We’re currently looking for a creative support specialist, but that’s not what this blog post is about. Well, that’s not all it’s about. Like everything we try to do here, we approach the way we recruit, select, and develop our team members with an intense focus on learning and a healthy dose of professional humility. When I discuss humility here, I’m talking about something very basic: understanding that you …
Leadership
“And we appeal to the friends of progress and to our citizens of the several states to continue their efforts to the various legislatures until every state can boast of having a free school system, with no distinction in dissemination of knowledge to its inhabitants on account of race, color, sex, creed or previous condition.” And nearly 15 decades later, the friends of progress and citizens of several states are …
There’s one common mistake that scores of leaders make. Okay, so there is more than one standard mistake, but this post will address only one. And here it is: LEADERS CAN’T MANAGE EVERY EMPLOYEE THE SAME WAY. Two researchers, Hersey and Blanchard, outlined a leadership process called Situational Leadership Theory. The concept is worth reading about in Paul Hersey’s book The Situational Leader and on the Center for Leadership Studies …
A few weeks ago, we had a brief discussion about the our moral obligation to people who work with us as employees or contractors. I had a similar conversation at the end of last year with the head of a larger agency, and a few weeks before that I had the same conversation with my accountant. Because it’s important. Last month, I read an article on The Intercept detailing the …
As I scrolled through my personal Twitter feed this past weekend, I scrolled upon a post of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. The post included the above picture of Bezos sitting at a desk with one computer in a makeshift office on which the walls hung an airbrushed “Amazon.com” banner. The text attached to the picture read, “Jeff Bezos 1999. Next time you want to give up, think of this.” …
Research and development. Trial and error. Risk and reward. They’re all a part of doing business, no matter what business you happen to be in. Our commitment to learning at Fahrenheit Creative Group stems from that reality. We invest in new ideas and opportunities, always seeking to increase value for our clients, sharpen our professional skills, and grow our business. Sometimes all three of those things happen. Sometimes only one of …
There’s a lot of attention given to leaders. In fact, there are endless books written on the top, bordering on leadership overload. According to Gary Yukl, one of the most prominent and profound leadership researchers in the world, there are as many definitions of leadership as there are researchers working to define the concept. And yes, leadership is extremely important. But, what about the followers? After all, a leader can’t …
I just wanted to post a quick word of congratulations to the fellow graduates of the 2017 SBA Emerging Leaders Executive Training Program, listed in the Mississippi Business Journal article below. I wish each of them great success in the years to come. 6 graduate from SBA Emerging Leaders Executive Training Program After spending eight months and more than 100 hours of work in evening classes, six small businesses will graduate …
How many times have you heard someone give a motivational speech and say with authority, “It’s not the destination, but the journey that matters” or “life’s a journey, not a destination”? Well, let’s say this idea is true. How does it play out? If the destination doesn’t matter, then as I’m falling off a cliff with the ground quickly rushing towards me, do I take a fraction of a second …
The world ends. Or at least it can feel that way. This, like many if my random revelations, has an odd derivation. I have very excited about seeing The Foreign Exchange (TFE) live at this show in Charlotte. If for some odd reason you are not a fan of The Foreign Exchange, please watch this and listen to this and then come back and finish reading this post. I’ll wait. …
See spot. Good. Don’t see spot. See spot run. See spot run your business into the ground. Seeing spots is healthy. I’m not referring to ocular health. If you’re seeing actual spots, you should immediately consult your optometrist. However, if you are an entrepreneur, manager, or really anyone at any level working in any organization, you should be actively trying to find the spots that you aren’t seeing. The blind …
I recently stumbled upon a headline on forbes.com that read “New Report: Women CEOs Make More Than Men”. This headline caught my eye… but not for the reasons you might think. You may believe some celebration is in order, however, I’m not ready to party just yet and I don’t think you should be either. I am afraid that people will read this headline rather than the entire article. Or, …
There’s a lot of talk about thought leadership. Many nonprofit organizations and leaders often speak about ways to position themselves as “thought leaders” in their respective fields or service areas. The term “thought leader” is slightly deceiving. It means more than just producing good ideas, speaking at conferences, or attracting new followers to a social media network to share insight on a topic. In the nonprofit community, thought leadership does …
I learned early in my college career that if I wanted “real-world experience” I needed to get out into the real world. I was fortunate enough to have an incredible professor that not only arranged an interview for me at a local television station, but she also went to the interview with me to ensure that I would really benefit from the opportunity. The internship was unpaid. However, what I …
At some point, every organization will experience some type of crisis. The crisis may be minor – like you post the wrong pricing information on social media. Or, the crisis may be major – like the one Delta Airlines is experiencing right this moment due to its a sitewide system outage (that currently has me stranded at DCA waiting to get to Atlanta and then home to Jackson). The first …
Disclaimer: I usually don’t waste time writing open letters to corporations unless there is some gross violation of civil or human rights. This letter is definitely not that. However, there are some larger points that I felt could be made by sharing some of the horrible experiences I’ve had an Enterprise. To the Enterprise Holdings Leadership Team: I’ve recently had a terrible string of rental experiences at Enterprise. I want …
If you asked me what I do, I’d probably tell you I work with an awesome team of creatives to solve tough problems for great clients. But if you asked me what business I’m in, I’d tell you something different. Because I’m in the customer service business. And if for some reason you’re not, then you may not be in business for long. We spend a lot of time talking …
So, this is a very random post. Kind of. We devote the last 30 minutes of our day every Friday to writing (or preparing to write or thinking about writing or thinking about preparing to write – you get the picture). Unless of course our perfect world is disrupted by work, which happens from time to time (can you believe it?). As I was preparing to think about what I …
Cartoons are normally the last place we expect to find some sort of worthwhile life lesson but there is one series that I recently revisited from my childhood (Netflix FTW!) that made me think about how we as marketers have to sometimes take failure in stride and keep pushing through. When I was a kid in the 90’s, I wasn’t overly concerned about providing graphic design and social media marketing …
Toward the end of Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc., Catmull includes a chapter dedicated to tech and design legend Steve Jobs. In that chapter, Catmull shares an exchange between Jobs and a Pixar director where Jobs compares the characters in a film in progress to Saturday morning cartoon characters. Now I am a fan of Saturday morning cartoons. Some of the best hours of my life were spent in front of a television …
I’ve seen the phrase “leading from behind” a lot. I never knew the derivation, so I did most of us do when curiosity strikes us while surfing the internet – I Googled it. I quickly learned that although many people attributed the phrase to Nelson Mandela, he never actually said it. And there was quite a bit of debate over if it was a positive or negative method of leading. …
We didn’t win last week. Technically, one of our clients didn’t get the win it was seeking, but from our perspective, when one of our clients doesn’t achieve its goals we don’t achieve ours. You’ll notice that I didn’t say we, or our clients, lost. Because we didn’t lose. True, we did not get the result we were seeking last week, and that’s not something we’re happy about. We did, …
Everyone wants to go fast, but fast doesn’t always win (see Aesop’s The Tortoise and the Hare as told through this classic Walt Disney cartoon). Paul Graham outlines a basic truism for business growth in his post Startup = Growth: For a company to grow really big, it must (a) make something lots of people want, and (b) reach and serve all those people. First, your business doesn’t have to …
What does best in the world mean? Seth Godin poses that question in “The Dip” episode of his Startup School podcast. The concept of “the dip” is interesting enough to be explored at length another time, but my attention was arrested with the idea of being the best in the world. To quickly summarize, Godin defines the terms in this way and in this order: The world: the only …
Earlier today I was randomly navigating from article to article, and I landed on a short piece by David Berkowitz titled Why Snapchat’s 3V Advertising Model Is Flawed. Full disclosure: I’m not on Snapchat, and the older I get, the less knowledgeable I become about emerging and new social media platforms. For example, my awesome interns hipped me to Dubsmash and shout out pages on Instagram, both of which turned out to …