Last week's Guest Speaker: David Zolkwer - how to organize an event

Posted by Franz Huber on Oct 13, 2016
 
How do you get the man who is in charge of running the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the 2018 Commonwealth Games to speak at your Rotary Club?  Easy. You wait till he comes over and asks you to lend him a hammer… ☺ Thus started the relationship between our DGE Darrell Brown and David Zolkwer, his neighbour across the road.  But David has had exposure to Rotary before: Some 20 years ago, on one of his many major assignments in London, the Rotary Club of Maidenhead was a major contributor of volunteer labour at one of the events he organized.  Today, David is Executive Vice President and Director of Public Events of Jack Morton, the multinational company that has organized events such as Opening Ceremonies at Olympic and Commonwealth Games for some 77 years.  They have won close to 100 major awards. But they are also involved in lots and lots of corporate promotions – some 10,000 (yes. Ten Thousand) events over the last 12 months.  Their client list reads like a Who’s Who of major brands: BP, Google, IBM, Nike and the list goes on.
 
Recently appointed to run the events at the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games (the fact that they also ran the Glasgow games and the London Olympics would not have been a disadvantage), David outlined an in principle timeline of staging.  And it is not easy, in particular where one deals with lots of people who have all their own view of what it is important.  “The list of what should and what shouldn’t be in the show is just about identical…” he quipped. [Hmmm… with ‘PowerPoint Pete’ in charge of the games, I’d love to be a fly on the wall… Ed.]
 
So where do you start? Well, with a principal concept of course. On Jack Morton's website, under ‘What we do’, they state “We create experiences that strengthen the relationships between brands and the people who matter most to them.” Sure. On the timeline David outlined, some 5 major segments are broken down into hundreds of steps.  And always, one is on the lookout to separate ‘Shock and Awe –v- Substance’, over-hyped and over-inflated statements.  “There is a difference between a good idea and the right idea”.