Comments (0) One day soon I’m going to write a real post. I think about it every day. I write one in my head. But then, writing it here, the words and ideas seem silly (sillier than my usual ideas 
). I think I may have writer’s block.
Listening at a conference this week, I heard some great tips on hiring, managing and creating culture:
Day two of the new job. There’s the part of me that loves being ten feet under. There’s the part of me that loves looking around and saying, “This is MINE. All of it. Down to the door tags and on-hold messages. Mine, mine, MINE.” And, then there’s the part of me that loves the inch by inch madness. Because, at the end of the day, it’s that extra inch that makes a winner.
For as long as I can remember, Al Pacino’s speech in Any Given Sunday has inspired me to crawl just a little harder.
Every once in awhile, I enjoy reminding myself it’s okay to not keep up. Yes, it’s important to stay up to date with some of the latest and greatest, but, you also have a valuable and existing toolkit just waiting to be tweaked. As Bill Marriott says, “Success is never final. We can always do better with what we already have.”
In his post, Stop Looking for the Next Twitter, David Armano, puts it succinctly – “‘yesterday’s Twitter’ needs some care and feeding before you start looking for the next Twitter.”
Trust me, spinning your wheels looking for what’s next isn’t going to generate as much ROI as tweaking your current path to conversion or being more strategic about your customer relationship management (CRM). Make fixing your current strategy a top priority, and put trying to figure out the next “big” thing on a back burner. Unless of course, your current strategy is already 110% perfect
I loved this post so much, that it was totally worth re-posting here. I never quite know how to explain what I do, but this is a good start
This post is for my Dad.
I don’t think he understands my job.
I work in advertising.
On the account side.
A lot of times people ask me what I do.
Here’s what I tell them:
When Churchill retired from politics he tried painting.
He set up his easel in his garden.
He got just the right size canvas.
He organized all his paints and brushes.
He’d chosen a perfectly comfortable stool.
He made sure everything was absolutely right.
Then he tried to decide where to start on the painting.
He stared at the pristine, white canvas.
Should he start in one area and work his way across?
Or should he sketch in the rough outline first?
Should he try to include the whole landscape?
Or should he pick one particular part to concentrate on?
How to begin exactly?
Two hours later his wife came out with a cup of tea.
He hadn’t painted a thing.
He was still sitting there thinking.
The canvas was still perfectly white.
His wife asked him why he hadn’t painted anything.
He said he couldn’t decide where to start.
So she picked up a brush and painted a huge squiggle in the middle of the canvas.
Churchill went ballistic.
“What are you doing, you’ve ruined a perfectly good canvas.”
She said, “Well now you’ll just have to fix it won’t you.”
And he started to fix the mess.
Scraping off the paint, and painting over it.
And pretty soon he’d painted his first landscape.
See what was stopping Churchill was knowing how to start.
What his wife did was take the start-point away.
She gave him a problem to fix instead.
The man who could lead Britain in a world war didn’t know what to do with a blank canvas.
Give him a problem to fix, a massive mess that no one else could sort out.
Fine.
But how do you start when there is no problem?
Creative people are good at fixing problems.
Good at responding.
Not so good at creating from nothing.
With no brief, no direction, no ideas, nothing to get hold of.
So that’s what I do. I draw squiggles on a blank canvas.
Certainly one of the coolest and most fun events I’ve had the pleasure of participating in! The energy that night was out of control!
True to form, this post has some interesting view points on working with friends. The post centers around counting up vs. counting down. They consider it being excited vs. looking for a way out.
I get it, I do. But, I also have to disagree
When you LOVE the partnership, you’re not counting up or down. Why? Because there’s no end in site. The partnership is a continuous ebb and flow. There’s no counting- down nor up. There’s no need to, because you know the partnership is a never ending one. The ideas constantly flow from both sides and the magic happens.
Those are the partnerships I want. Those are the partnerships I look for. And, every time I choose someone to work with, those are the partnerships I enter into it.
What type of partnerships do you want?
This cold and flu season intrigues me. For the first time ever, employers are taking people getting and being sick seriously. For the first time, employers are encouraging workers to stay home if sick. To me, it’s an interesting dynamic and a shift in mindsets across the board.
Having a grizzly swim coach, it’s been drilled into me that you show up for practice, work whatever, no matter what – unless you’re puking your guts out. In the past, most employers and employees alike took a similar approach. I mean, how many times have you walked into work and one of your coworkers looks to be on deaths’ doorstep? Or, how many times have you had to haggle with your boss for a sick day or show proof upon return?
But, today? Calling in sick is like a Get Out of Jail Free card. The first sign of a cough or scratchy throat and you’re being practically “forced” to stay home. Personally, I think it’s a good thing. We all need to take a step back and remember priority #1… ourselves.
BlogWorld Expo was in Vegas this week. What’s that saying? The more things change, the more they stay the same? Yep, that about sums up BlogWorld. It was certainly very different from the iMedia Brand Summit I recently attended and, not in a good way. Maybe I’m just not cut out for social media conferences, as many others commented that it was their best conference of the year. Either that, or they don’t get out much
Let’s start with the Conference itself:
Now, for the Attendees:
Thanks to my BlogWorld experience, I’m looking forward to iMedia Breakthrough now more than ever. Now, that’s a real conference.
I’m struggling again. “Digital Innovation” is all the rage. In the last few weeks, I’ve read more than my fair share of articles that tout innovation as the only way to survive the downturn in the economy.
I get it. I’m all for innovation. But, I’m still struggling with the idea. If your company is solely focused on very short term goals, where does innovation fit in?
David Lauren, Senior VP of Advertising for Ralph Lauren, states it simply in this article when talking about QR codes, “When the US catches up…. we’ll be ready.” And, that’s exactly my problem- we WILL be ready. Innovation allows you to be prepared and ahead of the future game. But, what about the NOW game? QR codes, Augmented Reality, even mobile, don’t have enough penetration to make an immediate, short term impact. So, why bother focusing on those things?
Maybe for short term goals we need to think about innovation differently. Maybe short term innovation is about taking old ideas and making them new. Maybe it’s about perfecting the basics. Maybe it’s about seeing what’s right in front of our faces. And, maybe, it’s about none of those things.
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