry. Through its website, magazine, copious e-newsletters, a podcast (GatherGeeks) and live events, BizBash is devoted to reporting on news and trends in B2B and consumer-facing events.
CEO David Adler says the website has become the largest, most-visited website for professional event planners. It’s an invaluable resource even for those who do not plan corporate events or meetings for a living. If you regularly get pulled into any aspect of planning offsites for your company and you are not subscribing to the BizBash e-newsletters, you’re missing a lot of creative inspiration.
The BizBash website (BizBash.com) spotlights the most creative ideas with fun slide shows and quick-read stories. “We’re the way event planners peek over the fence to see what others are doing,” Adler explains in a video on the company’s website. “If you think about it, event planners never get to see other people’s events.”
One recent creative meeting idea that BizBash spotted and shared was the untraditional use of a celebrity. A number of companies use a celebrity as a featured entertainer, BizBash explained, but guests are more surprised to encounter celebrities in an unexpected place, such as behind the bar. At MSNBC’s White House Correspondents Dinner after-party in Washington in 2012, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow (a self-professed mixologist) poured drinks for part of the evening.
Other ideas it recently shared for bringing an element of surprise to an event include bringing in a marching band and arranging for pop-up entertainment in unexpected places.
Memorable offsites and live events are stimulating. BizBash understands that creativity begets creativity.
As Apple’s Schiller told CNET’s Farber, “Great people actually understand at a deeper level what makes something great and then build on the shoulders of that and build something even more marvelous and take it further. “We all learn from everything in our industry.”
BizBash, a monitor of what’s neat and new at live events, practices what it preaches with entertainment at its recent launch of a San Francisco office.
