The Greening Has Begun and you haven’t even noticed

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.

  1. “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.
  2. “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.
  3. “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.
  4. “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.
  5. 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.

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4 Comments

  • Reply jon gatrell February 3, 2008 at 3:07 pm

    Blog: The Greening Has Begun and you haven’t even noticed: So I don’t often get any emails, .. http://tinyurl.com/38l9cm

  • Reply democracy February 6, 2008 at 5:44 am

    Thanks for this – an interesting addition to the debate and we enjoyed reading it. Our post was sort of a protest against lowest-common-denominator recruitment practice – a real problem in the UK marketing industry at present. We see people with supposedly relevant experience and solid agency backgrounds quite often, only to discover that attitudinally and in ‘chemistry’ terms they’re well off the mark. I’m sure they feel the same way coming out of those meetings – recruitment is, after all, a two-way process.

    So we wanted to raise awareness about our ‘horizontal’ as well as ‘vertical’ selection criteria. Candidates who demonstrate the qualities we listed are pretty rare – although they generally self-identify with our criteria, which is handy.

    For what it’s worth, democracy is a direct communications agency based in London. We like to green our own grass, and everyone else’s!

    Until next time…
    democracy

  • Reply G February 7, 2008 at 5:27 am

    Glad you like it and it seems like it might be a good place to work. I’m actually up north right now in Bolton, apparently I get to the Wanderers this weekend. Cheers!

  • Reply spatially relevant » Blog Archive » Social Media: Reducing friction and establishing a NEW discipline March 9, 2008 at 9:45 am

    […] time and good market change. So as a marketer, manager or contributors what can you learn and unlearn to leverage this change in the mechanics of the market?   I don’t know what the future […]

  • Leave a Reply to spatially relevant » Blog Archive » Social Media: Reducing friction and establishing a NEW discipline Cancel reply

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