A Long Day With Great Takeaways

Not a slide you usually see at a corporate event!

As I alluded to a couple of days ago, I spent the first part of this week away from my family on a business trip. I don’t travel much during the year but the spring usually brings about at least a couple of flights to various parts of the country with the most recent airport jaunt bringing me to Austin, Texas. And while there were many meetings during my day and a half in this interesting town, there are a couple of presentations that really made me think about some of the topic that I routinely encounter every day… money and public relations.

The first presentation that I attended was the keynote for the event by Peter, Lord of the Skies, Shankman. Over the years I have heard various opinions about this person from a plethora of people throughout our common industry. Some of those thoughts have been less than favorable while other endorsements have been, to put it mildly, glowing. Personally, I have had only the occasional correspondence with him over the years going back to the early days of HARO, so I never was really able to form any sort of strong opinion.

However, having now been present for one of his presentations I must, at the very least, give him a tremendous amount of credit for his ability to deliver a concise and easily digestible message. When it comes to PR, marketing, branding, and customer service there are great presentations and there are lectures that have you looking for the door, or the bar, about ten minutes into the talk. He was definitely in the former category. In fact, I can relate to much of what he said including the simple mantra to brand everything… I guess you could say that this blog goes a long way in achieving that goal. The other simple lesson gleaned from his ADOS style was that there is always a means to accomplish your goals as long as you are willing to put forth the effort and make time work for you.

The second session during the event that has left me with lingering thoughts was toward the end of the day when David Wolman, Contributing Editor of Wired, who spoke about “The End of Money”. His book by the same title is one that I will certainly have to pick up some time soon but the presentation was definitely enough to get me thinking. While the main impetus for this exploration was the simple fact that is costs the US government more to produce certain denominations of currency than the actual face value of that same coin, the historic as well as present perceptions of currency where a fascinating juxtaposition to the commonly accepted norms of money.

This immediately had me thinking about the value that information and access to information has in today’s society… a return to a norm not seen in nearly a hundred years. Also, given the publication for which he writes, another topic that kept forcing its way to the forefront of my mind is the simple irony that a publication named “Wired” focuses more on wireless and mobile rather than actually wired technology. I know, random thought.

Both Shankman and Wolman proved to be very engaging both from the stage and when I spoke with them one on one after the spotlights had dimmed. However, more importantly, they were engaging to a wide array of people in the audience and also provided me with many thoughts to process, posts to write, and projects to start. It was a long day on a short trip but one that was definitely successful and productive both personally and professionally. Don’t know if I could have asked to accomplish much more… well, a few more hours of sleep would have been nice and having my family with me would have been great.

I really had an early flight home.

Taking A Few Minutes Before Preparing For The Next Meeting

Today I am taking some time to relax and only making a couple of calls and sending a few emails. It is a day when I am able to enjoy what my lodge was able to accomplish last night by reading the overly gracious notes from the district deputy and my fellow brothers from the lodge. All the work came to fruition and the results were far beyond any expectations I ever thought of placing on the meeting. It truly was a great night.  

The night that we had been preparing and scrambling for over the past couple of months finally came and went without a hiccup during the evening. While we had a few setbacks during the weeks leading up to the district visitation and I had to take on a few more duties than I had planned on doing, the brethren came together and made last night a success. Being the first such meeting since becoming Secretary (the last visitation was my first meeting as a mason) I was incredibly nervous but over the past year I have come to find that even when things don’t go to plan we all come together as a lodge to make things happen. There has been no clearer example than that of last night’s meeting.

I spent the morning finishing up and revising the minutes and the rest of the day getting some projects done for the office (nice relaxing day off) before getting on a conference call in the early afternoon. After a quick shower and trips to Staples and the post office, I got to the lodge just before 4:00pm with a number of things that I had to do to prepare. While I knew exactly what I had to do, time seemed to be spinning around the clock faster than any other day that I could remember.

While I was able to greet a few brothers as they walked through the door and spoke to a few brothers as I helped to carry in the meal for the night, I didn’t really have much time to converse. Throughout the day, with brethren scattering about the building, I climbed and descended more stairs than I had in the past few weeks combined. Before the meeting ever started I was already beginning to tire. Of course, not having time to eat dinner didn’t help the situation either. After a few last minute scrambles, the meeting was set to begin.

Much like the earlier passing of the day, the meeting was a blur but thankfully I was prepared for every moment with copies of every piece of paper, document, and record needed. Additionally, the shirt that my cousin took care of for me was received with both great surprise and appreciation (mainly because it was something that would be used and not another mug or keychain). There were many moments to remember and ones that I will forever be proud to have been a part of.

However, the moments that will stand out for me or the rest of my life are the moments during the meeting when my fellow brothers took the floor and made speeches during which they thanked me for what I had done for them. While those moments were greatly appreciated and I am glad I could help in some small way the credit should really go to the lodge for what we have accomplished and to those individual brothers for putting forth the effort to ensure their recent success and recognition. It was certainly a night to remember and a night they we can all take pride in being members of this fraternity and of our lodge.

Fiction Takes A Back Seat To Reality

Sometimes the title reveals very little about the story.

Every once in a while in your life you meet someone who is truly an astounding individual who has lived a life that you only read about in books or see in the movies (or in a beer commercial). And sometimes it takes a second meeting to realize how remarkable someone is. This was the case when Dr. Liann Francisco was invited back to our Rotary club as a presenter.

Liann is a woman who has lived two lives. After a successful career working with the government, primarily with the military but also included assignments with the Pentagon and US Marshall Service, she is now dedicating herself to electronic security and surveillance in the private sector. However, this was only the beginning of her entrepreneurial efforts as she has recently ventured into the field of aviation. I guess you could say she is revisiting the aviation industry but no one, at least anyone I know of, would pay to take a ride on Con Air (Liann was the engineer behind the design of the US Marshall’s primary method of air transportation… not the Nicholas Cage version).

Of course, you can’t accomplish as much as she had done and flipped her life upside down and inside out as many times as she has done without being a highly motivated and intellectually curious individual. Even in her spare time, Liann has pursued her pilot’s license, dive master certification, EMT certification, and is an USCG Boat Captain as well as a Black Belt in Tie Kwon Do. If that weren’t enough she is also an avid drummer and ham radio operator (if you don’t know what that is ask your parents or look it up).

I never knew all this when I first met Liann a few weeks ago when she came as a guest of our club’s president, Dr. Sherman Leis. We spoke a little about her former life working with the government and a little about her recent venture into aviation but nothing really beyond the type of conversation that one would have when first meeting another professional at a Rotary meeting for the first time. This is a perfect example of the fact that truly amazing people won’t say they are amazing… their brilliance only comes out when you take the time to get to know them.

This is also a prime reason why all clubs should welcome the people who accompany members to a meeting. Don’t let any preconceptions dictate reality. Great men and women are around us every day; it is up to us to discover their brilliance.

The same can be said for your fellow Rotarians any why it is so important for us all to give presentations not only about our professions but also about our passions and interests. We are quite the diverse group when you sit down and think about it and I have known many successful businesspeople in my life whose talents shown through in their other endeavors more so than their day to day jobs. Few people are able to combine the two, whether due to lack of courage, opportunity, or means, but sometimes you come across someone who has been able to do just that, someone like Liann.

It’s safe to say that she definitely gives the guy in the Dos Equis beer commercial a run for his money. Oh wait, that’s right, he isn’t real. It just goes to show that if you pay attention, get out there and meet people, you will find individuals that put fiction to shame.