I organized every meeting I could in places that reflected where we actually were. A breakfast at a spot in the French Quarter where the coffee comes with a history lesson if you ask. Catch-up conversations at a bar where the walls have absorbed decades of music. A working lunch somewhere that didn't look remotely like a conference room and was better for it.

What happened was interesting. The meetings were more relaxed, more honest, more human. People arrive differently when they're somewhere with atmosphere. The city creates a kind of ease that a hotel meeting room actively suppresses, and that ease is good for the kind of relationship building that actually matters in business. You remember the conversation because you remember where you were.

Then one evening I organized a group to go to a live music show. It wasn't formally on the agenda and it wasn't pitched as networking. It was just: we're in New Orleans, there's extraordinary music here, come if you want. Almost everyone came. It was one of the most genuinely connecting evenings of the whole trip, more so than any structured event, because it was real. We were experiencing something together rather than performing connection at each other over a canapé.