Ideas can come very easy. Big, small, difficult to describe or simple and straightforward. But as we know, ideas without execution really are not worth much.

So how do you move your one-in-a-million business idea into execution phase? You certainly need a strong objective to drive you (money should not be one!). The accepted wisdom is for you to find your passion first, then to build something.

A quest for passion.

Developing your passion strengthens your belief, and if you passionately believe in something you will be in a better position to “make” your idea real.

However, to find your passion might not be as straightforward as it sounds.

Especially for very curious people, who want to try a lot of different things and might find it difficult to choose. Or for those who have a very short attention span, or whom get bored very quickly (even of things they like very much…).

If you are one of them, you will need variety to keep you concentrated and sharp on what you do.  So for you, a standard routine would be, for example, to “read-write-play guitar-watch a movie-surf the web”, sequentially or often simultaneously packed into a very short timeframe. The principle is, it’s the variety element that enhances each and every experience, and makes it whole at the same time.

An attention deficit can be a problem of course, especially if you want to embark on an entrepreneurial trajectory. As they say, you need to stick to things to make them happen.

The majority of entrepreneurs, however, are required to juggle as many balls as they can 24×7, so the ability to quickly shift your focus to different and often unrelated things might actually turn into an asset, and make the transition into execution somewhat less painful.

What is passion anyway?

How would you define passion? Is it to care deeply for something – a cause for example? Or is it the impulse to learn everything about it that turns it into your passion? And if you’re passionate about something, is it healthy to be driven to change it and run the risk of turning it into something that you don’t feel that passionate about anymore?

Once you’ve found your passion, it’s very important to expose it to and socialize it with as large a number of people as possible. They might not know it yet, but they might be as passionate as you are. I believe that this step alone will be the most important one in your quest.

Passion + Ideas + Focus = Making things!

Once you’ve found your passion, and you’ve come up with cool ideas, you need to give yourself enough time to focus and “make” those ideas into something tangible, even if it’s just a minimum viable product to start with. Unlike ingredients in a cake though, I believe you cannot reverse the equation and start with the idea or the focus. It has to be passion first.

Don’t be afraid of making things that break.

So if passion and belief are in place, you’re on the right path to “idea making”. Practice and iteration will make it easier for you to get going.

Interestingly, if you develop this habit, the idea making practice will in turn become the fundamental vehicle for your passions! Making stuff transforms the intangible into tangible,  truer to others and even to you. The stuff you make becomes the token that gets passed around, that feeds back into the excitement and nurtures your belief.

So feed your ideas with passion, let them blossom and make them happen. And don’t be afraid of failures: those are only there to make you try harder the next time.

Try this. Go to LinkedIN (or to any other job searching website of your preference). Enter your criteria and see what opportunities are found and recommended to you.

I bet you will get: fuzzy job descriptions (especially if the job is promoted through a professional recruiter), vague role and responsibility definition, unclear metrics. Salary range will be indicated as meaninglessly as “6 digits OTE” or “competitive package”.

But when you look at the job requirements, you will find a lot of details: languages, master degrees, certifications, years of experience, ability to write with your feet and clairvoyance (all right, I made some of those up…).

The latest fad I noticed is the trend of describing the candidate’s role as “acting as an influencer” to a more or less defined number of people, functions and areas.

Let me tell you right away: in my experience, to have a job defined as “being an influencer” plainly sucks. It’s the least rewarding kind of corporate job ever (and I should know…).

For a start, requiring somebody to be an influencer is a thin disguise for really saying: “look, we could not give you the hierarchical responsibility, the money and the empowerment to really change things around here, so you’re stuck with the influencer thing.”

In addition, such a role usually does not entail a clear and univocal definition of the operational perimeter, of what to do and how to measure the outcome.

In practice. If you influence a certain behavior, and the person changes because of you and goes on to achieve something important, you will not be rewarded. As honest as the other person can be, she will not grant you kudos for changing her approach. Sure, you might get a thank you note and a warm feeling inside, but that’s all you’re gonna get for your effort. This is called corporate ruthlessness.

Conversely, if the other person does not change her behavior notwithstanding all your tries (i.e doesn’t buy into your recommendations or does it only partially) then you have wasted everybody’s time.

And on top of that, if you are passionate about what you do, you will also have had a pretty frustrating experience.

Oh and by the way, how should you assess an influencer? Do you look at how hard he’s trying to influence? Or do you factor-in the changed behavior of people and teams that he influenced? A mix of both?

And what metrics do you use? Do you measure how many times he disagreed with a certain way of doing things and count that as “influencing activities”?

Reality is, at the end of the day there can be no hard metrics for influencers. The very nature of the job and the way that it’s usually set up in a large company are making it impossible to define those.

The annoying consequence of a lack of metrics is that you have no way to improve at what you do, and you’ve got no quantitative basis to claim your rewards either.

Because of such an unfortunate state of things, the performance evaluation of an influencer can only be carried out based on qualitative feedbacks from managers, peers and colleagues. No hard data. Not good enough I think.

So please be careful next time you look at a job opportunity or to a new position. Avoid anything that sounds as fishy and as unrewarding as “being an influencer”.

Unless of course you are the big boss, in which case influencing others is really all you should do. That’s called leadership, by the way.

IMAGE Credits: anankkml,  FreeDigitalPhotos.net 

It feels like a lifetime ago, but when I started working one of my favorite productivity tools was voice mail. I distinctively remember driving to work and calling my office voice mail from my mobile phone, and listening to long, convoluted messages from colleagues, managers and sometime clients too.

I could listen, re-listen, forward as-is or add my comments and share with others. And of course, archive or just delete.

It worked for me.

By the time I got to the office, I was fully briefed on key areas of my job and ready to get the day started. In many cases, I had even formed a crude follow up plan, if needed, and flagged key action items (on me or others). Believe it or not, email was only a supporting play, and almost none of my voice mail messages were backed up by a related email.

Granted, the quality of the voice message wasn’t always that good: sometimes you could not really understand much of what was said. Nevertheless, in most cases it was quite informative and valuable.

As always, there were those who would master the voice mail thing – clear, concise, short and to-the-point messages – others less so, rambling on forever. The system we used at my company did not put time restrictions to voice mail, so that was perfect for the long talkers!

The beauty of voice mail was that you could listen to it whilst doing something else: driving your car to work, shuffling papers on your desk or washing the dog. It was facilitating multi-tasking without really forcing you to juggle different medias. A little bit like listening to the radio whilst vacuuming the carpet in your living room!

You could easily store your messages on the PBX or, with a little creativity, download and store them on your laptop for future reference. You could send them to one person or to a group. You could build voice-distribution-lists.

It was handy.

Best of all, the intrinsic limitations of voice mail as a tool made it so effective. No bulky attachments of a hundred slides, for example. No endless lists of URL’s and portals to click on to find more info. And best of all, no hundreds of emails in your inbox to go through.

Voice mail was also very personal. If the originator was angry, you could tell. If she was happy, you could too. The best ones were able to instigate action by their passionate voices (but I’m afraid that others could bore you to death too!).

I believe that the most natural way for humans to interact and to communicate is not the web. It’s not email. It’s not instant messaging. It’s not mobile text messaging either. And no, it’s definitely not Facebook.

The best way is to talk to each other. It doesn’t really matter if in real-time or – as with voice mail – in deferred time.

The one modern tool I find very close to the old voice mail system is Twitter. Again, the design limitation of 140 chars is the key aspect making Twitter so functional. You cannot really pass on emotions as well as with voice, but you can get close if you are a little creative.

Voice mail was also accessible from anywhere, as long as you had a phone line (street pay-phones anybody?). You did not need to lug around smart phones, tablets, laptops, etc. All you needed was a quarter $, so to speak, and you were in business. Pretty low tech huh?

That’s my point. All the hi-tech devices and tools that we are taking for granted today, are they really making us so more productive than say fifteen years ago? Or are they just over-burdening us (figuratively as well as conceptually), creating layers of complexity and ultimately of intricacy in the way we relate to and work with each others?

Have we lost the ingenuity and simplicity of using limited tools “because they work best for what we need to specifically achieve” and fell victims of “because it can be done”?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t need to be 7×24 reachable and available. All I need is to work with people through simple, honest and fulfilling interactions. That’s how I grow.

Have your say here.

It is safe to say that all sales plans are built starting with a key assumption: let’s find the best prospects for our products/services. Best prospects are usually defined as “those clients that have a need, a compelling reason, a mean ($$) and an intention to buy now”. Even better if your company does business with them already.

Typically, as you go and develop the sales plan itself, you look at funnel data, installed base population of clients, and at a lot of market data to identify an addressable market. In a nutshell, you hope to predict the future by looking at the past – not a particularly easy thing to do.

What most people do not often do, however, is to make a fundamental operational decision: are we going in for accuracy or for precision?

I recently rummaged through some hard disk backups of mine, and I found a bunch of interesting materials that I would like to share with you.

Let’s look at the definitions first (source Wikipedia):

• Accuracy: it’s the degree of closeness to the actual value
• Precision: it’s the repeatability or reproducibility (often used as an indication of reliability)

Let’s use some visuals to better understand what those definitions really mean:

Image Credit FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A new year, a new set of information technology and social media predictions. Pretty much every major research company has produced their own papers to illustrate what they think will be the the trends in 2012.

I have tried to pick up the most interesting ones (at least in my view!) and to add some personal perspective. You can access the original material by clicking on the URLs at the bottom of this post.

Cloud. Everybody and their friend is talking cloud these days, often without really knowing what it is and what it can provide. Anyway, according to some market researchers, multi-cloud and cloud orchestration will become the norm in 2012. I believe that enterprise-class customers will go Private Cloud for pretty much all their major applications, except maybe a few very basic ones. These Private Clouds will still, for a while, be more a “virtualization” of the current in-house IT than a real cloud-based IT facility, but in time they will mature.

Cloud will commoditize further and as-a-service will become more pervasive. Offering for cloud-centric solutions are popping up everywhere, across customer segments and market industries. It reminds me of the rush to setup B2B portals ten years ago! I believe that the real differentiator between clouds will be the availability of as-a-service infrastructure facilities, software and applications. Cloud cost benefits will still be difficult to prove as a key value proposition, low-cost cloud providers might “disturb” some of the big players. Collaboration through cloud will probably improve too. It is expected that it will move from basic resource sharing to real collaboration, across type of information, business objectives and processes.

Business Intelligence and Big Data analysis will skyrocket. I think this is going to be the real new frontier for enterprises. SaaS will mature from CRM and collaboration apps to real BI and big data crunch. Exploiting big data will become a competitive advantage, although in 2012 I expect only the more innovative and advanced companies will implement significant instances (security and privacy being big scary monsters…).

Cloud brokerage might appear on the market. Because of the increase in number and types of cloud-based IT outsourcing offerings, there might emerge a trend to broker the best cloud features (e.g. cost, speed, security) to address client’s special needs (e.g. spikes of usage, temporary cloud spillovers, bursts). Innovative business models could spring up.

Access devices will continue to fundamentally change the way we work. Smart phone, tablets and generic mobile clients have changed the way people access  information. As more executives and professionals perform their duties using these devices, there will be a higher need for fast and reliable mobile connections, as well as stronger security enforcement.  Mobile apps targeted to smart phones and tablets will flood the market even further, to the detriment of more traditional access devices (laptops mainly).

IT security will remain a major headache across the IT spectrum: data-centers, access devices, network, applications and enterprise software. According to some analysts, more independent security testing of IT solution will be applied by enterprise-class companies.

In social media and technology, similar to the cloud over-provisioning, social networks are frankly too many and too fragmented in my view, so there is clear potential for consolidation.

Information curation will change gear and push news aggregation apps even further. Privacy in social media will remain highly sensitive, and there might be more a-ha moments like the recent CarrierIQ scandal.

Some observers predict a big change in the TV world, although I personally think that it will only happen if Apple’s iTV really is coming out with a revolutionary product in this space. True however that TV gets watched now on a broad range of devices not necessarily sitting in your living room anymore, and this trend will continue to accelerate.

Location based news, services and apps might bounce back. I personally am very disappointed with Gowalla selling out to Facebook and Foursquare disappointing trend. But the market potential for geo-based applications is still huge, I think.

There you go, my best effort at looking into the crystal ball for 2012! If only the economy would pick up in Europe….

DISCLAIMER: all of the above represents my personal perspective based on available market research and data points. This post does not reflect in any way the point of view, opinion or recommendations of the company I work for or of any company I do business with.

MORE MARKET RESEARCH INFORMATION

It has become a little bit of a tradition for me to recommend a few good books to read across the upcoming winter holiday season.

Whether you’re visiting family and friends or staying home, it’s always a good time to enjoy a good book.

This post is also a great opportunity to reflect on how I scored in terms of my beloved books acquisition.

2011 has been the first year for me in which the balance has been tipping in favor of the electronic format.

The huge amount of classic literature available for free (I usually prefer the Kindle format as I use Kindle for MAC) certainly represented a huge incentive for my voracious reading habits.

But I still have a sweet spot for paper books. Most of those I purchased online, through Amazon UK and BOL. Convenience and discounted price played a key factor here, and also the fact that being so particular in the titles I want to read, I can really save a lot of browsing time.

My “out of the blue” books for 2011 – the ones bought on a shopping impulse with no background info or pre-selection – have been a couple only (one of which figures in the list below). I guess I’m not that oriented to taking chances anymore!

Finally, I discovered a little gem of an international bookshop in Milan, called Melting Pot, from which I’ve been able to purchase a few titles in Spanish. Highly recommended if you live near Milan – Italy and if you care about people who care about books.

But now, on to the four recommended titles for this year’s winter break! Oh, non-fiction books rule this time (don’t ask me why…).

 ”Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson

An honest and easy to read account about a very complex man and his dreams. Extremely well documented, Isaacson enjoyed special access to the man that changed our world in many ways: PCs, animated movies, music, phones and tablet computing.

“The three Emperors” by Miranda Carter 

George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II and the last Tsar Nicholas II. Three cousins who could never be real friends. The clash of their personalities and responsibilities ultimately led the world toward disaster and near annihilation. This book paints a wonderful picture of the interconnected world of the European Royals and how the Great War really was instigated by personal, and sometime petty, reasons.

 ”A thousand years of annoying the French” by Stephen Clarke

If you love history with a twist and a lot of good old British humor, than you should not miss this book. Ready to reconsider historical happenings under an ironic and sarcastic light? Then let Stephen Clarke take you all the way through the Battle of Hastings, Joan of Arc and the guillotine. Entertaining, funny, informative, witty.

“At Home” by Bill Bryson 

If you’ve ever read a book by Bill Bryson, then you know what to expect. If you haven’t, this is the perfect one to start with.

Very well written, full of informative data points and anecdotes, and extremely funny. Travel across time and discover what made the human race, without ever leaving home. Clever and totally enjoyable.

There you go, another year has gone by. Damn…..

image credit: anankkmi.

 For many of us, it is difficult to move on, even when we change jobs or get new assignments. Somehow, we remain anchored to the comfortable feelings and emotions of our previous role.

You can train yourself to forget about the past, and to concentrate on the future.

It’s all about pushing oneself out of the comfort zone; in fact, in the current job you are probably feeling safe. You know the technicalities required to perform it best, you master the tools, you have built a network of colleagues, partners and clients, and you feel comfortable and professionally proficient.

Conversely, a new job or position brings in excitement, the opportunity to meet and network with new colleagues, the chance to tackle new challenges but also a lot of unknown, potential discomfort or even pain (at least in the beginning).

Changing jobs is ultimately about learning something new and about giving yourself a new set of demanding objectives. The best way to prepare for that, is to take the time to mentally disconnect from your previous job. Brain fatigue is almost as bad as physical tiredness, and unfortunately it does not go away as easily.

In most cases, taking on a new responsibility or joining a new company requires a fresh mind approach, and we all know how difficult it is to do so when you have been up to yesterday involved in demanding and intensive work assignments.

The switch works best if you have the good fortune to have some colleague to hand your old job to.

Try to apply some common sense techniques: if you are staying on at the same company, resist keeping your name in the old distribution lists, for example.

Do not tell your colleagues that you will always be available to consult or provide a point of view – because you know that you will immerse yourself in your new role from day one.

I’m not suggesting you should burn all your bridges, but certainly you should let less people cross them to get to you. Be selective.

From a practical stand point, try to tie up all the loose ends by your last day in the job, for example:

• back up and delete all the emails directly linked to your previous job. People WILL ask you about old stuff or communications, this way you can bounce them back easily.

• backup and delete from your laptop all the marketing materials: documents, slide decks, videos, promotional brochures; store and delete all sales plans, client data, pipeline information.

• if allowed, add to your email address an indication of your new job (e.g. john.d@acme.com - direct sales)

The fast approaching and long deserved year-end holiday season may in fact be the best time for looking back and assess where we want to take our career next.

Try to apply some of the recommendations provided in this post and see if they help you make a decision with a clearer mind, to understand why you want to move on and how.

By the way, you can try some of these suggestions even if you are NOT changing jobs. Run a little simulation, and see what impact it has on freshening up your approach to work. You might be surprised!

And as usual, let me know your thoughts by commenting here.

Image credit: cjansuebsri

 … is when I’m in meetings and events! When somebody is presenting or pitching to an audience, I always try to pay attention. My mind, however, pretty soon starts thinking about a million possibilities.

Just like many of us, I daily sit through a lot of presentations and pitches. Some are in person; most are through phone conference calls, IM and other collaboration tools.

Lately, I’ve come to realize an interesting pattern that I go through pretty much consistently and almost unwillingly.

As the speaker illustrates his material and point of view, a portion of my brain starts on a journey of its own. Suddenly, whilst still paying full attention to what is said and shown, my mind is able to bring up ideas, perspectives and original observations on a number of topics.

Sometimes these are related, or at least tangential, to the ones discussed in the meeting; other times they are completely different, and apparently disconnected, ones.

The experience is interesting because connection and branching happens almost effortlessly, without any planning and certainly with no defined story boarding.

Especially at in person presentations and events, this process can be very fulfilling if somewhat tiring, particularly because on top of listening and watching the speaker and his materials, I’m in the habit of scanning the audience for reactions, body signs, comments or remarks.

This practice fundamentally enlarges the experience and makes it more complete; by establishing a link between giver and receiver, I can take the whole exercise to a new level, where the two entities fulfill each other and at the same time keep each other in check.

A good and engaging presenter usually pushes my mind to expand on the things he says, often taking them to radical boundaries.

Likewise, if the material is also good, I tend to imagine how a story could be crafted around it in a way that would bring its message even more relevantly to the audience without changing much of the content – a victory of form and context over content.

But for me the magic happens when the presenter and/or the materials are not particularly good.

When that’s the case, my brain floods with tag-lines, words, visuals and a million ideas about how to improve the presentation, on a scale that is almost too huge to take in. Often times it’s all about painting “what if” and “why not” scenarios, other times is digging deeper on a certain aspect and sketching out a whole different outcome.

This is when I usually start jotting down short notes and hints, hoping to be able to recall the thought process at a later date and maybe share some of the ideas back with the presenter and the audience.

I imagine how the content being shared could be brought to life from different angles and perspectives. How things not being said are actually more important than the ones that are. And how what is presented as a minor detail, or sometimes left out altogether, should actually be positioned as the core reason why we do what we do.

Visuals jump at me and completely rework the ones on the screen, to reflect the new copy and underlying message that my brain has just put forward.

Sometimes I’m tempted to consider this phenomenon almost as a catharsis of my frustrations, but then again who am I to judge other’s work like that?

So I often end up not sharing much of my mind’s flight with anybody else, although I do tend to incorporate some of the major ideas into new projects and plans, certainly never providing the true genesis of my insights.

Another intriguing fact is that all of the above can happen on topics completely distinct to the ones being discussed at the moment. So for example, a presentation on the latest technology for migrating IT applications to the cloud can trigger my thoughts about the education system and how schools are using 19th century techniques to try and teach 21st century’s students.

But the best of it all is that my little impromptu brainstorming sessions with myself provide endless topics and ideas for future blog posts. I trust you – my readers – will let me know if any of my rants are interesting or indeed any good!

Look forward to your comments.

Image credit: jscreationzs

How do you measure your success? I measure mine by stepping out of my role to check if everybody in the team still performs as expected. 

If you want to have a better chance at advancing your career, you should try very hard to make yourself redundant.

I know it might seem like a suicidal proposition, but I believe that the best way to keep yourself from feeling too comfortable in what you do is to regularly assess: what happens if my role is suddenly removed from the org. chart?

The worst thing that can happen to your professional life is to become irrelevant, right? Doesn’t really matter if you are managing a team or are an individual contributor, the moment you feel like you are not adding value anymore, it’s too late for you career.

The thing is, however, that maybe that’s exactly the position you want to be in to make sure you can move to a new assignment.

Say you have a specific task to accomplish. For example, to get a newly formed team to understand their role, responsibility and expected contribution. Once that level of proficiency is achieved, your job is done. There is no need to hang around and keep holding hands. Move on, get a new challenge.

Similarly, when there are a lot of organizational changes, you might be in a position where you feel stuck in-between organizations and charters. Make sure you honestly assess your results against the objectives you were given, share a detailed report to document how you met them, and demand to look at other opportunities. Great people deliver and move on.

Don’t do this to show how important or how good you are. Do it to show how well you performed your duties, and do it to highlight how the world would still go on even when you’re gone.

This technique, apart from keeping you honest, also helps you feel “on the edge”, to combat the apathy that a comfortable job can bring. This way, you can be ready to move into positions that will develop your skills and advance your career further, without leaving a problem behind you.

Also consider that in some cases, if you are doing a truly great job, you might never get a chance to move somewhere else: your boss might selfishly feel that losing you would cause too much trouble for the team, thus de-facto building a wall around you.

Don’t let anybody ever take you for granted, that would be the death of your career (and possibly of your life too).

So the key is to strike a balance between stellar performance and flexibility to move, between relevance and expend-ability, between static and dynamic, and ultimately between comfort and risk.

The final recommendation of course is to act now: it’s never too early to change jobs, but it’s almost always too late to do so.

I believe that more of the same never drives change. And without change, in most businesses and industries, you simply cannot achieve breakthrough growth. 

A while ago, I was chosen as part of a selected group of people. The message we received requested us to make urgent arrangements for traveling to the south of France and plan to be away for a couple of days. The heading on the invitation only quoted the project name: “growth-boosters”.

The briefing that the small team was given was a simple one: to come up with ideas and a plan on how to drive breakthrough business growth.

So we basically camped for two days in a medium sized meeting room, located in a remote off-site building, fully equipped with a couple of white boards, three flip charts, our laptops, plenty of food and soft drinks.

It’s obviously difficult, and even potentially tedious, to try and reconstruct that monster brainstorming session. However, I think there is value to share some of the outcomes: after all, the problem of driving business growth is still pretty high in priority for many of us!

Change for growth framework.

First step was to look at dependencies for the success of our plan: who or what would be the biggest potential help to successfully implement it? We definitely needed to identify friends and foes early on, and secure sponsorship plus endorsement from the top.

Second step was to identify the key desired milestones:

• build a community focused on growth:
• provide a strong sense of “why” we were embarking on growth boosting initiative (‘what’s in it for me?”).
• identify what was the passion behind it
• articulate why did we need everybody on board
• define the role that each of us would play
• share and celebrate progress and success:
• tell the “good” stories and provide better visibility to key wins.
• go beyond the congratulatory email or card and give “social” visibility to winners, at personal and team level.
• recognize excellence:
• reward best deal of the month.
• shoot promo videos.
• give free vacation days.
• reward individual and collective contribution with technology gadgets.
• donate cash to favorite charity organization.

Pretty soon we realized that we needed to somehow package the whole effort into a sort of company-wide container, a powerful message or communication push to catch people’s attention. We devised an internal marketing campaign across some low cost actions:

• PING – Personal Impact of Non-Growth: a semi-serious tool to assess the impact on one’s career, development and earnings of non-growing the business.
• fit for growth bootcamps: hands-on focus days for small teams, geographically or vertical industry centered.
• music jingles and ringtones: branding exercise to distinguish top performers and create competitive tension.
• customized laptop sleeves: another branding exercise, to identify tech rewards to best achievers.
• T-shirts and promotional materials: fun stuff for the whole community to repeat and amplify through word of mouth.

Next we zoomed in on the specific working tools that we would need to develop to empower the growth teams:

• dedicated personal and team websites (mygrowth.com), wikis and forums.
• top management MBWA program (managing by walking around), to effectively turn our leaders into our stronger advocates.
• roadshow to be taken to the key European offices. This was developed as a play, complete with actors impersonating both clients and sales teams, going through examples of sales situations and typical business engagements. The roadshow was also filmed and relayed on the intranet in installments.
• a video game to simulate desired behavior and interactions.

Finally, we toyed around with funky ideas to motivate our large sales force, like putting up huge countdown (sales) quota indicators in the reception hall of our campus, setting up a phone hotline for depressed sales reps (“My client hates me, help!!!”) or building a client’s fan-zine.

We also concentrated our efforts on how to improve our storytelling capabilities, something we didn’t usually do very well. Coaching sessions with actors and comedians were taken into consideration, as well as the establishment of an internal TV channel for employees to practice one-to-many storytelling.

All in all, an incredibly fun project! In retrospect, with today’s social media tools, we could have implemented some of the ideas above in a radically different way, certainly reaching out faster and better to our desired audience, and through a richer experience too.

But I still believe that some of the things we developed and built were cool and are very much applicable today, and I’m immensely proud for having been part of that team.

As usual, I would love to get your feedbacks, suggestions and inputs so thanks in advance for engaging.