Life is a team sport. Every issue I start by thanking the amazing group of expert contributors who donate personal time, many times hours, to share their opinions and knowledge within these pages. They step up with a single email reminder and share knowledge not found in other collections or media outlets. This time around I have a special thank you that goes to John Burns who offered to help in the direction of the content of the Fall issue. We added a few new voices and perspectives. This is a difficult time and in difficult times it’s important to see people come together. I enjoyed the calls, emails and suggestions and I hope John enjoyed the “other” side of this process.

Once Jon Inge retired from a longtime gig writing our feature articles, he became the editor for a monthly Alfa Romeo newsletter. After about 6 months in his editor gig, he emailed me to tell me he had no idea what went into putting an issue together, or how much fun he was going to have along the way chasing and reminding. It's a team sport. Labor Day week was very strange here at Hospitality Upgrade. In a usual year, that week is bustling with activity around our annual CIO Summit with some extremely long days, last minute plans and changes of plans, travel, meeting with friends, sessions, trying to think of ice breaker questions that no one has ever done before … but 2020 is not like any other year. When that week came along, we weren’t back in office full time and when we were in the office it was so very quiet. We weren’t racing to the airport through the rough Atlanta traffic to catch a flight. There were no sessions to plan or table assignments to create. And then the emails and texts started coming in. “I should be sipping a cocktail surrounded by all my friends right now,” read one. Another read, “I feel like I should be doing some crazy ice breaker right now!” In that spirit, we asked CIOs to send some of their favorite CIO Summit moments. There are some LOL moments in there, we think you’ll appreciate, too.

Please see page 60-61 for the pages created by the industry CIOs. We felt the effects of all the canceled meetings personally – and are encouraged to see some group safety plans being put out by industry leaders. We are optimistic that 2020 will be a blip in the rear-view mirror soon and we can get back to gathering at important face-to-face meetings in 2021. Whenever that time comes, we enthusiastically look forward to seeing you. There have been so many minuses over the last few months we all look forward to some positive news. There is a constant bombardment about politics, vaccines, layoffs and more politics. But be sure to set aside some time every single day to focus on the positive, serve another person or just to laugh. If you need help with the last one, please don’t miss page 128 in this book. Our teammate, Elizabeth is great at helping us remember to laugh.

For the second point, remember we’re in the service industry and so many of our larger team are hurting. Find a teammate and check in on them. See what they need. Someone I look up to once said, do for one what you wish you could do for all. Those are powerful words worth sharing. Make a difference in one person’s life this week. It takes teamwork. After all, life is a team sport.