My Perfect Weekend: Bruno Giussani, TED European Director – The Telegraph

By Olivia Parker – 2/25/2013

Bruno Giussani’s weekdays and weekends are spent flying round the world on the hunt for brilliant speakers for TED, the global idea-sharing network.  The nature of my job means I really don’t separate my weekends from the rest of the week.

I’ve been working for TED [Technology, Entertainment, Design] since 2005, when it was an annual conference held in the US and attended by 1,000 people. TED’s aim is to give a platform to speakers from an incredibly broad spectrum of backgrounds [past speakers have included Bill Clinton and Gordon Brown; Bono is speaking at next week’s conference], who present powerful new ideas, theories and research in compelling ways.

Around the time that I joined, TED was expanding to include a conference in Europe, which I now curate, and we also began live streaming all our talks online. This means the ideas we discover are shared with the world for free, in dozens of different languages: the number of video views has recently passed the one billion mark.

My role is to put together the speaker programmes, so my focus is collecting new ideas and finding interesting people to be TED speakers. To do this I probably spend about half my time travelling around the world, and the work is so diverse I cannot really leave it on a Friday evening and pick it up on a Monday morning.

However, whether I am at home in Lausanne in Switzerland, visiting my girlfriend in the US or somewhere in Latin America meeting a potential speaker, there are a few regular elements that fit into most weekends. One of these is running, which I’ve become mildly obsessed with. I spend so many weekdays sitting in office chairs in meetings or on aeroplanes, that sport is something I really look forward to. I am even considering running a half-marathon, though it seems everyone I know has already done one.

To read more: My Perfect Weekend