How do we practice love within structures of power?

What progress leaves unsolved

We are 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 are not technical. They are 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. No advance in technology resolves them on its own.

This is not an argument against progress. It is an argument for matching it.

What we mean by love

When we say love, we do not mean sentiment, and we are not asking anyone to be soft. We mean something more demanding: taking people seriously, telling the truth, and using power in ways you would be willing to defend.

It shows up in ordinary decisions. How success gets defined. Who is in the room. What a culture rewards, and what it quietly tolerates. Understood this way, love is less a feeling than a standard, and it asks more of leaders, not less.

A decade of this conversation

This inquiry is not 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 had 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 are 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 are 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 have been sitting with, you are the kind of person we are looking for.