An 8th Grade Lesson In Managing Talent

He never talked about it much, but I learned while frequently pawing through a my Grandmother Adah Rae’s trunk full of army uniforms and sports memorabilia that my Dad was a four-sport standout in high school but he didn’t say a word when I came home with a “D” in P.E. in the 8th Grade. P.E? Really, REALLY?

Of course he also didn’t let me hide behind the excuse that I was going through an incredible growth spurt that reduced me to all knees and elbows and kept me out of football that year. Some things defy determination and will and grit.

It was my most embarrassing moment, rivaled only by the day when as a first grader, the third graders suddenly asked me to join in the tackle football games (no helmets or pads) they played during recess along one side of the Ashton, Idaho Elementary School.

I picked up a fumble on the first play and ran for a touchdown - the wrong direction! I’m not making this stuff up.

I had always excelled in sports before the dreaded “D",” but during that 8th grade year no amount of determination seemed to work until I caught up with my body that Spring and things started to click again in both baseball and track and field.

My Dad’s response, when I got that “D,” ignored that failure or anything having to do with improving in P.E. class. He simply said, “Why don’t you go out for varsity football in the 9th grade,” which I did. I made the team as a wide receiver so I wouldn’t get hurt. Everyone could tell I didn’t have my Dad’s frame.

I promptly and seriously aggravated an Achilles tendon in an “away” game and spent several months going to school early so I could soak in the whirlpool or what we called a whirlpool in those days, and doing other things to help the inflammation heal.

Dad’s next suggestion – “Why don’t you go for the school record in the 440 next Spring?” I did and not only broke that record but received the “most improved” award for athletics in Junior High. I wish I could say the happy ending is that I was a stand-out in High School. But I blew my left knee out.

My Dad’s solution – “Why don’t you focus on grades and getting into college,” Good idea!

Dad never came to one of my games or meets or matches. Maybe he knew the pressure I was under trying to live up to his name. He worked two jobs most of those years along with my Mom rather than declare bankruptcy like a middle man did after he took delivery of my parents’ stock one year before paying them a red “cent.”

For as far back as I can remember, he always played sports with me incessantly when he came home and that continued until I left home as an adult and even after. When it became clear I was a south paw when I was handwriting or eating but right-handed in sports, he encouraged me to switch hit. When I did excel on a team and came home to tell him about it, he was quick to bring me back to earth, sometimes not so gently.

My Dad didn’t make sense to me then, and our love and respect for him now that he is gone are much stronger than the humorous “bigger than life” caricatures that light up conversations about him at family gatherings today.

He was a star in sports but he didn’t do what the other parents did when it came to competitive sports. Knowing what I know now after a nearly 40-year career in building destination marketing teams and trying to help people motivate themselves, I realize my Dad never got the credit he deserved as a parent or as an astute manager of talent.

He never focused on failure or living up to expectations. He knew the kind of pressure I put on myself and my inherent grit and determination, a pressure I wasn’t always keen to modulate for those around me.

In hindsight I see that he had a very unique knack for helping me focus beyond the hurdle I had just missed, to a new and higher goal. I would have been a better executive and developer of destination marketing talent and teams, if I had taken more cues from my Dad.

He was always so proud of his children and grandchildren and he would have been delighted to see the pure enthusiasm his mid-kindergarten and first grade great-grandsons have for sports, as they took me through basketball, football, soccer and baseball workouts in just the first few hours of my recent visit with them.

Thanks to my Dad, I also have a great road-map for how to deal with any “D” they may ever get in P.E.

Litter-On-A-Stick

People in the business of marketing states and communities for visitor-centric economic and cultural development often jokingly refer to outdoor billboards along roadways as “litter-on-a-stick.”

Savvy tourism officials have long understood that any value in billboards comes at a huge expense to the sense of place so critical to generating travel in the first place, and businesses and organizations seeking to harvest interest en route have far more effective substitutes.

However, if the outdoor billboard industry gets the influence it tries to buy in the North Carolina General Assembly, we will see this type of litter popping up more than seven times per mile (every 1500’) and what tree barrier remains along state and federal roadways here will be swathed even wider to ensure each driver sees from one to the billboard to the next.

The industry wants to blink 10,000 messages a day per billboard, mushrooming multiple times the 1 million advertising images we’re bombarded with per person per day already via all mediums.

Oh, and they want to take regulation away from local communities so they aren’t able to protect their “unique sense of place” especially destinations like Durham which has prohibited new billboards for more than two decades now and soundly rejected the outdoor billboard industry’s similar ploy last year.

Sound familiar? The tobacco lobby tried the same thing in 1993 in an effort to derail but unsuccessfully thwart smoking bans. Judging by the two people I know in the outdoor billboard industry, they seem honorable but as a whole the industry is a bully as noted in yesterday’s excellent Herald-Sun editorial.

The outdoor billboard industry is evocative of the “bullies” reigned in at the end of the 19th century by Governor and then President Teddy Roosevelt: disrespectful, self-righteous and feeling more than a bit “entitled” to play rough and loose with the view-shed or field of vision that belongs to the public.

The usefulness of advertising in general is seriously threatened by its ubiquity and “less is more” right now. But outdoor billboards are obsolete and remarkable now by their absence.

Outdoor billboards belong now only in museums or preserved as artifact like the one restored atop the historic Old Bull Building in Durham, a national historic landmark. As the late management guru Peter Drucker noted, one of the four elemental activities of management is “organizing for the abandonment” of obsolete products and services. This is what the outdoor billboard industry should be doing.

For 10 compelling reasons for billboard control, read this link by a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute, Edward T. McMahon updated for Planning Commissioners Journal this winter:

1. Billboards are a form of pollution – visual pollution
2. Billboards are out of place in most locations
3. Billboards destroy distinctiveness
4. Billboards are the only form of ads you can’t turn off or avoid
5. Billboard companies sell something they don’t own – our field of vision
6. Billboards are ineffective and unnecessary
7. Billboard companies exercise almost no restraint
8. Billboards are both a cause and a symptom of blight
9. Billboards are bad for business
10. Digital billboards use huge amounts of energy, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

But they do have one effective purpose – they fund election campaigns while targeting anyone in their way.

Any elected official tempted to go ideological in support of outdoor billboards though needs to know that a President signaled as a model for conservative leadership by the Heritage Foundation, Calvin Coolidge, seriously curbed outdoor billboards as governor of Massachusetts in the early 1900s and that was back when they were very small, folksy and rare.

I close by paraphrasing McMahon: Come see North Carolina before it is nothing more than a ride through the yellow pages; a windshield vista of 50-foot beer cans, towering casino signs and strip club teasers.

Ask your elected representatives to preserve North Carolina and defeat or veto this bill.

The One Indispensable Ingredient of Community Marketing

People who call me for advice credit me with having forty years of experience and not just one year repeated forty times.

I don’t officially consult but because I was involved in three destination marketing start-ups in three very different communities, two from scratch and the other from its first months of infancy, I still get calls from time to time as I did on the last leg of 12,000 miles of cross-country road tripping done during a 5 months span since I retired back in 2009.

Thank goodness for Uconnect in my Jeep.

Typically these calls come from strangers including officials who want to know more about community marketing before setting up a destination marketing organization. Fortunately I can refer them to very talented friends like Bill Geist or Bill Baker.

But one question in particular has been intriguing. “If I only had resources for just one marketing activity, not a mix, what would it be? Sales? Advertising? PR? Promotion?” That’s a good one and I noodled a bit on it during my trip.

My answer is “marketing intelligence.” Typically stereotyped (not always in a good way) as research, marketing intel also includes secondary information, diagnostics, SWOTs, performance measures, analysis, and testing etc. Some are inputs, others outputs.

I can think of dozens but here are just five top-of-mind reasons, that if I started another DMO tomorrow and was restricted to only one marketing activity, it would be “intel:”

• Intel will distill a community’s values, personality traits, distinctiveness and place-based assets, as part of its overarching brand and “story” which can be deployed to leverage the influence and power of government, university, corporate, small business and individual communications about the community.

• Intel will inform public and private sector development decisions to optimize the experience and spending of existing visitors, justify loans and funding proposals and avoid cannibalization of “built, cultural and natural” place-based assets, things that make your community distinct give it the proverbial “there-there.”

• Intel will isolate a database of target households, down to the county and zip code level, that will prepare a DMO for when it has more resources and will empower businesses and organizations to more effectively and efficiently harvest existing visitors.

• Intel will give a DMO the tools to assure its community that they are worthy of additional resources and that decisions about a full marketing mix will be driven by objective data and performance rather than just opinions and protect it being buffeted by the stew of “who’s asking” sycophancy, “push and shove” lobbying or special interest influences which are commonplace in every community.

• Intel will inform foundational planning and preparation for if or when your DMO has more resources including the prioritization of a mix of activities like PR, interactive and marketing, advertising, sales and many other activities but also testing of nomenclature, story ideas and creative that will best enable your community to lower perceptual barriers such as image and leap-frog more established competition etc.

The average proportion of marketing expenses invested in marketing intelligence across all types of organizations is 11- 12%. In community destination marketing organizations, which are just catching on, the “best practice” average is only 5%-6%.

So marketing intelligence is not only the most indispensible marketing activity, it also delivers the most significant returns on investment.

The Meaning and Personification of Grit

“Grit” is a word often used to describe my adopted home, Durham NC. When place-branding expert and author Bill Baker used hundreds of individual interviews and scores of inclusively-balanced “focused groups” and generalizable research to help Durham distill its “overarching” brand,” he joked with the community-wide brand advisory group that he’d never heard so many people use the same traits and values to describe a place, including in a positive sense, the word “gritty.”

The term was also frequently used to describe me in a back-handed sort of way by people who resisted and often tried to undermine the team I spearheaded in the successful two-decade turn around of the negative perception of Durham’s in nearby communities, now vigilantly sustained even after my retirement back in 2009 by “the defenders of Durham’s image and brand and the guardians of its unique sense of place.”

It is a word I’ve often used myself to describe friend and colleague Bill Kalkhof who, over a decade and a half, has been spearheading the physical revitalization of downtown Durham and my neighbor Kevin McDonald who during the same period has built T.R.O.S.A, a beehive of social entrepreneurship and Commissioner and environmental activist Becky Heron and many others here. I could easily tick off hundreds of names from every gender, ethnicity and era.

But as concise as I’d like to be I’ve never been good at describing what I meant by the term.

Then while reading through the magazines that stacked up at the Post Office during my just-concluded and most recent three-week cross-country road trip, I came across a Next Strategy column in Fast Company magazine about “grit.

During the same span when a team of us were turning Durham perceptions around, Sally Herndon Malek’s team at North Carolina Project ASSIST, faced down the seemingly insurmountable tobacco lobby, culminating in a ban in restaurants that took effect in 2009.

To the authors, grit is “defined as endurance in pursuit of long-term goals and an ability to persist in the face of adversity” and they cite studies and research showing it is a key element in what makes people successful including one at West Point that explains the success of another Durham example of grit, Coach K.

I had the honor of working briefly with Sally from the tourism side of things during the final years of that campaign and I agree that she definitely personifies “grit” and yup, she also lives in Durham.

The biggest victories truly are won an inch at a time! And for those fighting to free North Carolina of outdoor billboards and their latest desperate strategy to strip local communities of the right to regulate them? The tobacco lobby tried the same thing in 1993.

Keep the faith.

50 Years Old And Still Incubating Startups

I wonder how many entrepreneurs and business startups can be traced back to their founder’s service in the Peace Corps? Last Tuesday marked the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, but I ask this question because it has surfaced recently in three separate discussions with or presentations by entrepreneurs such as downtown Durham’s Ari Zandman-Zeman, Owner and Founder of Rubberbanditz, and Joe Colopy, CEO and Founder of Bronto.

Over the years I’ve come across numerous business executives who honed skills in the Peace Corps including members of the governing boards for whom I served as a DMO executive in Anchorage, Alaska and Durham, North Carolina.

The Peace Corps was founded March 1, 1960 by then President John F. Kennedy and his brother-in-law, the late Sargent Shriver; and to-date 200,000 Americans have served in 139 countries. The average age is 28, which according to National Geographic is the average age of the earth’s 7,000,000 inhabitants this year.

Some 14% serve in business/information communications technology sector but I’m sure the 27% in education, 22% in Health, 13% in environment also learn entrepreneurial skills.

Both going out and returning, my recent cross-country road trip took me through Butch Cassidy country in Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. The actor who played Butch’s sidekick in the 1969 classic Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Academy Award-winning actor, director, producer, developer and environmental activist Robert Redford, is citied in an article this month as one of those people for whom “service is the rent we pay for living.”

I believe the original quote by Shirley Chisom, the first African-American woman elected to Congress, is “service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.”

Apparently service in the Peace Corps also pays dividends. Click here to learn about joining the Peace Corps.