Success Quote by Maurice Strong

Strong’s line is the kind of managerial prophecy that doubles as a blueprint for influence: shrink the room to increase the leverage. On its face, it’s a sober assessment of how “effective” collaboration happens. In practice, it’s an argument for re-engineering power through design choices that look merely logistical. Smaller, specialized conferences promise focus; they also promise control - over agenda, over access, over what counts as expertise, over who gets to be in the photographs.

The key word is “effective,” a term that sounds neutral but quietly begs the question: effective for whom, and toward what ends? Strong’s career sat at the junction of business, global governance, and environmental diplomacy, a world where conferences don’t just exchange ideas; they manufacture consensus and then present it as inevitability. Specialization turns politics into “technical” problem-solving, narrowing the range of acceptable disagreement. The tradeoff is transparency: the more you optimize for productivity, the easier it becomes to treat public accountability as an inefficiency.

Then comes the canny media logic: “occasional large gatherings” aren’t for decision-making, they’re for narrative. The big summit functions like a product launch - spectacle, symbolism, headlines - while the real work has already been negotiated in smaller rooms. Strong is describing a two-tier system: insiders draft the future; the public gets the press conference.

It works rhetorically because it sounds like common sense. Who could be against focus? Yet the subtext is clear: in the era of global problems, governance becomes a choreography of scale, with legitimacy performed at the mass level and authority exercised in the miniature.