How do we practice love within structures of power?
A ten-year inquiry into love as a practical force in how we lead, hold power, and build what lasts.
Convened since 2015 at Wieden+Kennedy and LPK. More than 450 leaders across 35 industries, from the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East.
What progress leaves unsolved
We're living through a period of remarkable technical progress and deepening human strain. Trust in institutions is falling. Loneliness is rising. Artificial intelligence is changing how we work, decide, and relate faster than our judgment can keep pace.
The hardest of these problems aren't technical. They're relational. They come down to how we treat one another, what we believe people are worth, and how we use the power we happen to hold. Those questions are older than any of our tools, and we've built almost nothing to meet them at the speed we've built everything else.
That gap is what this work is for.
What we mean by love
When we say love, we don't mean sentiment. It's often gentle, and sometimes gentleness is exactly what a moment requires. But it isn't only gentle. We mean something more demanding as well: taking people seriously, telling the truth, and using power in ways you'd be willing to defend.
Love shows up in ordinary decisions. How success gets defined. Who's in the room. What gets rewarded. Who gets protected when something goes wrong. Understood this way, love is less a feeling than a standard, and it asks more of leaders, not less.
None of this is only public, either. Whatever someone hasn't reckoned with privately tends to surface in the decisions they make under pressure, though rarely under its own name. How we lead is always shaped, in ways we may not recognize, by where we've known safety, fear, belonging, and uncertainty. The inner and the institutional aren't separate projects. They're the same one, approached from two directions.
A decade of this conversation
This inquiry isn't new. The Love Summit first convened in 2015 at Wieden+Kennedy in Portland, and again in 2017 at LPK in Cincinnati, two of the most respected creative institutions in the country. More than 450 leaders took part, across 35 industries and from the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. Fortune 50 executives, government officials, founders, investors, researchers, and people building things meant to outlast them.
They came for a conversation most gatherings avoid, and many left calling it unlike anything they'd attended.
"The Love Summit has the potential to be one of the most provocative, most transformational get-togethers you have ever participated in."
— Dan Wieden, co-founder of Wieden+Kennedy, creator of Nike's "Just Do It"
What we are building now
After ten years, we're building something steadier than an annual event. The center of gravity is a community: leaders across sectors, already doing this work, in conversation with one another throughout the year.
That conversation takes shape as a growing library of exchanges with people putting these ideas into practice, published over time and gathered, once a year, at the Love Summit itself.
The community is the substance of the work. The summit is where it gathers.
An invitation
We're convening a small group of people to shape what comes next. Leaders who want to take part in the conversations. Organizations interested in partnering. And readers who simply want to follow the work as it unfolds.
If the question at the top of this page is one you've been sitting with, we'd like to hear from you.