Planet Tran is an Earth Friendly car service in the Boston area, check them out if you are there.
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Life
This post clearly has the opportunity to be a whoa is me post, but I’ll try and not make it one of those.
So I’m officially immersed in the my spring speaking tour, 3 speaking gigs this week and at least another 12,000 air miles and additional 3 pitches before June 10 and various and sundry trips in between. I just received an email from a colleague informing me to have fun in Boston and I thought about it and I think folks who don’t travel much don’t necessarilly understand that travel isn’t fun.
The Essence of Business Travel
No matter what the location – Pheonix, Maui or Amsterdam it is still work! Typically you travel somewhere because you have stuff to do and places to be. You may be staying at the Pheonician, a four seasons or resort in some place like Banff Springs – you rarely get to enjoy the ammendities. OK sometimes you DO get to golf…
Ultimately I try my best to weave in friends and family in as possible, but it is normally a 1 out 10 type of thing since the paid gig comes first – priorities. You have to make sure your up for a keynote, customer meeting or prospect meeting at 9, so you can’t do bars with your fraternity brother until 3 AM. So while I appreciate Ed’s well wishing and fun recommendation, it is gonna be difficult.
But wait, I should have a good meal at least right?
Good Food Must Mean Good Times, Right?
A man’s got to eat and not every meal on the road is good, there is a whole lot of airport McDonald’s, more than I like. That being said, admittedly I have had some GREAT meals on the road, both on and off the expense account, but that doesn’t mean that it was fun. The general rule is that the better the meal, the more likely it is NOT on an expense account, since I’m a foodie I try and get the best local food possible. I acutally spend a good deal of time investigating place to eat, since this is typically the only thing which you can ultimately count on when on the road, since a man’s got to eat.
At the end of the day, no matter what the restaurant is – it is business if you aren’t able to eat alone. You’ll typically have customers, partners or staff members and you still have to talk supply chain or technology all night long, remain sober and not unveil your real interests. I gotta be work Jon who likes wine, boring stories and is just facinated by your latest project which has no relationship to the deal I’m trying to position or close.
Not that I’ve done the math, but I think there is actually an inverse relationship between food quality and fun on the road. The better the restaurant the more mundane the discussion – karma punishment. Too often you are forced to fain interest in stories about a kid’s tee ball league, football or the latest cool thing they did with a Seibel integration.
So while you may get good food, you’re ultimately stymied by the atmosphere. How many people who you work with or who you are selling to are people you would actually hang out with?
In closing, I do have to say the event I’m at and speaking to are some of the most interesting folks I know. The people that participate at NEECOM are as innovative as anyone in the industry and significantly improve my understanding of the stuff I do every time I attend. I am ultiamtely blessed by the opportunities I have and the people I meet, so Ed – I guess I will have fun in Boston since I will learn from the folks I see.
Please Note: Feel free to forward this to your spouse if you have the same type of discussions I have when I say good night as I leave Morton’s. If you have these discussion you know what I mean and you need to forward this as independent validation of life on the road.
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.
With just enough of learning to misquote. – George Gordon Noel Byron, Lord Byron (1788–1824)
It’s always a little difficult to open a post with a quote, but sometimes you have to try. A kernel of knowledge can indeed be a dangerous thing and a fact many, myself included, forget all too often. So with that fundamental baseline, I’m in Chicago to learn and meet good folks. Every day represents a new opportunity to drive change, improve your understanding of stuff and develop relationships – day 1 was of SOBCon has provided all 3 for me at least.
The first thing I have learned is we all want to meet others like ourselves and be part of a community. A quick/ad hoc survey of the attendees last night easily represented all four corners of the US and around the world. The diversity in geography is only matched by the diversity in expertise and passions which are distributed amongst the attendees I’ve spoken to so far.
While it seems that the blogosphere is littered with marketing folk and productivity leaders, this meeting represents participants who have diverse editorial agendas – parenting/homeschooling, education/international culture…. While I met a good deal of folks (ok Emily did – she was my introduction wing chick), we spent the majority of the evening engage in just a few coversational circles. It’s not the quantity, but quality and I was able to find some quality insights without a doubt from everyone I spoke to.
One of those more interesting and rewarding conversations was with Mary-Lynn and George, from Bigg Success. So today, I thought I would post the 3 things I learned from Mary-Lynn and George:
- Cards are good
- Get ahead of the game
- Play into your strengths
Cards are Good
Yup I love pinochle, but this reference is about a different type of cards – business cards. Ok – nearly everyone I met reinforced this lesson along the way. Apparently everyone makes their own cards – CRAZY creative cards which convey their focus.
Style, substance and brand are just part of having your own cards, but they also serve the very tactical purpose, follow up. You will invariably meet so many smart, cool and interesting folks throughout an event you can’t possibly remember everyone, even though you try. Essentially it appears that your cards are an extension of your brand.
Lesson learned – get cards – CHECK!
Get ahead of the Game
Last night I spent the better part of the evening honing my introduction pitch. The pitch organically meandered into an overly verbose apology for the lack of business cards while rolling into explaining that I’ve been traveling for three weeks and that my recent content shouldn’t be seen as characteristic of what I’m trying to do at spatiallyrelevant.org. I’m actually not sure what I am trying to do here which is another reason I am here at SOBCon08.
While I did reasonably hone this intro, my sheepish/apologetic intro pitch to George and Mary-Lynn teed up an immediately valuable retort on the importance of staying ahead of the game. George made it pretty straight forward: plan, write, edit and post. Seems simple enough – stay 1-2 weeks ahead. Initially I thought this was uniquely related to audio, since Bigg Success focuses on high quality audio production, but no it’s all things content since all content requires planning and execution. George confirmed this by providing an overview of their hybrid approach leveraging text, audio and newsletters for their readers.
So the key thing to remember for me was to stay ahead of the curve on content production. If I can practice this seemingly straight forward concept, I just might be able to avoid the horrible content holes which continuously creeps up by accident or by conflict here. So hopefully, the conflicts of my life, travel and the absence creativity can be avoided by staying ahead of the game with my content.
Play into your Strengths
So while I have multiple ways to look at this, Mary-Lynn and George put it simple: “We plan, we produce and leverage core skills which makes a better product in our opinion”, or something like that. So I took a little time to think about this. My conclusion – it’s as much about as skills as it is about reputation. The talented folks I have met here already have a common thread/quality – they are leveraging their past experiences to drive credibility and authority.
Bigg Success’ Mary Lynn is an example of this with proven/verifiable career in radio, as is George who brings to bear a life of lesson’s learned in business and an academic approach to sharing the information they provide on their shows. These folks are an example of how we should use our knowledge, skills and integrity to deliver value to our readers/listeners in a medium that best suits a person’s abilities. This is just what they have done.
While video may be killing the radio star, that doesn’t appear to be the case with Bigg Success, they are hopefully at the start of their online hockey stick, but for them it is more than stats.
George crisply summarized what “Bigg Success” would be for he and Mary-Lynn: “If we can help a single person with each program then we have accomplished a big part of why we are doing this”.