I’m Guilty of an -ism

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I haven’t been blogging much during the last week because I’ve been VERY busy working at my client’s annual conference in Chicago.  This post, and I’m sure many posts that will follow, is inspired by some observations and experiences I had last week. That’s what happens when you spend a week with literally hundreds of people who are smarter than you’ll ever be.

The opening keynoter for the conference was Bob Galvin, whose father started Motorola in 1928 and who took the company over in the late 50’s and grew it to the behemoth it is today.

Many of the folks involved in putting the conference together, myself included, were a little nervous about having Mr. Galvin as the opening keynoter.  The opening act is vital because he or she sets the tone for the conference.  The fact that Mr. Galvin is an octogenarian, and not a current business superstar, had us wondering if we’d made a wise choice.  Despite the fact that we’d all been reassured that he is actually a very good speaker, we were sure he’d get the conference off to a snoozing start. Of course not one of us is over 45!

None of us would categorize ourselves as ageists, or any -ist for that matter.  The fact is, however, that we were definitely biased by Mr. Galvin’s classification as an old man. 

Sure it took Mr. Galvin an inordinate amount of time to get to the podium, and maybe he wasn’t the most dynamic speaker in the world, but he was captivating. For 1 1/2 hours you could have heard a pin drop.  There were 800 or so people in that room and no one made a sound.  No one ran out to check their messages, no one’s cell phone went off, no one fell asleep.  It was as if we were in the town square listening to the sage advice of a village elder. 

Everything Mr. Galvin had to say was on topic, was well thought out, and most importantly was wise.  His body was stooped, his mannerisms were lethargic, but his mind was as sharp as a tack.

It was easily one of the most amazing business experiences I’ve had, and it was definitely a moment of personal discovery.  I’d never thought of myself as biased but I realize now that I had shown the most fundamental symptom of bias when I judged a man not by his achievements or his being, but by a classification.  Shame on me. Hopefully it is a lesson I’ll remember and not repeat.

Cherry Wine?

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I’m in Chicago on business and just finished watching UNC beat the Illini for the national championship.  On the news they interviewed Governor Blagojevich of Illinois, and he informed them that he had made a friendly wager with Governor Easley of North Carolina.

The bet?  Deep dish pizza and-some-drink-I-can’t-remember against barbeque (Lexington style I’m sure; not that inferior Eastern NC stuff) and cherry wine.  Cherry wine?  That sounds like ripple.  Surely the governor was refering to Cheerwine, the world’s greatest soda.

Oh, and I must remind everyone that Wake beat NC the only time they played this year. 

Tarheel Tavern

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Check out Tarheel Tavern #6. I contributed my post about my family’s amazing dinner last Monday, and there are some excellent posts from other North Carolina blogger.

For those of you not familiar with the "tavern" concept with blogs, it’s basically the blog practice of bringing together posts from bloggers with a commonality (like geography) and then posting them all on one blog, with links back to the original blogs.

Of all the posts on the Tavern, my Bush-hating friends and family will enjoy the piece, Comparative Wingnuttery, that compares Bush to Milosevic and concludes Bush is much worse.

For one soldier’s perspective in Iraq, read this post from USSoldier.  By the way this blog is one example of how the new world of communications is changing how we live our lives.  Basically this blog is like letters home in the old days, except it is instantaneous and has worldwide distribution.  It makes spinning the war a whole lot harder on the Pentagon, don’t you think?

The host of the Tavern rotates among members of the group, although you don’t have to host it to be included. If you’re interested you can see all of the available issues of the Tarheel Tavern here.

Sales Intelligence Summit

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groI’m half way through the first day of the Sales Intelligence Summit and I have to tell you that it’s one of the best business events I’ve been to in a while.  You know it’s a good show when the guys taking a bio-break sing its praises over the urinal divider.

The keynoter was Jim Dickie of CSO Insights.  If you are at all interested in sales, the sales process or what differentiates great companies from the rest in terms of sales then you need to check this guy out.  It really was one of the most informative keynotes I’ve heard in years.  While his core audience is people running big Fortune 1000 sales machines, his lessons are of great value to even the smallest company.  He’s also a very good speaker.

Also heard from Dennis Chapman of the The Chapman Group and Dave Roberts of Siebel Systems Users Services.  While both focused on the importance of sales intelligence and the sales process, Dennis spent alot of time on how you can take the subjectivity out of the sales process (make it more measurable) and Dave focused on how you can use sales force automation tools to help your average sales people improve so that they perform more like your star sales people.

Favorite line of the day came from Dave:  "A fool with tools is still a fool."  Of course Dave’s British.

More later.

Message to Mr. Marriott

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I’m in Park City, Utah for a couple of days attending the Sales Intelligence Summit.  They were overbooked in the Park City Marriott so they sent me and a couple of other people over to their premier property, Summit Watch, in the heart of town.  And the hotel picked up the tab!

So please hear me when I say this isn’t a complaint.  I mean how can I complain as I sit here in front of a fireplace, in the nicest hotel business center I’ve ever seen, and a view of the mountains to boot?

So say this is an observation that I would gladly share with Mr. Marriott if I were to ever meet him.  I think it’s silly that you’re charging your patrons $20/week for Wi-Fi.  It is so cheap and easy to do that I’m not sure what is gained by it.  There may very well be a good reason, but I have to think that some of the guests feel a little nickle-and-dimed.

Still, what a view!

Calling All Entrepreneurs

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Dana Blankenhorn wrote an interesting post about the dearth of entrepreneurs making hay out of all the new and developing online creations.  He points out that no one is really making money on blogging yet, but they are already moving on to podcasting, open source software, etc.

My favorite piece from his article is this:

The challenge is to find ways to bring in enough advertising,
sponsorship, event, and subscriber revenue to turn hobbies into
careers. Without fertilizer, plants die, and money is fertilizer.
Volunteers will burn out without it, some quickly, some more slowly,
but all surely. Or, as entrepreneur Max Bialystock says in The Producers, "Money is Honey."

Anyone who has ever tried to build a business based on bartering services, or paying their labor with beer knows that he’s right.  You truly get what you pay for.

BTW, what keeps me up at night is figuring out a way to build the next media empire with all this new stuff.  I’ll keep you posted.  And if you’re interested in building it along with me I’ve got a fridge full of beer in the basement…

2% of What?

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Just read this item in MarketingVox about a study done by MediaPost on the blogging phenomenon:

A Universal McCann study on consumer-generated media finds that very
few people – about two percent – are bloggers, according to MediaPost,
and that those who do commit their opinions to webpages regularly tend
to be quite young. Adults 18-24 are three times more likely to blog
than the average adult. The glass-half-full crowd may interpret that to
mean that blogging will increase as this generation displaces the older
adults. The half-empties may interpret that as meaning that blogging is
for less serious and more self-involved individuals.

I initially read this piece because I read most things I find that relate to blogging, but I couldn’t get past the first sentence.  Specifically, "very few people – about two percent – are bloggers" bothered me.  Two percent of what?  The world’s population, America’s population or the online population?

Even if it’s just the latter, two percent is a huge number.  Look at it this way: say there are 50 million people online (I’m sure it’s more than that, but I like round numbers).  Two percent is one million people. 

That’s a lot of content, and yes most of it’s crap, but when in the history of mankind have you had access to the opinions, comments and thoughts of one million people without leaving your home?

I guess I’ll have to read the MediaPost piece to get the details, but I wish MarketingVox had been a little tighter in their writing.

And for the record I fall into the glass half full crowd.  I don’t really care how old someone is, as long as they have something intelligent to say and say it well.

Dinner Legacy

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Per my earlier post you know that today started off as a classic crappy
Monday, literally.  This post is to tell you that it ended with one of
those sublime evenings you hope to remember forever.

It began with dinner.  Nothing special; ham, peas, pineapple and some Kool-Aid to drink.  Then we started talking.

Erin, my daughter, is 11 and she was on a roll.  She is renowned for mixing
metaphors and for being a step late on getting the joke, but then
out-laughing everyone.  She cracks herself up in the middle of jokes
and can’t finish them.  She’s brutally honest and oblivious to that
fact.  She is our catalyst.

I can’t even remember what we were talking about, but she mixed
something up and it got Justin, our 8 year old, laughing so hard I
thought he was going to puke.  These laughs are generally reserved just
for us.  I’m not sure how many of his aunts, uncles, cousins or even
grandparents have seen this laugh.  It’s a thing of beauty, something I
wish I could do.

Then Michael, our 12 year old resident comedian jumped into the mix and
it was a full-on riot.   Michael’s a goof, and Erin’s antithesis.  He
gets the jokes before they’re finished and holds his tongue when he sees
"the look" in his parents’ eyes.

Celeste sat back with that bemused look she gets when they are this way
and watched her fourth kid, me, jump into the fun.  We wandered into
gross joke territory, talked about kids from our respective schools who
can pull spaghetti out of their noses and kids who have milk shoot out
their noses when they laugh.  Then it was mean teachers and who knows
what else.  Celeste explained a joke or two to Erin and we kept laughing.

It was a half-hour of paradise.

Then the truly remarkable happened.  We asked Erin and Justin to clean
the kitchen and Michael to finish his homework while we went to work
out.  Upon returning we found a spotless kitchen, a new table cloth on
the table and homework completed.

Celeste and I talked about dinner tonight and when I said these are the
moments I hope I never forget she said, "I hope these are the moments
the kids never forget."  As always she is so right. 

What that this would be our legacy.

P.S. Don’t tell him I said so but I think Michael is a budding author.
His assignment was a (very) short story and if you go for military bugs
slaughtering each other I think you’d like it.  Of course if you have
a soft spot for caterpillars you’ll probably lose your lunch.  He’s asleep now, but if he wakes up and gives me permission I’ll upload a scan and link to it.