Sam Lippman, President, Lippman Connects sets the tone for the day with this fast-paced session highlighting key data points that have big implications.

Widen Your Leadership Perspective

Your leadership acumen has brought you great success. The ECEF 2026 Keynoter Edwina Kulego will give you the opportunity to build on that success when she presents “A Global Mindset Pays Off Even if You Operate Locally”.

Edwina will explain that a global mindset has nothing to do with borders or expansion. It’s much bigger than that. It really boils down to increasing the resilience of your organization in an era where uncertainty is never-ending.

Drawing on her role as Vice President of Global Business Development & Growth, Fashion, Informa, Edwina will explore how even small mindset shifts can create outsized leadership impacts.

Here are key takeaways you can look forward to:

• How a global mindset strengthens leadership, teams, and revenue.
• How diverse teams and partnerships reduce business risk.
• Practical ways to think globally while staying locally focused.

When does it pay off to leave money behind? For the past 24 years, the NACS show has been quietly doing just that. Bob Hughes, Vice President, NACS, shares their success strategy.

NACS does not leave it to the exhibitors to decide how big the next show will be. Their consistent success is built on making growth thoughtful, controlled, and intentional.

Counter-intuitively, they don’t conduct an onsite space drawing and don’t necessarily allow exhibitors to buy as much space as they want. Yet, the show always has a waiting list, and year-round engagement is thriving.

There’s a lot more to what NACS is doing. It’s all working, and it’s been working for a very long time. You’ve waited 24 years to hear this. Don’t miss it.

A conversation with Joshua Oloriegbe and Sam Lippman.

For many organizers, “learning” is synonymous with educational sessions, including lectures, keynotes, panels, breakouts, etc. But that narrow definition may overlook some of the most meaningful ways knowledge is created, shared and applied at events.

In this session, Ken Holsinger and Kimberly Hardcastle will explore how learning shows up across the broader event experience – often outside of traditional classroom-style formats. Drawing on early insights from ongoing research, they’ll examine how participation, experimentation, peer interaction and real-world context can shape learning in ways that lectures alone cannot.

Following the discussion, event organizers who are actively experimenting with different learning models will join the conversation to share how they’re translating these ideas into practice, including what they’ve tried, what they’re learning and how their audiences are responding.

This session invites organizers to broaden how they think about learning at events and to consider how design choices across the entire experience can better support curiosity, engagement and application.