"Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth." - Lou Gehrig
I have been accused of being many things, however, at a loss for words has never been one. For the past few weeks I have been unable to write my blog. For all that have enjoyed every incredible word I have written in the past, you know my blog is as much about life as it is business. Lately, life has been all too real.
My father is dying. It's a fact I have been dealing with for some time and by the time you read this he may already have passed. However, the impending definitiveness as I am writing is now here.
My father was very influential in my life and his loss will have long lasting effects on me personally. I am not eloquent or intelligent enough to express in prose his impact on me. However, it's not my father but something my mother once said that is dominating my thoughts. "You learn a lot about people during death. Crisis shines an all knowing light."
My mother’s statement is true in business AND in life. There have been countless examples during the past couple of years of appalling and egregious corporate behavior. However, there have also been remarkable acts of kindness and proper corporate responsibility. Morals are not attached to a financial biorhythm and should never shift no matter the peril. (OK - that fulfilled the business requirement portion.)
Only recently and only to a few have I shared my personal struggle with losing my "hero." I never wanted to project my burden onto others and thought of these types of discussion useless and self absorbed. However, I felt compelled to share to a few who where witness to my morose behavior and countless cancellations to their kind invitations. They were not only understanding, but without my knowledge shared with others who they felt would benefit from knowing my ordeal. Normally this type of personal exposure would make my skin crawl, however what has transpired has changed my outlook completely. A great majority of my life's interactions are through work or with husbands of friends of my wife. As such, I never considered myself someone who had many friends in the traditional sense. I felt those interactions were forced or of some duty on their part, since I was either providing a service to them or in the case of the husbands, stranded on the same island together. There was a part of me that also believed that I was too old to make friends.
However, what I have found out lately is there is no such thing as traditional love, kindness or friendship. In the past couple of weeks so many people have reached out to me, expressing their thoughts and genuine offer of support. Each interaction leaves me bewildered by my luck to know such caring people. I can even be so bold as to say, I have many friends.
Mine is a blog about business and life. If indeed "Crisis shines an all knowing light," I have learned my light shines bright.
Thank you all.
Greg
Gregory Salsburg
CEO/The Big STIR
STIR-Communications
Miami | New York | London
c: (561) 386-8064
o: (305) 407-1723
Monday, June 13, 2011
Thursday, June 9, 2011
People Are Not Cogs
Thought this blog may be of interest to you, as it was for us ...
Harvard Business Review – Conversations Blog
People Are Not Cogs
Thursday June 2, 2011
by Nilofer Merchant
With peers in a few CEO roundtables, I've heard things like: "I plan on hiring 3 biz dev people to get $345K per headcount in revenues." After publishing a book about closing the execution gap by focusing on the "peopley" stuff, CEOs of major companies took me aside (in a friendly way) to suggest I had made a major faux pas, and would be seen as having gone "soft." In spite of a forest's worth of academic papers and rafts of best practices published by the likes of HBR on the importance of the "soft" stuff, most companies continue to treat people as inputs in a production line. I've had leaders ask me if this "people engagement thing" is something that can be added on, after the core business stuff is done, sort of like adding frosting to a cupcake.
And I. Can't. Believe. It.
Are we still having this conversation, really?
We know our economy has shifted away from mostly producing things . It makes no sense in such a landscape to keep talking about people as if people are disposable, replaceable, cogs in the mix.
Gurus like Don Tapscott, Tammy Erickson, John Hagel, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Gary Hamel, and more recently, Umair Haque, have all written about how our new economy is about producing ideas, experiences, and meaning. Companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Slideshare, and even Groupon are based on the conversion of ideas and creativity into value, rather than shipping physical stuff. Even companies producing "things" have found a way to embrace the new economy. Look at Apple. Their earnings per employee figure is $419,528 per head, beating out even Google's of $335,297/head and well on its way to be double that of Microsoft, currently at $244,831. They outperform their industry because they've figured out how to enable the key asset of the new economy: scalably leverage many people's contributions, including the app developers eager to piggyback on the industry's most attractive devices.
Yet most organizations still operate much as they did in the industrial age. We manage the measurable, rather than the things that create meaning that fuels creativity, that enables innovative thinking and that helps any company to outpace the market.
Am I revealing a certain naïveté in even writing this? Maybe yes, maybe no. Because I know the truth today: In work archetypes, we believe we must choose either performance or people. We can't see them as one and the same. We tag performance as the quantitatively focused work of what we can design, market, measure, track, bill, and monetize. Talent, purpose, culture and creating meaning is the peopley work mostly viewed by the performance folks as "cost centers," or departments that exist only to manage legal risk. The two camps operate with a "live and let live" approach, and they don't attempt to collaborate or interoperate with one another.
I have long believed that this "two camps" model must change, convinced that a more unifying model must be possible. And now we have "existence proofs" in the form of successful companies with different models. And it's not all of these companies were built from scratch; some were reinvented. The peopley stuff is what allows organizations to not just win, but also win repeatedly.
There's plenty of empirical data to support this strategic direction. Gallup, the research firm, recently did a meta-analysis across 199 studies covering 152 organizations, 44 industries, and 26 countries. It showed that high employee engagement brings an uplift of every business performance number. Profitability up 16%, Productivity up 18%, customer loyalty up 12% and quality up an incredible 60%.
We know that life is not just about efficiency. So why do we resist the idea that work can be about greatness?
We know we need more than the simple efficiency that our current measures capture. Our view of performance has become limited by overly focusing on those metrics. Because we can see the outward manifestations of work performance like products shipped, revenues booked, and earnings-per-share, we can discuss them in analyst calls and at management meetings. We can barely see and surely can't measure the soft aspect of how we make great products, revenues or earnings per share.
That doesn't mean that greatness can't be decoded. There are pieces that we can see and understand. It includes groups being creative. It includes people being themselves. It includes all of us having confidence that we're making a difference. It's asking questions that let us reimagine what could be. It's feeling motivated. It's about being challenged within our capabilities. It's all of us having a rich, intense sense of joy at work. It's trusting ourselves, and our ability to learn. It's about being trusted by others. It's when we can say to each other: I believe in you. It's about being courageous and not always trying to fit in. It's about everyone knowing what matters. It's about all of us learning, and growing and changing. It's about creativity and inventiveness, and the ability to go fast because we are adaptable. It's about getting rewarded for caring about the commons, not just the silos.
We need a measure that captures all of that. Something that captures our purpose, our talent, and the way our culture enables us to create velocity in bringing ideas to market.
How do we do start to measure the peopley stuff and also keep on performing and measuring the external stuff — how do we make sure we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater? For too long, the quants have lived in one world, and soft, peopley folks in another. Neither side was particularly willing to take the first steps necessary to bridge the gap, or even to even acknowledge that bridging was possible. I hold that to realize our organizations' full potential, both sides must work hard to get that bridge built.
For now, let's all agree that when someone proposes that we can put off that peopley stuff till later, we can all answer a resounding: "No, we can't." It's not the frosting on the cupcake. It's the key ingredient in how we make the cupcake bigger.
Nilofer Merchant is a corporate advisor and speaker on innovation methods. Her book, The New How, discussing collaborative ways to have your whole company strategize, was published in 2010. Follow her on Twitter @nilofer.
Harvard Business Review – Conversations Blog
People Are Not Cogs
Thursday June 2, 2011
by Nilofer Merchant
With peers in a few CEO roundtables, I've heard things like: "I plan on hiring 3 biz dev people to get $345K per headcount in revenues." After publishing a book about closing the execution gap by focusing on the "peopley" stuff, CEOs of major companies took me aside (in a friendly way) to suggest I had made a major faux pas, and would be seen as having gone "soft." In spite of a forest's worth of academic papers and rafts of best practices published by the likes of HBR on the importance of the "soft" stuff, most companies continue to treat people as inputs in a production line. I've had leaders ask me if this "people engagement thing" is something that can be added on, after the core business stuff is done, sort of like adding frosting to a cupcake.
And I. Can't. Believe. It.
Are we still having this conversation, really?
We know our economy has shifted away from mostly producing things . It makes no sense in such a landscape to keep talking about people as if people are disposable, replaceable, cogs in the mix.
Gurus like Don Tapscott, Tammy Erickson, John Hagel, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Gary Hamel, and more recently, Umair Haque, have all written about how our new economy is about producing ideas, experiences, and meaning. Companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Slideshare, and even Groupon are based on the conversion of ideas and creativity into value, rather than shipping physical stuff. Even companies producing "things" have found a way to embrace the new economy. Look at Apple. Their earnings per employee figure is $419,528 per head, beating out even Google's of $335,297/head and well on its way to be double that of Microsoft, currently at $244,831. They outperform their industry because they've figured out how to enable the key asset of the new economy: scalably leverage many people's contributions, including the app developers eager to piggyback on the industry's most attractive devices.
Yet most organizations still operate much as they did in the industrial age. We manage the measurable, rather than the things that create meaning that fuels creativity, that enables innovative thinking and that helps any company to outpace the market.
Am I revealing a certain naïveté in even writing this? Maybe yes, maybe no. Because I know the truth today: In work archetypes, we believe we must choose either performance or people. We can't see them as one and the same. We tag performance as the quantitatively focused work of what we can design, market, measure, track, bill, and monetize. Talent, purpose, culture and creating meaning is the peopley work mostly viewed by the performance folks as "cost centers," or departments that exist only to manage legal risk. The two camps operate with a "live and let live" approach, and they don't attempt to collaborate or interoperate with one another.
I have long believed that this "two camps" model must change, convinced that a more unifying model must be possible. And now we have "existence proofs" in the form of successful companies with different models. And it's not all of these companies were built from scratch; some were reinvented. The peopley stuff is what allows organizations to not just win, but also win repeatedly.
There's plenty of empirical data to support this strategic direction. Gallup, the research firm, recently did a meta-analysis across 199 studies covering 152 organizations, 44 industries, and 26 countries. It showed that high employee engagement brings an uplift of every business performance number. Profitability up 16%, Productivity up 18%, customer loyalty up 12% and quality up an incredible 60%.
We know that life is not just about efficiency. So why do we resist the idea that work can be about greatness?
We know we need more than the simple efficiency that our current measures capture. Our view of performance has become limited by overly focusing on those metrics. Because we can see the outward manifestations of work performance like products shipped, revenues booked, and earnings-per-share, we can discuss them in analyst calls and at management meetings. We can barely see and surely can't measure the soft aspect of how we make great products, revenues or earnings per share.
That doesn't mean that greatness can't be decoded. There are pieces that we can see and understand. It includes groups being creative. It includes people being themselves. It includes all of us having confidence that we're making a difference. It's asking questions that let us reimagine what could be. It's feeling motivated. It's about being challenged within our capabilities. It's all of us having a rich, intense sense of joy at work. It's trusting ourselves, and our ability to learn. It's about being trusted by others. It's when we can say to each other: I believe in you. It's about being courageous and not always trying to fit in. It's about everyone knowing what matters. It's about all of us learning, and growing and changing. It's about creativity and inventiveness, and the ability to go fast because we are adaptable. It's about getting rewarded for caring about the commons, not just the silos.
We need a measure that captures all of that. Something that captures our purpose, our talent, and the way our culture enables us to create velocity in bringing ideas to market.
How do we do start to measure the peopley stuff and also keep on performing and measuring the external stuff — how do we make sure we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater? For too long, the quants have lived in one world, and soft, peopley folks in another. Neither side was particularly willing to take the first steps necessary to bridge the gap, or even to even acknowledge that bridging was possible. I hold that to realize our organizations' full potential, both sides must work hard to get that bridge built.
For now, let's all agree that when someone proposes that we can put off that peopley stuff till later, we can all answer a resounding: "No, we can't." It's not the frosting on the cupcake. It's the key ingredient in how we make the cupcake bigger.
Nilofer Merchant is a corporate advisor and speaker on innovation methods. Her book, The New How, discussing collaborative ways to have your whole company strategize, was published in 2010. Follow her on Twitter @nilofer.
Monday, May 2, 2011
STAY STUPID
The book industry is changing. At STIR-Communications, we love the written word (obviously), the verbose and the brief.
Also, we applaud Seth Godin and his company Domino for the impact they will make on sharing knowledge through books – it will be huge.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Resistance is the enemy to great work, says author Steve Pressfield in Do the Work. But with enemies come allies. Consider, who and what will push you through the dips and help you do the work that matters.
Here’s an excerpt from Do the Work about the champions on your side (available for free on Kindle for another three weeks only):
1. Stupidity
2. Stubbornness
3. Blind faith
4. Passion
5. Assistance (the opposite of Resistance)
6. Friends and family
Stay Stupid
The three dumbest guys I can think of: Charles Lindbergh, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill. Why? Because any smart person who understood how impossibly arduous were the tasks they had set themselves would have pulled the plug before he even began.
Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway.
How do we achieve this state of mind? By staying stupid. By not allowing ourselves to think.
A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.
Don’t think. Act.
We can always revise and revisit once we’ve acted. But we can accomplish nothing until we act.
Be Stubborn
Once we commit to action, the worst thing we can do is to stop.
What will keep us from stopping? Plain old stubbornness.
I like the idea of stubbornness because it’s less lofty than “tenacity” or “perseverance.” We don’t have to be heroes to be stubborn. We can just be pains in the butt.
When we’re stubborn, there’s no quit in us. We’re mean. We’re mulish. We’re ornery.
We’re in till the finish.
We will sink our junkyard-dog teeth into Resistance’s ass and not let go, no matter how hard he kicks.
Blind Faith
Is there a spiritual element to creativity? Hell, yes.
Our mightiest ally (our indispensable ally) is belief in something we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or feel.
Resistance wants to rattle that faith. Resistance wants to destroy it.
There’s an exercise that Patricia Ryan Madson describes in her wonderful book, Improv Wisdom. (Ms. Madson taught improvisational theater at Stanford to standing-room only classes for twenty years.) Here’s the exercise:
Imagine a box with a lid. Hold the box in your hand. Now open it.
What’s inside?
It might be a frog, a silk scarf, a gold coin of Persia. But here’s the trick: no matter how many times you open the box, there is always something in it.
Ask me my religion. That’s it.
I believe with unshakeable faith that there will always be something in the box.
Passion
Picasso painted with passion, Mozart composed with it. A child plays with it all day long.
You may think that you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true.
Fear saps passion.
When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.
Assistance
We’ll come back to this later. Suffice it to say for now that as Resistance is the shadow, its opposite—Assistance—is the sun.
Friends and Family
When art and inspiration and success and fame and money have come and gone, who still loves us—and whom do we love?
Only two things will remain with us across the river: our inhering genius and the hearts we love.
In other words, what we do and whom we do it for.
Greg
Gregory Salsburg
CEO/The Big STIR
STIR-Communications
Miami | New York | London
c: (561) 386-8064
o: (305) 407-1723
e: Greg@STIR-Communications.com
Also, we applaud Seth Godin and his company Domino for the impact they will make on sharing knowledge through books – it will be huge.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Resistance is the enemy to great work, says author Steve Pressfield in Do the Work. But with enemies come allies. Consider, who and what will push you through the dips and help you do the work that matters.
Here’s an excerpt from Do the Work about the champions on your side (available for free on Kindle for another three weeks only):
1. Stupidity
2. Stubbornness
3. Blind faith
4. Passion
5. Assistance (the opposite of Resistance)
6. Friends and family
Stay Stupid
The three dumbest guys I can think of: Charles Lindbergh, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill. Why? Because any smart person who understood how impossibly arduous were the tasks they had set themselves would have pulled the plug before he even began.
Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway.
How do we achieve this state of mind? By staying stupid. By not allowing ourselves to think.
A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.
Don’t think. Act.
We can always revise and revisit once we’ve acted. But we can accomplish nothing until we act.
Be Stubborn
Once we commit to action, the worst thing we can do is to stop.
What will keep us from stopping? Plain old stubbornness.
I like the idea of stubbornness because it’s less lofty than “tenacity” or “perseverance.” We don’t have to be heroes to be stubborn. We can just be pains in the butt.
When we’re stubborn, there’s no quit in us. We’re mean. We’re mulish. We’re ornery.
We’re in till the finish.
We will sink our junkyard-dog teeth into Resistance’s ass and not let go, no matter how hard he kicks.
Blind Faith
Is there a spiritual element to creativity? Hell, yes.
Our mightiest ally (our indispensable ally) is belief in something we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or feel.
Resistance wants to rattle that faith. Resistance wants to destroy it.
There’s an exercise that Patricia Ryan Madson describes in her wonderful book, Improv Wisdom. (Ms. Madson taught improvisational theater at Stanford to standing-room only classes for twenty years.) Here’s the exercise:
Imagine a box with a lid. Hold the box in your hand. Now open it.
What’s inside?
It might be a frog, a silk scarf, a gold coin of Persia. But here’s the trick: no matter how many times you open the box, there is always something in it.
Ask me my religion. That’s it.
I believe with unshakeable faith that there will always be something in the box.
Passion
Picasso painted with passion, Mozart composed with it. A child plays with it all day long.
You may think that you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true.
Fear saps passion.
When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.
Assistance
We’ll come back to this later. Suffice it to say for now that as Resistance is the shadow, its opposite—Assistance—is the sun.
Friends and Family
When art and inspiration and success and fame and money have come and gone, who still loves us—and whom do we love?
Only two things will remain with us across the river: our inhering genius and the hearts we love.
In other words, what we do and whom we do it for.
Greg
Gregory Salsburg
CEO/The Big STIR
STIR-Communications
Miami | New York | London
c: (561) 386-8064
o: (305) 407-1723
e: Greg@STIR-Communications.com
Monday, April 18, 2011
Who We Are
“You need to be a jack of all trades.”
"Better to be a master at one thing than mediocre at many.”
“Just do it.”
Since this is tax day, I will share with you the most taxing issue I am facing of late: other people’s opinions. And you thought the IRS is a pain in the ass.
As you know, I have NEVER once used this platform to outwardly promote our company, STIR-Communications. Today, I use it more as a reference, albeit ad nauseum, and with the less than subtle attempt to express our overarching virtues and modesty, which is only surpassed by our unequalled skills, which is only surpassed by our modesty.
Our company’s approach to the practice of strategic public relations, advertising and marketing can best be summed up in the words of R. Buckminster Fuller, the American architect, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. In his book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), he writes:
“If…nature required man to be a specialist she would have made him so by having him born with one eye and a microscope attached to it. What nature needed man to be was adaptive in many if not any direction…Mind apprehends and comprehends the general principles governing flight and deep sea diving, and man puts on his wings or his lungs, then takes them off when not using them. The specialist bird is greatly impeded by its wings when trying to walk. The fish cannot come out of the sea and walk upon land, for birds and fish are specialists.”
Like Buckminster, STIR-Communications eschews the concept of specialization, while still being special. The common industry notion is that when an agency is smaller, it is more efficient to specialize in one industry. Hence, there is no shortage of boutique agencies specializing in food, technology, health care, home goods, social media, financial services, travel, fashion, beauty, or anything else you can imagine.
But, what is the true cost of such “efficiency”? We believe the cost is stagnant, uninspired and derivative work. Even worse, the agency becomes subservient to the industry or category itself and has to put its own reputation within the category above and beyond the reputation of its clients. Yawn!
If an agency specializes in one industry, then it has to always “play by the rules” of that industry. It has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, because the agency itself becomes the very epitome of the status quo. It can’t afford to rock the boat or ever challenge the conventions of the industry. It certainly can’t represent a client that is trying to do things differently, to innovate. After all, how would the firm’s other clients react to such heresy? In the end, boutique agencies simply can’t take risks. Clients may come and go, but once the agency loses its reputation, then all is lost.
An antidote to the traditional boutique agency, STIR-Communications is a multi-specialty boutique firm, working within a wide variety of different disciplines and industries. All agency members are required to work with a diverse client base, where they get broad and differentiated experiences. The result is fresh, original and creative programming, as well as big-idea development. It is this unique, boundary-less approach that makes STIR-Communications a “Circular Communications Agency,” and true “thought providers” (see last week’s blog).
Our industry and category agnostic approach allows us to put our clients first. At STIR-Communications, we don’t care if we challenge the conventional thinking of an industry … in fact, that’s what makes us get out of the bed each morning; or, because we are contrarian work directly from bed. That’s right, often we even eschew the office itself, since we have found the least amount of productivity is accomplished in a “working” setting.
As a result of this specialty (or we should say anti-specialty), we have come to realize that STIR-Communications is ideally suited to working with companies that value non-traditional thinking above and beyond specialization. As a result, the overwhelming majority of our clients tend to be industry challengers or innovators.
As a matter of fact, multi-specialization is not only beneficial to challengers, pioneers or iconoclasts, but really to any organization that needs to reach multiple constituencies simultaneously.
It’s no surprise that lots of companies need to communicate with different audiences. For example, a B2B company may need to reach out to enterprise customers, mainstream consumers, internal audiences, investors and the government all at the same time. If the company is big enough, it can hire multiple specialist agencies or hire a large global agency with multiple practice areas, essentially the same thing as hiring a bunch of smaller agencies—except they receive one very large invoice. But what about smaller to mid-sized companies or any company that can’t afford this option?
Don’t fret, my contact info is below.
Greg
Gregory Salsburg
CEO/The Big STIR
STIR-Communications
Miami | New York | London
c: (561) 386-8064
o: (305) 407-1723
e: Greg@STIR-Communications.com
"Better to be a master at one thing than mediocre at many.”
“Just do it.”
Since this is tax day, I will share with you the most taxing issue I am facing of late: other people’s opinions. And you thought the IRS is a pain in the ass.
As you know, I have NEVER once used this platform to outwardly promote our company, STIR-Communications. Today, I use it more as a reference, albeit ad nauseum, and with the less than subtle attempt to express our overarching virtues and modesty, which is only surpassed by our unequalled skills, which is only surpassed by our modesty.
Our company’s approach to the practice of strategic public relations, advertising and marketing can best be summed up in the words of R. Buckminster Fuller, the American architect, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. In his book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), he writes:
“If…nature required man to be a specialist she would have made him so by having him born with one eye and a microscope attached to it. What nature needed man to be was adaptive in many if not any direction…Mind apprehends and comprehends the general principles governing flight and deep sea diving, and man puts on his wings or his lungs, then takes them off when not using them. The specialist bird is greatly impeded by its wings when trying to walk. The fish cannot come out of the sea and walk upon land, for birds and fish are specialists.”
Like Buckminster, STIR-Communications eschews the concept of specialization, while still being special. The common industry notion is that when an agency is smaller, it is more efficient to specialize in one industry. Hence, there is no shortage of boutique agencies specializing in food, technology, health care, home goods, social media, financial services, travel, fashion, beauty, or anything else you can imagine.
But, what is the true cost of such “efficiency”? We believe the cost is stagnant, uninspired and derivative work. Even worse, the agency becomes subservient to the industry or category itself and has to put its own reputation within the category above and beyond the reputation of its clients. Yawn!
If an agency specializes in one industry, then it has to always “play by the rules” of that industry. It has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, because the agency itself becomes the very epitome of the status quo. It can’t afford to rock the boat or ever challenge the conventions of the industry. It certainly can’t represent a client that is trying to do things differently, to innovate. After all, how would the firm’s other clients react to such heresy? In the end, boutique agencies simply can’t take risks. Clients may come and go, but once the agency loses its reputation, then all is lost.
An antidote to the traditional boutique agency, STIR-Communications is a multi-specialty boutique firm, working within a wide variety of different disciplines and industries. All agency members are required to work with a diverse client base, where they get broad and differentiated experiences. The result is fresh, original and creative programming, as well as big-idea development. It is this unique, boundary-less approach that makes STIR-Communications a “Circular Communications Agency,” and true “thought providers” (see last week’s blog).
Our industry and category agnostic approach allows us to put our clients first. At STIR-Communications, we don’t care if we challenge the conventional thinking of an industry … in fact, that’s what makes us get out of the bed each morning; or, because we are contrarian work directly from bed. That’s right, often we even eschew the office itself, since we have found the least amount of productivity is accomplished in a “working” setting.
As a result of this specialty (or we should say anti-specialty), we have come to realize that STIR-Communications is ideally suited to working with companies that value non-traditional thinking above and beyond specialization. As a result, the overwhelming majority of our clients tend to be industry challengers or innovators.
As a matter of fact, multi-specialization is not only beneficial to challengers, pioneers or iconoclasts, but really to any organization that needs to reach multiple constituencies simultaneously.
It’s no surprise that lots of companies need to communicate with different audiences. For example, a B2B company may need to reach out to enterprise customers, mainstream consumers, internal audiences, investors and the government all at the same time. If the company is big enough, it can hire multiple specialist agencies or hire a large global agency with multiple practice areas, essentially the same thing as hiring a bunch of smaller agencies—except they receive one very large invoice. But what about smaller to mid-sized companies or any company that can’t afford this option?
Don’t fret, my contact info is below.
Greg
Gregory Salsburg
CEO/The Big STIR
STIR-Communications
Miami | New York | London
c: (561) 386-8064
o: (305) 407-1723
e: Greg@STIR-Communications.com
Monday, April 11, 2011
Thought Provider
I have come to bury Caesar, not praise him. -- Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare: Act 3. Scene II
I admire many in the world of business. The ability to innovate, initiate and guide their companies to achieve desired success is astonishing. I also admire those tactile bunch that get into the mix physically, working alongside to ensure goals are achieved.
However, over the past few years a new leader has evolved. One slightly more passive than those aforementioned and possibly held in higher regard. I think this new leader would set Brutus in a venal rage.
The “Thought Leader.”
The Thought Leader has become the moniker of choice for those donning the dais of network functions. For purposes of full disclosure, I have used this term often and have been called one by many. OK, by a few … OK, once and it was a family member, but I assumed it was implied many other occasions.
I digress.
The world went array and we looked to leaders for opinions. We elevated those thoughts because we felt ours were somehow askew. However, great leaders, great companies, great people don't just THINK, they ACT and equally GIVE. I don't want to be associated with or be known anymore as a Thought Leader, I seek for "Thought Provider."
My suggestion reminds leaders of their very essence, to lead. And, that is much more powerful.
Greg
Gregory Salsburg
CEO/The Big STIR
STIR-Communications
Miami | New York | London
c: (561) 386-8064
o: (305) 407-1723
e: Greg@STIR-Communications.com
I admire many in the world of business. The ability to innovate, initiate and guide their companies to achieve desired success is astonishing. I also admire those tactile bunch that get into the mix physically, working alongside to ensure goals are achieved.
However, over the past few years a new leader has evolved. One slightly more passive than those aforementioned and possibly held in higher regard. I think this new leader would set Brutus in a venal rage.
The “Thought Leader.”
The Thought Leader has become the moniker of choice for those donning the dais of network functions. For purposes of full disclosure, I have used this term often and have been called one by many. OK, by a few … OK, once and it was a family member, but I assumed it was implied many other occasions.
I digress.
The world went array and we looked to leaders for opinions. We elevated those thoughts because we felt ours were somehow askew. However, great leaders, great companies, great people don't just THINK, they ACT and equally GIVE. I don't want to be associated with or be known anymore as a Thought Leader, I seek for "Thought Provider."
My suggestion reminds leaders of their very essence, to lead. And, that is much more powerful.
Greg
Gregory Salsburg
CEO/The Big STIR
STIR-Communications
Miami | New York | London
c: (561) 386-8064
o: (305) 407-1723
e: Greg@STIR-Communications.com
Monday, April 4, 2011
Blog Poetry
"I Tweet, therefore I am.” Not, René Descartes.
April is National Poetry Month. Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary. Poetry is an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define, however, I will try: how's dead or at least on the verge of extinction?
When was the last time a hot new poet was downloaded on iTunes?
Have we forgone the patience necessary to open our hearts to explore expression?
Is our societal requirement of immediacy diluting the requirement of cadence and nuance needed for wonderful prose?
Can we truly articulate our most passionate and descriptive thoughts within the newfangled 140 word requirement?
I could only imagine what creative stifling Yates, Dickinson, Cummings and Frost would suffer if they also had to monitor their Facebook page and Twitter accounts.
Like the art of a hand written note, the use of poetry seems to be a thing of the past. Do you think there is any correlation towards the increasing depletion of chivalry?!
Greg
Gregory Salsburg
CEO/The Big STIR
STIR-Communications
Miami | New York | London
c: (561) 386-8064
o: (305) 407-1723
e: Greg@STIR-Communications.com
April is National Poetry Month. Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary. Poetry is an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define, however, I will try: how's dead or at least on the verge of extinction?
When was the last time a hot new poet was downloaded on iTunes?
Have we forgone the patience necessary to open our hearts to explore expression?
Is our societal requirement of immediacy diluting the requirement of cadence and nuance needed for wonderful prose?
Can we truly articulate our most passionate and descriptive thoughts within the newfangled 140 word requirement?
I could only imagine what creative stifling Yates, Dickinson, Cummings and Frost would suffer if they also had to monitor their Facebook page and Twitter accounts.
Like the art of a hand written note, the use of poetry seems to be a thing of the past. Do you think there is any correlation towards the increasing depletion of chivalry?!
Greg
Gregory Salsburg
CEO/The Big STIR
STIR-Communications
Miami | New York | London
c: (561) 386-8064
o: (305) 407-1723
e: Greg@STIR-Communications.com
Monday, March 28, 2011
My Life in Ruins
"Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way." – Anonymous
In spite of some prior blogs, I don't fancy the written manner of anything morose or macabre. I pride myself on being a little off-beat, off-color and sometimes off-kilter. I have a been accused of late of occasional lapses into obscurity and a penchant for tomfoolery. I assumed both as compliments.
I often jest and ridicule the masses, of course secretly, since most of my existence is within my own private Idaho.
My "intellectual libidinous" nature provides me the confidence that with a few exaggerated pantomime moves I can conjure the best in situational absurdity and make you love me and agree I am "one of a kind."
However, on this day the crashing realization that I had transformed into a bottom feeding parasite was never more evident. It's not my fault, the devil does walk among us.
For four days in a row, I awoke at 5:00 a.m. like the dolt I have secretly become, filled with an eager anticipation and periodicals to pass the time, then headed out the door. I arrived at the mall, still dark outside. As I neared the Apple store, hopes of buying the iPad 2 was my single-minded focus.
However, for the fourth day in a row I left without my new device in hand. Either there were too many in line in front of me (did the others stay in the mall hiding as mannequins?), not enough arrived at the stores or they were stocked with the wrong type.
Damn you Steve Jobs!
Vowing to end this charade and never to return, I slunk out the mall at 7:45 a.m. I needed a pick me up and headed to the nearest Starbucks in hopes of erasing this whole ordeal.
I'm not making this up, the line was out the door. I am not positive, but I a believe some of the patrons were my former brethren from the mall.
Mr. Jobs meet your long lost twin, Mr. Schultz.
The similarities were too striking. Like the mall, I realized we are a nation of masochists, mirroring the collective descent into the struggles of bovine.
Mooo!
With double espresso in hand, my race for redemption was rampant. I ingested the black gold in one swig, fired up the car and raced for the highway to get to a meeting in Miami, 45 miles from my current location.
You guessed it, after waiting in traffic the whole ride, I acceded at my destination 2.5 hours later.
I have waxed poetic to leaders of business about the marketing importance of tapping into tribal societies and ritual … never realizing along the way I'm at the head of the line.
Greg
Gregory Salsburg
CEO/The Big STIR
STIR-Communications
Miami | New York | London
c: (561) 386-8064
o: (305) 407-1723
e: Greg@STIR-Communications.com
In spite of some prior blogs, I don't fancy the written manner of anything morose or macabre. I pride myself on being a little off-beat, off-color and sometimes off-kilter. I have a been accused of late of occasional lapses into obscurity and a penchant for tomfoolery. I assumed both as compliments.
I often jest and ridicule the masses, of course secretly, since most of my existence is within my own private Idaho.
My "intellectual libidinous" nature provides me the confidence that with a few exaggerated pantomime moves I can conjure the best in situational absurdity and make you love me and agree I am "one of a kind."
However, on this day the crashing realization that I had transformed into a bottom feeding parasite was never more evident. It's not my fault, the devil does walk among us.
For four days in a row, I awoke at 5:00 a.m. like the dolt I have secretly become, filled with an eager anticipation and periodicals to pass the time, then headed out the door. I arrived at the mall, still dark outside. As I neared the Apple store, hopes of buying the iPad 2 was my single-minded focus.
However, for the fourth day in a row I left without my new device in hand. Either there were too many in line in front of me (did the others stay in the mall hiding as mannequins?), not enough arrived at the stores or they were stocked with the wrong type.
Damn you Steve Jobs!
Vowing to end this charade and never to return, I slunk out the mall at 7:45 a.m. I needed a pick me up and headed to the nearest Starbucks in hopes of erasing this whole ordeal.
I'm not making this up, the line was out the door. I am not positive, but I a believe some of the patrons were my former brethren from the mall.
Mr. Jobs meet your long lost twin, Mr. Schultz.
The similarities were too striking. Like the mall, I realized we are a nation of masochists, mirroring the collective descent into the struggles of bovine.
Mooo!
With double espresso in hand, my race for redemption was rampant. I ingested the black gold in one swig, fired up the car and raced for the highway to get to a meeting in Miami, 45 miles from my current location.
You guessed it, after waiting in traffic the whole ride, I acceded at my destination 2.5 hours later.
I have waxed poetic to leaders of business about the marketing importance of tapping into tribal societies and ritual … never realizing along the way I'm at the head of the line.
Greg
Gregory Salsburg
CEO/The Big STIR
STIR-Communications
Miami | New York | London
c: (561) 386-8064
o: (305) 407-1723
e: Greg@STIR-Communications.com
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