Golf Tournament

Eighteen holes, a full field of IT leaders, and zero PowerPoint slides. Our inaugural golf tournament was the longest-format event we’d hosted, and it turned out that six hours on a course is exactly the right amount of time to build the kind of relationships that actually matter in this industry.

The scramble format kept things competitive without being cutthroat, and the conversations between shots covered everything from cloud cost optimization to AI strategy to who had the worst vendor horror story. By the back nine, strangers had become peers, and by the 19th hole, peers had become collaborators.

The tournament proved something we’d suspected all along — the best technology conversations don’t happen in conference rooms. They happen when leaders are out of their element, relaxed, and spending real time together. We’ll be doing this one again.