Thinking Inside the Box

Our office is undergoing a major remodel in a month or so, and the logistics folks asked us to consider which items in our office we’d absolutely need to have with us for two months and which could be stashed in longer-term storage. I was told that my list of must-have items needs to fit in a box or two.

Thankfully, I’m not a pack rat, so it’s going to be pretty easy to distill my essential items down to a pretty short list. My computer, certainly. A family photo, perhaps. It’s actually quite liberating to know that these few items are all I’ll need to keep me busy and productive.

This little exercise did prompt me to reflect on how much marketing communications has changed. If I had been asked to pack my essential work materials into a single box ten years ago, I would have looked around at shelves full of archived transparencies, cases of printed collateral, hard files, etc. and probably broken into a cold sweat. As I sit here planning our corporate social media strategy, I realize how so much of what we do as marketers now is about influencing opinions and behaviors in a virtual, interactive realm, and much less about generating stuff. On the whole, I think that’s a positive development.

Now if I can only experience a similar transformation with the contents of my basement…

Learning by Osmosis

I’ve led a number of different creative teams over the years, and one of the things I’ve come to notice is that the folks that really thrive on teams and in larger organizations have a common characteristic—the ability to learn multidimensionally.

Unlike many of their peers, who tend to learn by absorbing information in linear, sequential steps, multidimensional learners are able to naturally gather information from multiple sources and synthesize this information with what they learn through formal training. This ability to absorb and process information in a more exponential fashion enables these high performers to offer immediate value to their team and accelerate their career growth.

I call this trait learning by osmosis, and I often see evidence of it shortly after someone joins my team. The new staffer will attend formal training sessions, but will be listening simultaneously to conversations, reading company communications and generally being open to and interested in other information sources. Within a day or two, the trainee will begin piecing together disparate bits of information and will begin asking questions to verify the connections he or she has drawn. The process accelerates from there, and shortly the new person is contributing to the group in unique and valuable ways.

Of course, I’ve also experienced situations when this trait is absent, and this too has a way of surfacing early in someone’s tenure on the team. The learning process only seems to happen at the rate at which formal training is provided. Compared to the high performer, the linear learner’s growth curve remains fairly flat. Sadly, these situations don’t usually end well.

Given how important high performers are to the success of a team, I’ve often wondered 1) how best to identify osmosis learners in the interview process and 2) whether it’s possible to train people to better learn multidimensionally. My success rate isn’t perfect on either. All I know for certain is that, when I’m successful at finding and retaining people with these traits, it’s a magical thing.

Kodachrome, RIP

Many news outlets reported over the weekend that Dwayne’s Photo Service, the last lab in the country to offer Kodachrome processing, stopped taking processing orders for the iconic film on December 30. We’ve known for more than a year that Kodak was going to discontinue Kodachrome, and there have been a number of great tribute projects around the country in 2010.

While I grew up with Kodachrome and have a soft place in my heart for its warm color tones and sharp detail, I’m personally kind of happy to see slide film go the way of the dinosaurs. Slides are hard to store and handle, processing slide film can be kind of fussy, and scanning transparency film to insert images into print layouts is time consuming and expensive.

Many photographers lament the passing of this great film, but I bet if you asked them when no one was listening, they’d all admit that they much prefer digital.