All you need is love - MLove is all you need | SMLXL - Business and Communication Innovation from Alan Moore

All you need is love – MLove is all you need

June 27th, 2010

Last week I was speaking @ participating and co-creating in an event called MLove. Which was held in Beesenstedt in an old Schloss, in the middle of nowhere. When we landed in Altenburg, our driver said “welcome to nowhere. I am now taking you you nowhere”.

I new this event was going to be different when we arrived, though I was already excited because of the design of the event, and the quality of speakers. And I knew something special might happen, when on the first day sitting in the faded grandeur of the ballroom, we were asked to close our eyes by a Tibetian Lama, and to take the red, white and blue pill for inner peace and harmony, to feel the quietness of the inner body. We all did it, it felt really weird and it felt really really good.

Yes we were all there because in some way or another, the idea of connectivity and communications enabled by mobile technologies was the gravitational pull, yet the agenda I can tell you was as broad as the diversity on this planet. Favourite speaker was, Kazi Islam – CEO, Grameenphone IT, Dhaka, Bangladesh, as his message to us was compelling and humbling. His statistics of the probability of too many people that will never make it beyond child birth, to the age of 5, the chance of obtaining clean water or an education to lift them out of poverty – forced us all to pause and think what we filled our days up with – we were he told us in the 0.01% percentile blessed in so many ways that we all take for granted.

I also felt there was a desire to want to effect change, to build the world afresh, but also that we could do this by also making money, redistributing wealth, and creating a more equitable society.

The Open Space and Future Cube experience, where speakers and attendee’s collaborated together to look at for example, Justice, Wealth Distribution, Emerging Markets, Media, was part of the special part of this journey of discovery for us all. So we were actively working together to look at problems and trying to discover/design solutions. Paul Bay spoke so elegantly about media being sensorial, emotive, and fluid. S if you did not go missed something special and if you did it was an honour to hang out with you all.

Emerging Markets Future Cube. Very intense very productive

Ralf Rottman wrote:

When Peter Giblin and Harald Neidhardt set out on their journey to create the MLOVE concept, there was one key driving factor: Putting the people back into the center of everything. Many, if not all, business events and conferences are grouped around the central concept of an audience and speakers. Two distinct roles. Some who listen. Some who talk.

While “a great chance to network” is on every agenda these days, I never quite experienced it as intense, as enriching as during the MLOVE days. Both, for work and for my personal life.

It was this intensity of engagement that made this event special, the only other experience that has moved me as much is the Do Lectures, And the art projected onto the facade of the schloss was something that took this whole experience onto another level, created by these very special people.

As the Beatles sang, All You Need is Love.