For seven years I ran a thing called The Drinking Lunch. Third Thursday of every month, a brewery in Lansing, two to four in the afternoon. No agenda. No speakers. No name tags with "what's your ask" printed under your name. Just a room full of people — business owners, photographers, real-estate agents, developers, a few executives, occasionally an opera singer who once showed up and sang two Christmas carols — in the same place at the same time, with nothing scheduled to happen.
Fifty to a hundred and fifty people came, month after month, to an event with no program. People still ask me when it's coming back. I learned more from running it than from any business book I've read, and what I learned was mostly this: the room is the strategy. Everything else is downstream of who's in it.
Structure was the enemy
The instinct, when you run an event, is to add structure. A speaker. A theme. Icebreakers. A "featured member." I resisted all of it, and the resistance was the whole product. The moment you put a speaker at the front, you've told everyone else to sit down and be quiet. The moment you add an agenda, you've decided in advance what the valuable thing is — and you're almost always wrong, because the valuable thing at a gathering of a hundred people is unpredictable by definition.
What I provided was a room, a reason to be in it, and then I got out of the way. The connections people needed weren't ones I could have planned. They found each other. My job was to make finding each other possible, not to direct the finding.
“You don't engineer the connection. You build the room and let it happen.”
Why this is a business lesson, not a party lesson
It sounds like event-planning advice. It's actually how most real value gets created, and most organizations get it backwards.
Companies spend enormous energy trying to manufacture outcomes directly — to force the sale, force the collaboration, force the innovation through a process. And the genuinely good stuff almost always comes from the opposite move: get the right people in proximity, give them a reason to be there, and create the conditions for something unplanned. The relationships do the work. You just have to build the room and resist the urge to over-manage what happens in it.
I think about this constantly now, in client work, in how I run a project, (in the work I do at esther.ai). The temptation is always to add more process. The better move is usually to get the right people at the table and trust what happens there. The Drinking Lunch taught me that, two-to-four on a Thursday, one month at a time.
It's coming back, by the way. Same idea. No agenda. I can't wait.
