Amer Iqbal gives closing keynote at GBTA’s annual conference
Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) held their annual conference in Singapore on May 14-15th, and they invited me to give the closing keynote.
Ahead of the keynote, I’d taken some time to speak with GBTA’s leadership and had identified a number of tensions from various stakeholders in the business travel community:
Corporate employers are trying to manage the costs of business travel, particularly in a post Covid era
Employees want more flexibility in their business travel than ever, for example adding a few days of leisure travel with their family to a business trip
Distributors want to adopt emerging standards in the industry like APIs that help create consistency and let their systems talk to a variety of different suppliers and service providers in a consistent way
Suppliers like airlines all want to own customer data and build direct-to-consumer relationships
And of course - the headline for the entire industry is to achieve all of this sustainably, making business travel more efficient and delivering better environmental outcomes
Conscious that attendees had spent two days in detailed sessions discussing all of these issues, I decided to elevate the keynote to a single common theme. Across all of these themes, I saw that one thing would be needed more than anything to resolve these tensions and achieve these goals: collaboration.
With this in mind, my presentation was entitled: Unlocking the Power of Partnerships. Like all of my presentations, it consisted of three core elements:
Analogous storytelling: I told the story of how Michael Jordan’s famous last shot was actually the result of teamwork and collaboration, not just individual brilliance. I then got a bunch of volunteers on stage to re-enact that famous moment in sports history to drive the point home.
Case studies: I then shared three specific cases from the business world that demonstrated how successful partnership design can lead to winning outcomes across customer experience, ESG and distribution challenges
Framework: I then used a rubber band game to get participants to feel what it’s like to be part of a winning partnership. I shared the underlying framework (Seth Godin’s Changemaker’s Triangle) to demonstrate the importance of identifying capability gaps and collaborating to build a winning partnership.
The session was received extremely well with excellent feedback across the board.
Thanks to GBTA for inviting me to close their biggest show of the year!
Amer
