Spring Forward
Yup — a new time for Outsell Accelerate! — change your clock and mark your calendar!
I’m pleased to announce today that we’ve jumped ahead and will be producing our annual event on April 22–23, 2026, location U.S. TBA.
We’ll continue to hold meetings in London and New York on the original dates of October 8–9 (one for each) for our members and CEO Network but decided to slow down to speed up and take this event into the spring, so clients can jump-start their June planning cycles and stay ahead of the curve.
As we contemplated this change, I was faced with bevy a of internal naysayers sharing all the doom and gloom for making such a move. My response — we are living in uncertain times, we must read the tea leaves, listen to clients, and remain aligned with what we advise including being agile.
There is nothing about the cycle we’re living in that says stand-still. And anyone standing still is about to get hit by a train. Just look at the pace with which Gen AI is being adopted. One leader I spoke with last week believes (and I do too) that most knowledge-based businesses (and we are one too) are about to ‘get strip-lined’ by Gen AI doing the basic work of its talent pool. Sure, that frees up people to do better more elevated work. It also means the business will be dramatically reshaped and our reliance on people will change.
People aren’t seeing the writing on the wall. I see it every day. This leader’s lament, and I couldn’t agree more — that many of the CEOs she’s speaking with in Fortune 500 companies, or their boards, or governors of our 50 states are eager to embrace the change but do not have a lens on how. Or what the implications are for proceeding or not. She said many look at their teams and think it’s someone else’s job — CDAO, CPTO, and the bevy of alphabet soup on the leadership teams that report to them.
Our take during that call: Be moving or be cooked.
We contemplated this event date change about four weeks ago, finalized the decision two weeks ago, and spoke to key sponsors this week before this announcement. In that timeframe our read on the tea leaves looks downright prescient.
Clients are telling us that for this year at least they want to stay on either side of the pond given a lot of passion and uncertainty about economic, geopolitical/trade/immigration related issues.
Travelling across borders is becoming controversial; it’s scary for others. It is expensive.
Had we remained in London, the currency shift in just a few weeks would have made it prohibitive for US-clients. Many of our non-US clients just don’t want to cross through customs in big-city airports right now or even enter the US for that matter.
An expensive hotel in the US for many of our UK mission-based organizations or any of our attendees in PE-backed companies would read as tone-deaf. A venue change is important. And we decided to take proper time to produce the event the way we envision, with a new city, a program that attracts CEOs and their c-suite more broadly, the right type and size of venue while also modernizing the digital aspects of the event.
Stay tuned for updates. Our largest sponsors CCC and EY-Parthenon are on-board (thank you!) Every leader and their team must focus on what’s right for their business, their clients, and make quick and thoughtful decisions. This is not a time to look back. Like Mom used to say: the only constant in life is change.