I just Just found out that yesterday was the first ever Pangea day. Plate techtonics and subduction will continue to change the morphology of the earth and is an unstoppable force, so is compassion. What is subduction, it’s a geology thing, but it is also could be a metaphor for things that suck up time and energy - the forces that move us every day. Formal definition:
Subduction is the process in which one plate is pushed downward beneath another plate into the underlying mantle when plates move towards each other. The plate that is denser will slide under the thicker, less dense plate. Faulting occurs in the process. It is the process in which rocks break and move or are displaced along the fractures. The subducted plate usually moves in jerks, resulting in earthquakes. The area where the subduction occurs is the subduction zone. A long, narrow, deep depression forms in this area. It is called an oceanic trench.
I try my best to not put long videos on my site, but I’ve been watching this 25 min piece and it’s worth it for a geologist, geographer or just the plain person. Pangea day is a great concept that we are all sisters and brothers on a single planet. So you don’t have 20 mins? Well, carve it out, any video which opens with Desmond Tutu has to be good.
Want to find out more about Pangea Day? It’s a day of film and sharing, so find a way to put this concept in action, Be more empathetic and more understanding of the diversity and adversity that exists on our planet. Find a way to give back.
That’s right - honesty is the best policy. So in full disclose this is Just a traffic update, yesterday was the worst traffic this blog has had since I’ve been paying attention! (Nov. 07). That’s right, celebrate the little things, because it appears y’all are transitioning to rss readers. Thanks team!
Maybe it is that no one is searching of relevant terms for what I’m writing about, so let’s highlight the top 10 search items, since we have analytics.
bob’s ichthyosaur - A Great book and apparently the top search term.
what is scientific management - High school students everywhere are googling.
mbifm - A made up acronynm, which apparently means Member of the British Institute of Facilities Management.
calculating gross margin
danielle pribbernow - Chick on the Check out blog, wonder if it’s just her searching on herself? Way too much traffic for a Wal-Mart employee. No I mean WAY TOO MUCH.
dijouri - I made up this name for my second son, 12 years old. I think this IS my son searching on himself or people trying to figure out if I made up his name or people looking for movie made in 2003.
things i am thankful - This is encouraging.
afro - Right on.
giggly quotes - Who searches on giggly quotes?
So if you don’t find anything interesting above interesting, perhaps one of the top 10 “trafficked” pieces, mainly produced via keywords - which you will notice via the relationships between keywords above and titles below. That being said,I REALLY am partial to the Stuck in the Middle series — and — I like the Mosaic piece the most, mainly because it plays well in my head. Yup, I’ve sucked you into a replay post, but a replay of posts everyone else seemed to like too, or at least this is 10 most visited posts here.
Our stories as marketers continues to be a theme of late, whether it’s understanding how YOUR history and biases impact your stories and now from Seth, how your EXECUTION is central to the story/brand experience. Below is an excerpt which asserts lack of a story can impact consistency of the brand:
But what if you haven’t figured out a story yet?
Then the work is random. Then the story is confused or bland or indifferent and it doesn’t spread.
On the other hand, if you decide what the story is, you can do work that matches the story. Your decisions will match the story. The story will become true because you’re living it.
Does Starbucks tell a different story from McDonald’s? Of course they do. But look how the work they do matches those stories… from the benefits they offer employees to the decisions they make about packaging or locations.
The pithy piece from Seth opines about what comes first, the story or the work. Not sure that this is the best way to manage the story or the execution, since they are more or less ONE thing - the Brand. These are two interactive and evolving components which can’t be untethered. Customers, employees and transactional interactions move the story and change the story over time, evidence the $1 coffee from Starbucks or the 3 hour re-training event which was intended to boost the barista-ness of the the customer experience.
This example from Starbucks is a great use case for how to align execution to the story and the market. So if the story is linked to execution/the work, then speaking to the market is only part of the story to be told.
As brand managers/creators, marketers need to continuously deliver messaging not just for the market, but for the larger organization in partnership with human resources and the leadership. What are the types of activities and processes required to consistently deliver on a brand story/uphold the integrity of a brand? The realities is it varies. This will vary from industry to industry and market segment to market segment, but 3 key areas for consideration regardless of industry:
Establish a Unified Tribal Understanding
Open Channels for Feedback
Consistently Reward and Publicize Contribution
Tribal Understanding
You can’t tell the same story, unless you KNOW what the story is, so what have YOU done as a marketer to make this happen?
This is the concept of making sure the whole organization understands what a product is supposed to do and what the value drivers are for the consumer. In technology for example, the larger organization needs to understand the solutions being delivered, the relative importance of the solution for the consumer and overall strategic direction of the company.
With this baseline folks can understand and how this relates to what customers/the market need for a given technology provider. Without common tribal understanding, you get inconsistent execution which can greatly change the market version of the story/the stories your customers tell.
Tip: The easiest way to figure out if you need to develop a plan for this is fairly simple, walk around the business. Walk around and ask say 10 folks across the organization from a functional perspective and seniority perspective and see if they tell the same story about your product or your brand. If you get 6 different answers, you probably need to do something.
Channels for Feedback
As consumers habits change and market requirements evolve, it is important that every organizational story teller cannot only understand the brand story, but also that they can contribute to the evolution of the story. Whether it’s collections, professional services or customer service, all of these stakeholders interact with the market daily and should have easy access to provide input from the business. This can be as simple as email or a suggestion box on the intranet and is imperative to keep a pulse on the market and to understand how your product is perceived on the front lines.
Tip: See if you have a clear path from communication to the marketing team, product management and leadership of YOUR organization, if not perhaps you should roll out a formal plan, remind folks of how to contribute and develop a formal plan to manage input for improvement.
Reward and Publicize Contribution
This seems a little obvious, but telling the story for the market, requires awareness for the larger organization of how a single person can leverage their tribal knowledge and exceed the promises of the brand. While the type of recognition will vary by company size and budget, marketers need to equally tell the story internally and leveraging an open channel for feedback and ensuring the full understanding of the story makes it simple. Don’t underestimate a Starbucks gift card and an “all employee” email.
Tip: Recognition isn’t about burying an accomplishment on the intranet for a specific functional group - it needs to be shared. Don’t fall for the corporate newsletter trap here - you can mention it in the newsletter, but take the time to highlight individual successes outside of the normal communications channels for the whole organization.
While this clearly is not the alpha and omega of brand based story creation and modication, it’s a good place to start. Do YOU have any ideas on how to improve the stories told in the village? Leave a comment and let us know.
So I was browsing around at Pragmatic and found an interesting piece by Barbara Nelson on Agile and politics. Here is the somewhat interesting open:
The Politics of Agile
In the world of agile software development, it seems like Marketing and Development are in a race for control of “the product.” Who will win? The flakes in Marketing or the geeks in Development?
I’ve never thought of it as who wins, rather what the revenue, the competitiveness of a solution and do customers like it. Nelson then sets up the piece with the following 3 career alternatives, albeit slightly weighted options:
While developers sprint through development cycles, one of three things happens to product managers. 1) They are ignored. 2) They are dragged deep into the development cycle. 3) They lead the team to build products people want to buy. The first two situations are lethal to a product manager’s career. The third alternative can lead to successful products and successful careers.
Oh the age old politics of PM…. ? Hurray! A new set of methodology based scapegoating techniques for the marketplace. Clearly talking to people helps with the process and the goal is for the customer to win. Faster, Better - more effective… “NASA development” regimens, while rigorous and needed for space travel are not necessarily needed for software.
I’ve always thought effective product management was politics-like - engage the people, earn trust and deliver on what is promise. I know the later is theoretical in politics, but product managers are effectively diplomats trading favors. Agile methodologies help drive personal interaction and tightens relationships throughout the team by partnering on delivery. I’ve always seen agile methodologies as a way to “formalize” the dev process in context of the customer. Pragmatic is a strong revenue “front end” for agile development, since it is market focused and innately iterative from the customer perspective. If the customer doesn’t win, no one wins - there is this whole revenue thing which drives future builds and development.
Wouldn’t index cards be perfect for customer meetings?
“Just a second Mr. Customer…. so what’s that you need again? …I needed to get a index card from by briefcase to bring it back for the ‘board’…”
So Seth, by way of Chris got me to thinking about development again this week and how every person has the opportunity to improve the workplace and EVERY person can help identify and develop talent. Corporate gardening is no simple task - it takes diligence, collaboration and nourishment. I don’t think Corporate Gardening is the sole domain of HR - it should be a requirement for the whole organization and HR should provide the infrastructure and tools to enable corporate gardening.
Organizational Horticulture
A rich and fertile cross functional resource landscape is required to maintain a green workplace. Growing organizational talent requires a passion to create opportunities for expansion and growth throughout the entire organizational field. This means exposing folks to right the amount of career specific opportunity and sponsored industry access and participation. If your people don’t get out - you might have good skills and some reasonable gardeners, but most will be more mechanical robotrons, rather than folks working towards their master gardner certificate.
Hi, my name is R57200, a product management robotron. I create tables with requirements, complete checklist and draw childish diagrams. Proficient at email. Give good meeting.
So I had to dig back into a lecture from over a decade ago for a class I can’t remember (sociology, psycology, other?!?), to identify a model which could be updated to be in context of Corporate Gardening. The not so random framework is - Bloom’s Taxonomy. The base framework is below:
With Yahoo’s rejection of the MSFT offer, I am reminded of a line from a book by James Patterson, Cat and Mouse, which make one wonder where Yahoo! is in the planning process. The quote is as follows:
Don’t mistake the edge of a rut for the horizon
It’s all about where you are, what you can see and what you are willing to see when planning for change. I think YHOO may just be making the optimistic rejection offer because they believe they can reach rut escape velocity and transition into a compelling competitor in the market for years to come. I mean what worked in the past has to work in the future, right? Why else would you bring back the former leader - lightning can strike twice in the same place. I know this is sorta true, because my brother has been struck by lightening 3 times - not in the same place, but still statistically crazy - his nickname around the house is Anomaly.
I can hear the logic being leveraged around the board table on the 62% premium and the REAL value of the company. “MSFT is so wrong, we are worth like eleventy GABILLION”! Mathematically I’m not sure how you get to a higher valuation as a standalone entity. One would think MSFT would see significant cost relief through consolidation after a combination that made it uniquely more valuable to MSFT than as a standalone business. I digress - this piece is about what an organization needs to do achieve escape velocity and take a business somewhere new and this is not the type of investment Yahoo is going to make or the time they have in the marketplace. I mean Yahoo has great assets, but it’s no Cray. (or maybe it is). Yahoo! a current event for a piece I’ve been thinking about for a while - achieving a corporate metamorphosis.
Change Requires Education
So is it a horizon or a rut - not really sure, but both getting out of a rut and going to a new place require a massive organizational effort - top to bottom. Getting out of a market or company rut requires a willingness to invest in education throughout the workforce. This isn’t a set of slides and a 1 hour meeting via webex in a theatre offsite - it’s engaging as many people as possible to UNDERSTAND the mission and current challenges in the business. Folks need to understand who are their competitors, why they are losing/not rocketing and what the opportunity is that is being pursued. A core tenant is it needs to be believable as well, there is a little faith required in this kinda thing. Essentially repositioning a technology company requires balancing the now with the new. Folks will need different skills as well, so not only awareness and alignment - but core skills training to help in the process. The previous mode and skills got you where you are.
Innovating is tough stuff and it requires a new view on things - not just for the leadership, but the whole organization. The only way to do this is make sure everyone is aware of the goals, drivers and opportunity and that they have the tools and skills to add value. When aligning to a new segment and market, leverage your tribal knowledge and a synchronized vision to drive organizational partnership and execution. You clearly may need to new people, but you have lights to keep on and there are good ideas in the employee base which could be leveraged that an outsider just might not be able to help with for 18 months.
Partnership Is Not Just a Press Release Opportunity - It’s an Organizational Requirement
Most of time in software companies true partnerships are hard to find. Common ideas, a comprehensive solution and a plan are just hard to get done and execute on, but these are what is needed to find the next market horizon. Partners need to be everywhere - outside the organization and inside.
If an organization is looking to change and deliver “new things”, true partnership needs to be central in the plan and part of the culture. When rebuilding an organization - everyone needs to be considered a trusted partner - employees, customers, resellers and OEM partners. You will need as many evangelists as possible telling the story and pushing the new agenda from every edge of the rut as possible.
Customers are no longer margin generators - but extended members of product management who help drive innovation and adoption. Customer number 6 is probably a margin story, but the first handful need to be your partner. Why would you want to view the first handful differently?
Simply - traction is a good thing - it reinforces in the market and the organization the strategy is viable in a way that no ad placement or poster can. Reference-able customers are worth 10X any traditional marketing spend to demonstrate than an organization IS something else, or at least going to be and that the asserted transformation is real. When you partner with your customer you will quickly see new opportunities and gain insights you can’t get from social media, trade rags and spreadsheets. The crazy things customers tell you just might make the product better - another way to look at it, is it takes a village.
An all-in partnering approach also makes a team a little more introspective and humble. Quickly customers can help you understand the things which aren’t done well or that you can’t do because you don’t have the capabilities. Gaps aren’t bad things - they are opportunities for brand drafting. Be willing to outsource/enhance capabilities with a strategic partner with a viable solution and transfer a little of their brand equity to yours.
A partner approach to delivering new solutions to market can rapidly increase brand visibility and help establish additional credibility in the NEW marketplace. Once you have effectively balanced your partner channels and established new capabilities, you can leverage this investment in partnership to ruthlessly execute on the opportunity and plan with an extended virtual team.
Differentiated Execution
Every company is going to make mistakes when trying to reach escape velocity, but as long as effort is put forth to understand the mistakes and quickly correct, most things will work out. You will need keep as many folks around as possible and bring new folks in to adequately fund the transformation and give it a chance. With a common understanding, moderately larger teams, cross-functional trust and measurable deliverables just about anything can happen. That’s right folks the sky’s the limit.
Planning like this will take far more than the 100 day’s predicted by the not so new CEO Jerry Yang. It’s got to be 180 days to baseline, 120 days to prioritize and another 180 to implement the first wave for a company the size of Yahoo!. This could ultimately be a plan and restructure of $500M-1B for them to transform the business. Seems like a crazy number, but the 1000 folks forecasted to be taken out of the business probably has a $120M annual benefit (salaries, real estate, infrastructure…) and a probable $15M spend on severance. Only another $350-850M to go, good news is at least $200M is investment and $25M is in travel over the next 3 years (strategic planning sessions are best done at the Four Seasons in Prague).
Not sure Yahoo! has the temperament for getting as serious as they should on the restructure, the only evidence I have on this is the recent “let’s cut some costs” to establish the illusion of a plan with rightsizing announced to the market last month. If they were really looking to drive improvement through restructuring it would have been a far more aggressive announcement to prepare for the next incarnation of the organization. Don’t get me wrong, you can cut to innovation and improvement, but often it requires a little more effort than 5-10% of the workforce. You don’t get that cool “Survivor Culture” with extreme execution unless you pull out 20%. At a 20% reduction everyone is interested in staying on the island - it’s a weird Stockholm Syndrome thing coupled with a Sally field “they really, really like me” vibe all which is validated with a bi-weekly paycheck and every monthly super jumbo mortgage payment as the reoccurring milestone of continued individual success.
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Yahoo is widely expected to undertake significant layoffs this week and dump several underperforming businesses as the struggling portal continues to reorganize its business operations.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Web giant has declined to provide specifics on the number of employees that will be let go — estimates have ranged from 5 percent to 10 percent of its work force, or hundreds of staffers.
Officials confirmed Tuesday that some segments of the company will be phased out.
“Yahoo has embarked on a multiyear transformation that includes making some tough decisions about the business to help the company grow,” Yahoo said. “Yahoo plans to invest in some areas, reduce emphasis in others and eliminate some areas of the business that don’t support the company’s priorities.”
Maybe the board’s right - they will come up with the next big idea, focus on what works and start generating mad cash in 24-36 months in opposition of the trend for the internet’s largest property. Rainbows and Unicorns - catch one if you can.
Facebook is bound to be is the LAST big new thing in the market, so I think I’m going to buy some YHOO stock. The optimism and strategic planning which appears to be going on in the boardroom is all I need. I mean come on - this upward stock trend has to be sustainable and rational, after all the board THINKS it’s worth more than a 62% premium. This is going to make for a great case study for some HBS student someday. For now, it’s made for a mediocre blog post on one of the interweb’s smallest properties.
So I don’t often get any emails, but I have that feature turned on for my feedburner feed so I get do get some, but i’d rather have comments - turned it off - snap. My 10 Tips for dealing with the fact that you will never leave your job post has received 3 emails and NOT from 3 people I know, so I thought I would follow up on it. Each of them referenced the “Greening Your Own Grass” concept - weird I thought, because sometimes I’m just cheese, which was the intent. So like any good opportunist, I googled the term and it appears there’s no obvious content around this, so what the heck. It even has got a kitschy pop psychology ring to it.
I went out looking online for ideas, since I haven’t thought the concept much more than cheesy bullet I created. So I decided to extend the concept to support the hiring requirements of democracy, an online entity of some sort in the marketing sector, but I changed them a little, to fit the context of greening.
“The ability to unlearn.” - After you are in a business for a while take the opportunity to engage new kids on the block and get their input. A refreshing view is always a good thing, plus you might find something simple which could add significant value.
“The desire to add value.” - In principle this is the enjoy what you do concept with a little Locke thrown in. Don’t become a pass-thru entity. Routing work “packets” isn’t a job, it’s a network appliance . A router is cheap, replaceable and boring.
“The imagination of a child.” Creativity is the first thing to go after being in a role for a while. Wake up and be excited about trying new ways of doing your job. Take 10 minutes a day researching on what you do and find out what others like you have done - repackaging is still creative, if not fully original.
“A global perspective.” - This is one of those onion concepts - first layer is understand the big picture, identify your ability to impact the big picture and to deliver. The other is more literally - understand your connection to supporting the changing market place, which is going global.
Soul. While the democracy list takes a jab at James Blunt, it’s about identifying how you can find your corporate flow. Perfect balance of challenge and capabilities.
So as I think about Greening YOUR Own grass, is about finding your corporate flow. Flow is basic chart, which most marketing and tech folks should be able to interpret. I first discovered the construct of Flow in a Leisure Lifestyle course during undergrad, these diagrams come from a person who synthesized some chap named Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi presentation in Sydney on 17 March 1999…
So this Flow thing just might work to start the greening. So keep a hiring attitude and a desire to find your flow in the workplace. There’s $.02 on something I never thought I would post on, my Leisure class.
I must admit - not my idea, stole if from an outro on an Onion News piece, Child Bankrupts Make-a-Wish Foundation. (you will feel guilty for laughing at it) If you never check in on the Onion, I encourage you to do so, fun stuff and you can get a printed version in Denver at Sancho’s.
So I saw this the other day when I got home from New York and thought about it a while, asked some folks questions about this and got an array of great ideas. Most of them are why you might want to stay where you are - find an opportunity to grow and expand your contribution. That’s right - pollyanna optimism, with a dash of opportunist thrown in.
Another way to look at it this post might be: 10 ways to optimize your current gig…
Stop the Alerts! - turn off your daily monster reminder that there is something else you could be doing. I did this a long time ago and I am better for it. Basically there is no need to find out about that analyst job at a cool web 2.0 company. Your career builder and monster reminders encourage/foster thoughts like: Maybe they give weekly massages? or It might be cool to get a haircut in my office or It might be good to just be a network admin again. Nothing good can come from a free haircut - think work life balance.
Understand what YOU do: This esoteric concept is a fairly interesting way to grow professionally. Find others like YOU in your industry. Caution: This may foster Zen like clarity and a renewed passion for what you do.
Understand WHY your role is important: You aren’t getting paid because you are really good at pouring coffee for the CFO when he or she randoms into the break room, in fact you probably internal and external constituents that depend on you, so find out what they expect from you. Do a little ad hoc survey of your “customers” and understand what their value drivers are.
Get a life! This is the easiest way to bring joy into the workplace. Find a way to jam your off time with satisfaction - we don’t work for nothin! Plus all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Get a hobby, fall in love, join a support group - whatever.
Work hard and play hard. Duplicate? Nope. You need a life, before you can have fun. So I guess get a life, has more to do with finding folks who you can hang with and once you have friends you can play. Think about it playing with yourself is a little boring — I like action action figures like the next geek, but other humans ROCK!
Mentor: Find a mentor - be a mentor. If you have someone you can learn from it makes everyday an opportunity to grow, the other side of the street is that if you can find someone to mentor, YOU can improve your organization. Upside: You might actually build a relationship, which will set you on the path to finding a life. Yes this a self referencing looping structure for career improvement in a 10 tips post.
Push Yourself: After being in a role or company for a long time you will ultimately get a little complacent. Well I’m here to tell you, if you don’t expect excellence from yourself or growth - no one else will and that’s a sure fire way to want to turn your monster alerts back on.
Green your own Grass - This is a concept that if you have a life, expect excellence and understand what you do, you just might enjoy what you do. We all long for greener grass, especially in Atlanta, but you have to find a way to “be the ball“. If you have a reasonably good gig, you like the people you work with and are good at what you do - take advantage of it. Think about it - if you are lucky enough to have this kind of gig or you think you may have an opportunity to develop it where you are - what a cool place to be in a career!
Switch it Up - Been there a while? See if you can get a different role in your company. Use your tribal knowledge, leverage your mentor and passion for excellence to learn something NEW. This is definitely greening your own grass!
Engage: Remember - You work with people! Develop relationships! Execute towards shared goals, actively participate in the processes and be a collaborative team. We all got something to learn or share - no matter where we are.
As you may have realized by now, I just needed a snazzy title to frame some leadership concepts. Cheers!
Over the course of the stuck in the middle series which have examined several leadership personas (the geologist, collaborator, Visualist, Vassalizer, amoeba and the fence mender) - to date these were leadership styles which represented themes in execution - today’s Leader is different. Today’s leadership persona is really about a type of leader who sources their content from a fairly interesting media type, not quite pulp fiction, not quite the economist.
So where does this leader source their idea’s? The dreaded In flight magazine - yes that rag which is saturated in hokey travel, the latest gadgets to get and trends in business. The leader who manages by in flight magazine or a MBIFM is typically fairly conservative and not overly creative. I would like to think a CMO, CEO or other C with the tendacies of finding “good ideas” in magazines would find them in Ad Age, CIO.com or another credible source, but the Get Me One Of These (GMOOT) orders from this leader are typically sourced in Sky Magazine, WorldTraveler or the American Way magazine. Don’t get me wrong - I’ve got cool logo gear and have had great meals thanks to in flight magazines, but I’ve never had a great idea because of one. So why is it that this leader uses in flight magazines rather than real magazines? I really don’t know, I think it might be that he or she just spends too much time on a plane and is possibly too cheap to buy a magazine at Hudson News. In years gone by when airline’s supplied other magazines, it was a lot harder to figure out this leader, but in days of cut backs and snack packs it’s considerably easier. Not only is this leader conservative, they might just be a little naive as well in thinking others haven’t read the article as they usurp and pervert the concepts gleaned from Salt Lake to Denver. In general - don’t all of us spend the 7 minutes required on a flight to read the important headlines and articles? For this leader ideas from Sky Magazine become an imperative - if his or her organization isn’t doing it yet - they should be and NOW. The reality is that if it’s already in an in flight magazine you might be a little late, but I do believe in the adage that it is better late than never, but does it really need a SWAT team? Take this month’s management duh on customers and the product from Continental Magazine:
“I think companies have spent too much time thinking about their products and their brands, and not enough time thinking about their customers,” explains Rust, who serves as chair of the Department of Marketing at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. “Really, they ought to be organized around customers, rather than around products and brands.”…“It’s a matter of communicating with customers interactively. We do something. They react in a certain way. They communicate with us. We have various touch points with the customer. And you can take a look at that relationship in terms of how it unfolds over time.”
The problem with MBIFM’s isn’t the idea, but how they misinterpret the idea. The quote above is as much about target market and “the Product”, as it is about transforming how a company interacts with their customer in new channels and in a transparent way. If you are effectively managing a product customer communication, understanding and interaction should always be part of the plan - I digress. As a use case, this type of an article for a MBIFM will start with challenging the team to not talk about the products and deemphasize the brand rather than encouraging an open culture which embraces communication with the customer via social media.
NOTE: The article never used the term social media, so this use case also proves out that you only get cursory information in such magazines.
The poorly pitched project kick off and the general misunderstanding caused by sleepy reading will take the SWAT team at least 3 meetings to correct course on. I’ve actually brought a suspected article to a meeting once to clarify things on the 4th meeting, I was getting annoyed that folks were taking the leader a little too seriously/literal on the project charter and initial interpretation. This group mentality is the difference between the sprit and the letter of a leaders charter, the same type of over simplification a MBFM makes when acting on in flight content.
The impact of MBIFM’s reading habits are peppered in most of their interactions and sometimes used as proof points that they are well read, cool and worldly. They talk about travel to Iceland, new gadgets and great places for dinner in other cities they’d like to eat at. Don’t get me wrong, I use Sports Illustrated to have sporty things to chat about - so you can’t fault them, but please don’t tell me how cool the hot springs are in Iceland.
At the end of the day, these platinum medallion travelers have 3 to 5 paragraphs of all things new and they will wield this knowledge as a sword. To account for this type of leader, I recommend you make sure to spend some time every month to read the airline Hub’s magazine for your airport thoroughly and browse other airline mags online where available. Few things are more fun than quoting back factoids from an article, building out a conversation by speaking to a featured Spa in North Carolina or the scallops at LaCôte in New Orleans with this leader. Bottom line: While most of these ideas are typically a late and not fully understood - they are well intentioned and can be used for good within the organization.
A MBIFM’s group is very easy to execute in, since every new leader idea is all about NOW and allows for idea extension in the execution phase. Meaning it offers the the thoughtful middle manager the opportunity to streamline the concept and steer the SWAT team towards new versions of the idea. Usually if an idea is in American Eagle Latitudes, there’s already a new permutation in practice and you can actually use a late idea as an opportunity to innovate.
So how do you find one of these in your office if you don’t travel or prefer not touching a magazine touched by hundreds of other people? Look for the leader with really cool things to play with in their offices which they probably ordered from Skymall and who has inspirational posters from successories. You could also just make it part of your online reading, so stay armed and ready with your own MBIFM Content at iTravelNet’s Directory of In-Flight Magazines.
CONFESSION: I once used an in flight magazine source to prove an idea wasn’t whacky and out there. I did of course use it as a trojan horse to move the project to a new incarnation of the concept.
