Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Art of Gathering
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.priyaparker.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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PERSONAL
Married Anand Giridharadas; children: two.
EDUCATION:University of Virginia, graduated; Massachusetts Institute for Technology, master’s degree; Harvard University, master’s degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Entrepreneur, consultant, and writer. Thrive Labs, NY, founder. Former employee of organizations, including Dalai Lama’s Foundation for Universal Responsibility, PRS Legislative Research in India, the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, and the Omidyar Network. Founding member of Sustained Dialogue Campus Network; member of World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Values Council and New Models of Leadership Council; senior expert at Mobius Executive Leadership.
MEMBER:Phi Beta Kappa.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Priya Parker is an entrepreneur, consultant, and writer. She founded a consulting company called Thrive Labs, through which she has worked with businesses, including LVMH, Stone Barns, and the Museum of Modern Art.
In 2018, Parker released the book, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. In this volume, she identifies common problems that occur within gatherings. Parker explains that throwing out arbitrary rules, planning carefully, and meaningful content are among the things that can make gatherings more successful.
In an interview with John Williams, contributor to the online version of the New York Times, Parker explained how she became inspired to write The Art of Gathering. She stated: “Every time I was at a dinner party with amazing people who would go home after a beautiful night of food having never connected in a meaningful way, or at a meeting with attention paid to the whiteboards or the PowerPoint font but not to gripping people or reminding them why they do the work they do. I kept thinking, all this time and effort was clearly put into these gatherings. So what is actually happening and why aren’t we connecting?” Parker continued: “I wanted to write a book that shifted the focus away from the crudités and on to what actually creates magic between people.” Parker told a writer on the Journal of Beautiful Business website: “Every gathering contains the opportunity to create a temporary alternative world for those who enter it. And one of the ways to do that is to think like a game designer and create temporary rules.” Parker added: “My mother has been a huge influence on me. She’s a sociologist/cultural anthropologist and is an incredible gatherer. Throughout my childhood she created various well-conceived gatherings, though I didn’t think of them as such at the time. When I was eleven, she threw me a ‘period party’ where she, along with half-a-dozen of her female friends, welcomed me into womanhood.” Parker continued: “When I was in high school, she hosted weekly gatherings in our basement for a dozen of my friends to learn ‘life skills,’ as she put it. She understands the power of ritual, and I am all the better for it.”
A Kirkus Reviews critic offered a favorable review of The Art of Gathering. The critic suggested that the book would be “useful to those whose job it is to plan meetings, conferences, and the like and a worthy survival manual for consumers of the same.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2018, review of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.
ONLINE
Journal of Beautiful Business, https://journalofbeautifulbusiness.com/ (May 13, 2018), author interview.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (May 13, 2018), John Williams, author interview.
Priya Parker website, https://www.priyaparker.com (July 9, 2018).
Priya Parker is a facilitator and strategic advisor.
She is the founder of Thrive Labs, at which she helps activists, elected officials, corporate executives, educators, and philanthropists create transformative gatherings. She works with teams and leaders across technology, business, the arts, fashion, and politics to clarify their vision for the future and build meaningful, purpose-driven communities. Her clients have included the Museum of Modern Art, LVMH, the World Economic Forum, meetup.com, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, the Union for Concerned Scientists, and Civitas Public Affairs.
Trained in the field of conflict resolution, Parker has worked on race relations on American college campuses and on peace processes in the Arab world, southern Africa, and India. She is a founding member of the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network. She has been appointed a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Values Council and the New Models of Leadership Council. She is also a senior expert at Mobius Executive Leadership.
Priya is the author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters (Riverhead Books, 2018). She is passionate about helping people create gatherings in their work and life that are transformative and meaningful for the people in them. She is also the co-creator of the 15 Toasts dinner series format and I Am Here Days. Her TEDx talk on purpose has been viewed more than 1 million times.
Priya studied organizational design at M.I.T., public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and political and social thought at the University of Virginia. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, Anand Giridharadas, and their two children.
To inquire about Priya designing and/or facilitating your company gathering, send us a message.
QUOTED: "useful to those whose job it is to plan meetings, conferences, and the like and a worthy survival manual for consumers of the same."
Parker, Priya: THE ART OF GATHERING
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Parker, Priya THE ART OF GATHERING Riverhead (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 5, 15 ISBN: 978-1-59463-492-5
Wherever two or more of you gather, you're probably doing it wrong.
The reason that most of us hate meetings is that meetings are so hateful: They're too often aimless and endless, poorly conducted and seldom meaningfully concluded. Parker--founder of a company that specializes in "transformative gatherings" and a sort of Martha Stewart of the conference table--identifies the common errors that go into gathering, which she helpfully, if perhaps obviously, glosses as "the conscious bringing together of people for a reason." The "for a reason" bit is key, for the act of bringing people together can seem like an afterthought, seldom planned through from beginning to end and a font of missed opportunities. The first step, writes the author, is "committing to a bold, sharp purpose," with milestones along the way that include plenty of reminders for why the attendees are there in the first place. Parker nicely explores and sometimes explodes conventions: Must a baby shower be the exclusive turf of women? Can people who hate meetings be persuaded that they're something other than a "Massive Exciting Opportunity for a Panic Attack"? To the detriment of a book that focuses on sharp significance, the author sometimes allows her anecdotes on successful and unsuccessful gathering to run on until they're out of steam, violating her own principle: "If you are going to hold your guests captive, you had better do it well." And readers who detest business jargon won't be happy with phrases like, "we didn't gauge their buy-in." Fortunately, such lapses are outweighed by Parker's enthusiastically delivered formulas for better get-togethers, from "sprout speeches" to accepting that time is fleeting and that the good planner will strive to make a meeting different and memorable.
Useful to those whose job it is to plan meetings, conferences, and the like and a worthy survival
1 of 2 6/24/18, 12:06 AM
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manual for consumers of the same.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Parker, Priya: THE ART OF GATHERING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700517/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=674cf070. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700517
2 of 2 6/24/18, 12:06 AM
QUOTED: "every time I was at a dinner party with amazing people who would go home after a beautiful night of food having never connected in a meaningful way, or at a meeting with attention paid to the whiteboards or the PowerPoint font but not to gripping people or reminding them why they do the work they do. I kept thinking, all this time and effort was clearly put into these gatherings. So what is actually happening and why aren’t we connecting?"
"I wanted to write a book that shifted the focus away from the crudités and on to what actually creates magic between people."
Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: Turning Routine Meetings Into Memorable Events
By John Williams
May 13, 2018
Image
CreditPatricia Wall/The New York Times
Like many others, I’m celebrating Mother’s Day with my family this weekend. The following weekend, I’m attending a significant birthday party. Priya Parker would have strong opinions about these events. In “The Art of Gathering,” she sets out to invigorate the way we meet — at birthdays, weddings, funerals, negotiation tables and elsewhere. Trained in conflict resolution, Ms. Parker has worked on issues including the fate of NGOs in Zimbabwe and the peace process in the Middle East. On a more personal level, she has helped friends with questions about how to sit shiva or throw a dinner party. Much of Ms. Parker’s advice is provocative, sometimes counterintuitive, with chapter titles like “Cause Good Controversy” and “Don’t Be a Chill Host.” (“Many people who go to the serious trouble of hosting aspire to host as minimally as possible,” she writes. “But who wants to sail on a skipperless ship?”) Below, she discusses Martha Stewart’s “greatest crime,” how not to end an event and more.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?
It wasn’t one moment per se, but many over a period of time — every time I was at a dinner party with amazing people who would go home after a beautiful night of food having never connected in a meaningful way, or at a meeting with attention paid to the whiteboards or the PowerPoint font but not to gripping people or reminding them why they do the work they do. I kept thinking, all this time and effort was clearly put into these gatherings. So what is actually happening and why aren’t we connecting?
I like to tell people that Martha Stewart’s greatest crime wasn’t insider trading, it was telling a generation of hosts that gathering is about fish knives, flowers and canapés; that if you get the things right, magic will happen. One of the documents I found that illustrated this for me was a party-planning guide on Stewart’s website. It’s a 29-item checklist and only three of the items focused on people. I wanted to write a book that shifted the focus away from the crudités and on to what actually creates magic between people.
What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?
Image
Priya ParkerCreditMackenzie Stroh
I learned so many amazing things from the people I met with. I interviewed over a hundred gatherers — my language, not theirs. I talked to a very thoughtful dominatrix, and from her I learned how important it was to create space for people to show a different side of themselves, sometimes a darker side. A pair of Buddhist monks taught me that it’s essential to make your gathering decisively end rather than peter out. We plan when something will stop from a time perspective, and we hope the striking of the clock means it’s over. But studies show that the beginning, the end and the peak experience is what most people remember. There are a lot of things you can do to close an experience, from reminding people of what happened, to connecting them one last time, to making them think about how they want to re-enter the world. But don’t end with logistics; for example, saying, “Thank you all for coming, your coats are in the checkout room and the last shuttle is waiting outside to take you to the airport.” It’s not that you don’t have to convey that information; just don’t do it as the last thing.
In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?
The book I wrote is radically different. I started writing a book that told the stories of the gatherers I interviewed, about their lives and backgrounds and what led them to gather in the way they do. When I met the dominatrix, a lot of the talk was about her childhood, and a lot of the first draft was about that. I shared this with a friend, and he was fascinated by the story, but he was irritated that I couldn’t tell him how it related to his life. I think in trying to avoid this book being a cheap how-to, I didn’t give people enough information.
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And as I started to meet more people who were rethinking what a gathering has to look like, I was surprised at the fields that were doing it. For example, a courtroom in Red Hook, in Brooklyn, that paused to ask, What is the purpose of court? And they radically redesigned the courtroom proceedings.
Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?
My mentor Hal Saunders. He helped draft the Camp David accords. My training is a process called sustained dialogue, which he started. I met him when he was in his late 60s, early 70s, and even then he was this giant in the field of diplomacy. But he deeply, deeply listened to and was curious about young people. He was obsessed with the technology of group relationships. The reason he influenced me so much is because I never knew that was a thing. I thought it was just like water. He tried to study and break down and codify and organize the dynamics of group relationships. He believed that relationships are something you can transform, which is what he did. He made me realize that making a career out of trying to transform groups is not only an O.K. thing but it touches every part of our life.
Persuade someone to read “The Art of Gathering” in 50 words or less.
If you’re secretly insecure about convening, if you feel disconnected at work, if you wish you and your friends had more meaningful conversations, this book can help you. Life is too short to gather in the old Martha Stewart way. Welcome to the new rules of gathering.
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This interview has been condensed and edited.
Follow John Williams on Twitter: @johnwilliamsnyt.
The Art of Gathering
How We Meet and Why It Matters
By Priya Parker
304 pages. Riverhead Books. $28.
A version of this article appears in print on May 13, 2018, on Page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: Dinner Party Success (Don’t Fret Over Forks). Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
QUOTED: "Every gathering contains the opportunity to create a temporary alternative world for those who enter it. And one of the ways to do that is to think like a game designer and create temporary rules."
"My mother has been a huge influence on me. She’s a sociologist/cultural anthropologist and is an incredible gatherer. Throughout my childhood she created various well-conceived gatherings, though I didn’t think of them as such at the time. When I was eleven, she threw me a “period party” where she, along with half-a-dozen of her female friends, welcomed me into womanhood."
"When I was in high school, she hosted weekly gatherings in our basement for a dozen of my friends to learn 'life skills,' as she put it. She understands the power of ritual, and I am all the better for it."
Q & A with Priya Parker on the Art of Gathering
Photo by Mackenzie Stroh
The aphorism “You can’t throw the same party twice” is a wry acknowledgement of the wisdom Priya Parker distills and dispenses in her new book, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. Gatherings — which she defines as the conscious bringing together of people for a
reason — are an essential human activity. Sadly, they often fail to achieve
their purpose, much less delight those who participate in them.
Parker, the founder of Thrive Labs, has helped hundreds of people, from community activists to CEOs and heads of state, create gatherings that are both memorable and transformative. Her simple rules, wide-ranging examples, and enthusiastic presentation are eye-opening and inspiring. Anyone who’s ever had to quell pre-event jitters or wished for a magic wand to wave over their business meeting, dinner party, class reunion, or conference will welcome this engaging and eminently practical book.
Parker recently took time out from a busy launch schedule to answer some of the questions the we posed to her by email.
You’ve said that a gathering starts long before the event, and that preparing human beings, not logistics, is key. One of your signatures is the dinner held the night before the primary event. How does time and the temporal figure into the art of gathering?
I believe every gathering contains the opportunity to create a temporary alternative world for those who enter it. And one of the ways to do that is to think like a game designer and create temporary rules. One of the most interesting and thoughtful gatherers I met in writing this book was a game designer named Albert Kong. Kong hosts monthly game design nights in San Francisco at which guests get to present new games they’ve created to a live group of people, and then watch the group play it for the first time. Kong’s purpose is to help everyone in that room realize and practice the skill of rule formation. “If the society we live in is a game, then changing the world is making the rules we want to play,” he told me.
There is a concept in game design called “the magic circle.” Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman popularized and explained this idea in their fantastic book, Rules of Play. The basic idea is that the power of games is that you get to create rules that everyone agrees upon. And when the game “starts,” every player steps into this proverbial magic circle where the rules are different, and your behavior changes based on them. I believe gatherings work in much the same way. Each gathering — whether a birthday party, a family reunion, a conference, or a hackathon — creates an opportunity for the thoughtful host to temporarily create a specific world for a group that they open, spend time in, and then close.
What are the two most important elements for fueling the alchemy of a memorable gathering?
Public intimacy — when people are vulnerable in front of each other and share of themselves — and heat, by which I mean facing the things we typically avoid, such as conflict, taboo, and controversy.
Do you have a favorite gathering, or favorite type of gathering?
I love gatherings that have a specific purpose, with a specific audience, and a thoughtful format that reflects that purpose. Some of the gatherings I admire include Lennon Flowers’ The Dinner Party, Michael Hebb’s Death Over Dinner, and Jenifer McCrea and Jeffrey Walker’s Jeffersonian Dinners. And of course, our very own House of Beautiful Business 15 Toasts.
And then there are certain people who you just know that if they’re designing or hosting something, you should do everything you can to be there. People like Anthony Rocco, Ida Benedetto, Jerri Chou, Danya Shults, Jon Morris of the Windmill Factory, and Mari Sierra all come immediately to mind.
Are there any kinds of gatherings you tend to avoid?
Networking events.
Is there any particular memory from your young life that you now believe influenced your call to write about the power of a well-conceived gathering?
My mother has been a huge influence on me. She’s a sociologist/cultural anthropologist and is an incredible gatherer. Throughout my childhood she created various well-conceived gatherings, though I didn’t think of them as such at the time. When I was eleven, she threw me a “period party” where she, along with half-a-dozen of her female friends, welcomed me into womanhood. When I was in high school, she hosted weekly gatherings in our basement for a dozen of my friends to learn “life skills,” as she put it. She understands the power of ritual, and I am all the better for it.
You’ve described a kind of physical breakdown you experienced when you were a hard-driving twenty-something that set you on a different path, one that led you to found Thrive Labs. When you’ve talked about that time you’ve said that one of the things that helped your recovery was dance. How?
When I had my breakdown, I simplified my life in many ways, and cut most “extra” things out of my days. I had a teacher at the time who told me to practice becoming aware of what I wanted to do in each minute, and to close the gap between thinking about that thing and actually just doing it. It is an exercise meant to help people get clear on their actual desires, as opposed to their “shoulds,” and it is based on the idea of nurturing your creative spirit. I found that I wanted to dance. And so I started regularly attending West African dance and hip hop classes in my neighborhood. It was a radically simple act. Rather than thinking about going to dance class, I just went. Those classes helped me physically rebuild my strength. But regular attendance also became a simple act where my beliefs about myself and my interests began to match the way I actually spent my time.
Do you have a spiritual practice?
Prayer.
What is the most romantic aspect of your work?
Creating environments where people decide to show more of themselves than they may be used to, and watching relationships transform because of it.
What do you always make sure to do when you’re drawing an event to a close? What makes for a beautiful ending?
So many of our gatherings simply just stop — a group reaches the end of the agenda and the meeting dissipates, the last session of the conference finishes and people head to the coat check, a dinner party is winding down and everyone gets up to leave. Think about simple ways to create a closing so that your gathering doesn’t just stop, it ends. This can be through giving a toast, finding a creative fun way to remind people of the themes of the evening, or, having some way for people to give final thoughts.
Renaissance Weekend, a gathering I write about in the book, ends their conference with a session called “If These Were My Last Remarks.” They invite 20 participants to each share with the larger group what they would say if this were the end of their life. “It’s motivating, it’s touching, it’s tragic, and it kind of seals the bond,” Alison Gelles, its Executive Director, told me.
Also, as I talk about in the book, never end on logistics. Do them second-to-last.
If you could convene only one gathering in the next three years, what would its purpose be, and who would you invite?
It would have to do with stitching our national fabric back together again, or perhaps weaving it anew.
Is there a gathering that you would hope never to miss?
Family dinner.
The Journal is a production of The Business Romantic Society, hosts of the House of Beautiful Business. The House can be found on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram, but most importantly in Lisbon, Portugal from November 3rd to 8th, 2018. Request an invitation at houseofbeautifulbusiness.com.
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