I just got back from AOM 2026 in Philadelphia, and my name badge should have just said “Meetings, Inc.”

Looking back at my “participation history,” I counted the damage:
1 symposium as a Distinguished Speaker (a title that mostly means “please stop talking, your 12 minutes are up”)
2 PDW workshops as a Panelist (professional nodder with an occasional hot take)
1 more symposium, also as a panelist, because apparently one wasn’t enough

Then it just… spirals: SIM Executive Board meeting, Business & Society Editorial Board meeting, SIM Business Meeting, SIM Social, Editors’ Breakfast, Doctoral Consortium, an Andy Wicks Remembrance, and not one, not two, but four separate community events. I think at some point I stopped RSVP’ing and just started teleporting between rooms.

By the numbers: 16 line items, 7 different “hats” (Program Chair, Speaker, Presenter, Panelist, Organizer, Host, Participant), and exactly 0 minutes spent seeing Philadelphia outside a hotel conference floor. I’m fairly sure I organized a meeting about a meeting to plan the next meeting.

The actual content — publishing literature reviews in the age of AI, sustainability research in Latin America, the future of social enterprise research — was genuinely great.

The schedule that got me there was a war crime I signed up for voluntarily.

Phew! Glad to be done with the Program Chair role.

On to the next adventures now! 10/10, would over-commit again.