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Why Corporate Summits Are Essential to the Success of Your Business

At Volaris it seems as though we are always planning for our next corporate summit. After finishing a Global HR Summit, we began preparing for our Professional Services Summit and our Strategic Planning Summit with our global business unit leaders.

Why we do it:

We think that it is important to get people to come together to learn and share. Working collaboratively has provided us with the tools necessary for success, so that our company is always moving forward. Summits are a great opportunity to see how far the company has come, learn what others are working on and identify where we need to focus our attention more directly.

We think that regardless of time, distance, and cost, bringing people together is central to the success of a summit. However the use of video conferencing software helps when others cannot travel great distances, but are still eager to learn and to share.

Key focus:

We want to establish a vision for change, which means that we organize summits when we need to discuss large scale goals and possible changes. In order to make a summit most effective the content must be geared towards an important topic; it has to be more than a simple meeting.

Furthermore, at our summits we encourage more than just presentations in a lecture style format. We often use breakout sessions as a way to hash out new initiatives and to generate new ideas.

As a result, a summit is very often a generator of more complex questions which need to be solved than an answer to current ones. However these questions are necessary in order to drive the company forward.

Important Information:

Summits take a lot of work to plan and prepare for - make sure that you have a team in place that will be efficient in organizing your summit so that it goes off without a hitch. Also ensure that you can justify the funding to host a summit – bringing in your top leaders and innovators from around the globe is a costly endeavor.

At Volaris, we think that the cost and time involved in hosting a summit is certainly worth it. Outlining next steps is vital for any company, and a summit provides the unique opportunity for you to do so with all of your leaders in one room. By pooling together ideas and collaborating on a large scale, companies can collectively decide on new initiatives and directions the company should consider moving towards.

Remember

Follow up on what was discussed at the summit. Why spend all the time and money to leverage new ideas if they aren’t put into action? Divide the responsibility between groups who can focus on achieving the new goals which have been outlined during the summit.

Your Turn

Does your company host corporate summits? Do you see their worth? Do you have any strategies you use to make your summit great? Let us know in the comments below and like and share with us Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

About the Author

Mark Miller is the Global CEO of Volaris Group and Trapeze Group. In addition, Mark is the COO at Constellation Software – Volaris Group’s parent company. He began his career as a software developer and it was during that time that he co-founded Trapeze Group in 1995. Mark has a passion for software technology and building innovative businesses that last forever. His goal is to help intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs surround themselves with a great team so that they can be leaders in their industries.

Profile Photo of Mark Miller