Why We Are Hosting the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens
In 2026, the House of Beautiful Business will be turning ten.
The PolyOpportunity, our flagship initiative for 2025, created in partnership with the Acosta Institute and The Holon Institute, is still going strong.
Following four gatherings across four continents (counting a boat ride across the Bosphorus to the Asian side of Istanbul…), six Open House sessions, and a steady flow of content and conversation, we are filled with inspiration—and hope for the future. Our most recent Istanbul Bootcamp invited the most fervent PolyOpportunity explorers to begin turning ideas into practice. This September, our digital learning course will enable a global audience to deepen the conversation and hone the skills needed to realize all the opportunities.
Meanwhile, we have been busy making plans for 2026.
It is a special year for us: the House of Beautiful Business will be turning ten!
And we want our tenth annual gathering to reaffirm and amplify our mission: to place beautiful business at the heart of every enterprise and make a life-centered economy the economy.
After a decade of developing new economic and workplace paradigms at the intersection of science, art, and the humanities; after building a vibrant, global community of beautiful business people; and after countless transformative experiences, collaborations, and conversations, we believe it’s time to elevate the HoBB to a new level.
That’s why we are thrilled to announce the World Beautiful Business Forum, taking place in Athens, Greece, on May 7-10, 2026.
A new gathering for those who dream bigger, aim higher, and seek for more. An invitation for the boldest, most original, most whimsical minds across disciplines to think, feel, and do business beyond business. The business leaders with scorch marks on their decks. The founders and technologists who move slowly and make things beautifully. The artists, philosophers, and scientists who reveal what matters.
We are crafting something extraordinary: a four-day experience that honors our roots while charting bold new directions. Building on a decade of gatherings and contributions from our community, the World Beautiful Business Forum will debut fresh ideas, language, and practices to navigate the fractured, synthetic realities taking shape at breakneck speed.
In a time defined by accelerating AI, ecological crisis, and social division, we believe the core tenets of beautiful business—imagination, intimacy, and beauty—are more essential than ever.
But we are keen to have more impact. We know there are many more people around the world for whom the HoBB experience would resonate deeply. People yearning for new language, new rituals, new practices in business. People for whom the House could be a home.
The World Beautiful Business Forum will be a signature-style House gathering, but one with a broader tent. We think this is what the world needs right now.
We will continue to be far out there and deep in here—curious about the fringes of socio-economic, technological, and cultural forces, while attending to the spiritual dimension, the soul of business.
Yet we aim to be more welcoming to those who haven’t yet found us or who may not have felt invited in. We want to move beyond our echo chamber and become an open forum whose ideas reverberate globally, in progressive companies and mainstream discourse alike. A House that produces household ideas. And builds a lasting legacy.
We are planning for an event that will feel intimate and vibrant—to not only talk about big ideas, but to experience and feel them.
This has always distinguished our work.
From the beginning, ten years ago, we have stood by three convictions: business must change; the future of business lies beyond business; and the way we bring leaders together must change, too.
Simply put: to make business more beautiful, we must create something truly beautiful.
The World Beautiful Business Forum will take this philosophy further.
If you’ve joined us before, you know: HoBB events are not conventional conferences. Instead of PowerPoints, we host deep conversations, silent dinners, ideation walks, simulations, social experiments, public readings—even football matches. Instead of panels, we convene long-form debates in intimate and expansive formats, and we go into the field. Music, dance, and theater are not sideshows—they are central to the program. We draw from a rich tapestry of intelligences, disciplines, and cultures. We eschew tidy frameworks and predefined outcomes in favor of complexity, paradox, and the most audacious ideas—including those that resist resolution.
As our friend, the philosopher Bayo Akomolafe—who has spoken at every annual gathering since 2021—once said: “I’m attracted to good questions, not confident answers. The House of Beautiful Business is a concretization of good questions around the formulation of business, the crisis of the Anthropocene, and what we might call ‘the good life.’”
We can’t think of a better place to ask these questions than Athens.
Athens is both the epitome of nostalgia and a laboratory for the future. It is steeped in history and—once again—rising. Greece is one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies, and Athens has become a magnet for digital nomads and refugees alike. It is the cradle of philosophy, humanism, Europe, and democracy. A crossroads of East and West, old and new empires, economic ambition and social complexity, grandeur and grit.
It has seen it all—and sees it all.
It feels like an arc that began with our first gathering in Barcelona in 2017 and now spans across the Mediterranean. To Athens, we will bring the spirit and themes of all previous annual gatherings, from Barcelona to Lisbon, Sintra, and Tangier; our PolyOpportunity events in Berlin, New York, and Istanbul; and the more than 50 community-hosted gatherings across 30 cities over the past decade.
The World Beautiful Business Forum will be both a celebration of what has been and a vision of what’s to come, a “best-of” and “future-of,” a reunion and a point of departure.
And we want you to be there!
Whether you’ve attended one or several of our gatherings, contributed to them, subscribed to our newsletter, or become a paying member; whether you’ve hosted a local event, served as part of our brain trust, taken part in one of our House Work groups, or worked with us directly; whether you’ve stayed with us in the House for years or simply passed through once—we hope you’ll join us in Athens.
Hi Cindy, we will announce the venue in October. But if you want to go ahead and secure accommodation, on most booking sites and Airbnb reservations are cancelable and refundable. See you in Athens!
Making business (and life) beautiful, should be such a natural way of being.
Wonderful to see the opportunity for many more to savour and then make it their life to create beauty and profit. Because profit is a beautiful consequence of doing things well, doing things with the generosity of serving others and serving them beautifully. May many more beautiful business arise, the business models FOR the world of the #Bcorp movement a clear example of how this does work. Congrats for your last 10 years and saluting your next (very turbulent for the world in desperate need of beauty) ten years.