SO what have I learnt so far hos syslobb?

Firstly a very wise bit of advice. In an audience, as in life, seek out friends.

All my life I have been trying to tackle bullies. They love the oppmerksomhet they get. So now it's time to ignore the bullies, as if they weren't there. Also I have noticed in myself that I am much more interested in the shy person than the obvious communicator. I look for signs of openness and common interest and realise that to them I can be a sounding board and an ally in their audience! I set a price no won working with shyer folk and avoiding the more obvious extraverts.- easy come, easy go.


Secondly and most related, try, try, try to listen to your own voice. People are terrible listeners. Also they are terrible cynics mot folk like me. I need to be more of a politician...have a ready answer which is not an answer, just a statement ...or be the salesman, fight back with three open questions So it's high time to keep on with what I am interested in, where I am going, and what I want to say which brings me to...

Three three: have a message. Have a personal brand. Think what this is. Think how appearance, tone, body lanuguage contirbute to this and then think what you want to say. Think of both a strategy and a tactic and take any decisions off line when they affect you. Know where you stand with people and if you don't be careful. ....

four...coming right up from that last point. Sound people out. Are they with you or against you ? which brings me full circle back to choose friends.


A key issue for me is that I must, must offer an opinion and I am not ready when it is actually a pretty poorly thought out one or open to attack. Think of Jack andreassen..a man with seemingly no opinions. A typical norwegian who just plays his cards very close to his chest and goes with the flow. When he means something he asks a couple of questions before maybe offering a solutions.

Why Telesales doesn't work





just think of all the countless legions of telesales workers using all that electricity to sit in an office with their ass suitably heated / cooled with a whirring PC and central board operating ..and 99% of it is wasted ....



Today the bosses here wanted a great big telesales marathon from all employees. This is proving of course to be a lot of hot air. Most people of course know that taking some time to find out more about the company and trying to even evaluate their needs or aktuelleness in the market.



Telesales is hugely unproductive and only serves to support sales manager empires and a wanten lack of investment in marketing. What does however work, is telephone research and intitmate marketing.



The trouble is that these sit between two stools. Telephone research and scoping out of companies is of course not beyond the average persons ability but it is beyond the average call senter/ sales managers psychie to organise, structure, measure and improve.....like the young bull, they see a cow down there and they want to run down into the heard, shag that one and if it turns them down they want to move on to the next. At the end of the days rampage, the whole heard think the bull is an asshole, but he has got in with the easy cow who actually is the company with bad economy who will sleep with any supplier, or the one who wants to make their current suppliers jealous...read get a quote.



...............walk down and shag them all, says the old bull. Take your time to see th ebody language and get in tune with each cow and then when they are ready, fu'em all.

The old bull though has long since given up being a sales manager and is higher up in the feeding chain., haven given up the Omega with two slices cheese.



Now the old bull story says alot about how business structure fights against effective customer identification, conversion and retention. Sales managers understand running down and fucking a cow, then running back up, talking strategic goals just to run back down with a "quarter making" sales pitch - usually bringing orders forward on discount which is the same-old-same-old tool in the hands of the "powerful" sale mangement. Marketing are just tarts and farts. They don't grind the shoe leather and make it happen.

But the world is changing and not only are some companies embracing new forms of sales but new companies are stealing business by being more intelligence oriented and media-effective. Some SMEs are even defining their strategy as keeping small- keeping close to their customer psychically and geographically so as to focus on these relationships. Expansion is based upon :

1. a model where the business unit scales by duplication not structural growth
2. when their initmate customer need evolves into being a wide-marketable productised package

So what do I think works?

Well it's bad news to both the sales manager dinosaur and the kotler muska-marketeer.

It's business intelligence and intimate marketing. This is not just the reserve for B2B but also in consumer markets where visible relationships function by reference and word-of-mouth marketing...the intimacy is visible and transmissable. However, of course, as a discpipline in it works best in B2B ..Why?

B2B has a rather small customer base either from known clients and potential customers or from prospects. Marketing has got to be therefore, through channels which touch the customer in a segment ...mass marketing is usually a waste of time. Often a focus is kept on a well definable business segment which is easily targetted. This is a double edged sword because while FOCUS is good and sounds strategic, if the benefit reaps more value in another application or further up in the value-chain then the business suffers from targetting MYOPIA.

Now some B2B is actually just that in name- it is really mass consumer marketing with a transaction interface. Buying is driven by brand influences, trends, information / buying convenience, cross-purchasing (basketing). So knowing which ball-game you should play in is important as initmate marketing and business intelligence is often expensive per head of customer.

I had a new CEO come into a biotech tools company from an engineering firm and the first things he put on the MUST have list were all sales realtionship oriented around swinging "the big deals". He wanted to book the fantastically expensive bill-board above the main down esculator at arrivals in some US airport near a well known customer, JUST so he could talk about it and the committment to the bio-area with the directors at the customer. 99.9999999% of passers by would see no relevance in the ad'. It took him four years to realise that the company was in fact a mass marketing company, as it had been from outset of being DM driven!

Further to this- at this firm in one analysis I did I found out that 80% of the business came from ...wait for it-...... 80% of the customer base. A further 10% came from just 2% of the customer base i.e. there were some huge deals on the books, BUT not a focus to drive growth and investor value. To be balanced a little more to all those Harvard MBAs- the company was actually missing out on some other big deals and knew it, but this was because they were not intimate with small gazelle customers or new project R&D managers. These gazelle opportunities would suddenly scale-up and hey-presto "where are we", "we went in on price and lost , why?" and so on. To get in as a qualified/documented and approved supplier for high growth, high risk projects you have to be validated early...or rather you are an out supplier until you accept the cost of re-validation. Only one in maybe 20 of these projects goes to market or to clinical trials scale up but if you aren't in early - forget it.

So in a B2B (or some special consumer circumstances!) environment tred carefully before you actually plunge in with money for intimate marketing becuase.

• intimate marketing is done with relative few customers pulling in relatively many employees
• is therefore expensive in tools and internal resources
• Communication is easy to get wrong by not understanding the customer enough
• SO the key events, meetings, PR, sponsorship or stunt can go wrong
• it is to build committment and trust and hence loyal non switching customers
• Time line to purchase is critical. They must be HOT leads.

The kotler marketeers aren't liking this because they know what is coming: intimate marketing means for an organisation:

1. multi level contact with customers
2. shared, organastion-wide intelligence
3. events are key
4. risk of bad communication is high

The one group of people who are liking this so far are the product managers who have at some point worked in sales and currently work a lot with the field reps. And they like it for the same reason sales management don't:

1. PMs take authority and marketing take over one sevy thing from SMs
2. The brownie-point score is ridden by the PMs and not the SMs
3. Authority is further stripped from the SMs by the multi-level contact

God, everyone gets in on the old game of chummying up to customer. Marketing come out their academic 'target segment' shells, customer services say what's really the problem, R&D talk willingly about joint NPI and customer needs to customer R&D and cheif executives get to reside over the whole thing without having the vaneer of sales management distroting the information flow in a selfserving way.

How does the key sales process 'translate' into intimate marketing then? that is the Prospecting, developing, pitching, closing and retaining cycle?

Prospecting: the whole company becomes the eyes and ears. Lost customers take on a new prominence and lost potential deals get re-examined without the sales management filter. New cutomer enquiries are treated like diamonds falling from heaven in "joined up marketing" integrated to sales and customer services. Other functions go out and meet other companies in the industry or target segment and start chin-wagging. S&M people start going to R&D conferences as participants out of their suits! R&D people start manning booths at trade shows...

Soon new customers get the feeling that the whole company cares about getting their business because they met someone who wasn't tell-selling them!

Developing, Pitching, converting: this becomes the multi level task groups which organise resources about the key meetings which will happen. Small, intimate events for less than 100 participants are organised by the PMs to channel in several potential customers. Then a focused effort of mulit-level detective work is swung into action to deliver the key intelligence on customer needs and behaviour which will inform the pitch. The pitch is done at the appropriate management level, with those delivering in the selling company attending ie. every point of influential touch with the customer is mirrored in the conversion group.

Retaining : now by this time much of the work of retention is already done. No longer is it a sale driven by price and sales-filtered information. Compared to going through one sales repsonsible and their sales boss, the whole sale is probably on a shorter cycle to close. Also the resources are already lining up, and not stuck blind infront of the 'closed deal' from a suicide or volume based quote. True costs and implications of "resource alignment" at the vendor are much more accurately assessed and hidden costs or opportunities to bill for support services are aired and not swept away by the "close now" old fashioned sales channel.

Now traditional sales management hate all this...it takes away that deal doing, commission getting thrill and power from them. To begin with they think, hey great, I get those dossers in marketing to pay for my meetings...which is the trojan horse senior managerment and marketeers should use...support for customer group meetings with high value content for the attendees. When R&D turn up, the SMs get a little nervous. Customer services can be patronised away, but when PMs run the show then there can be outright war because the writing on the wall is KAM managed from HQ and not the field.

Intimate marketing is especially effective when introducing new products or technologies which will later take on a wider transaction market down the line. It is very worth doing to influence the opinion leaders and those inovators who have a high profile. The trickle down is good, and the initial sales or projects are of high value in either payment or later pay-back for the early "test marketing" and relationship building. In the self-same market for biotech-research tools, the best growing and stronest performing companies are using it with all their NPI and KAM work. There are many other B2B markets, (it's B2B which employs the most marketeers actually) for which this approach is very suitable.

The alternative, lateral thinking and naughty tricks side of job hunting for MSc Marketing Students/ Graduates.



Guilt is often a motivator in my life....... as is sheer boredom! The eagerness to share is also there. But mainly it's the guilt of knowing that you folks from the MSc 2007 and 2008 will face not only a tough time getting jobs, but a hell-ride in progressing your career and even occiasionally holding onto a job. No one came and spoke to us way back-when I did the MSc.


So What Are the tricks?

What are the alternatives firstly-


Firstly consider this- many a young post graduate learns the ropes of a small business while on a summer job or placement, or just biding time and paying bills post graduation/peri graduation.

However often they think the long hours, financial risks and sheer tenacity of starting their own wee enterprise are not something for them...they then go out and get a job in an ad' agency? duh!...d'ya get my point?

Most marketing people will at some point end up working 14 hour days for a mediocre pay and under a false illsuion that they are in safe employment. Experience informs we of a bit of grrey hair to work clever, prioritise and push back...and of course delegate to the minions..

However, starting your own business is a very worthwhile alternative, even if you at some point fail. I mean anything from window cleaning to a new software and internet company set to take on youtube. I choose window cleaning because a friend of mine did just that- cleaned windows to scratch a living. Last time I was over he had about four different business areas employing maybe 100 people - be that on mostly part time basis,...but hey, it's impressive despite the unglamerous nature of it all.

I did the round for the boys a few times when they were busy way back when. They started without even a credit rating and just begged, borrowed, stole and got support from the local enterprise people for some training. At some point soon they are going to walk into a business opportunity which has better margins and just requires hard work and dedication to the customer. Then they will be rich. Originally they set out as a business to make houses look finer, not just clean windows!

So the best way to apply a lot of you knowledge and attitude to marketing being a key, neigh integral driver of a business is to start your own idea.

Gazelles

Another area which is not for the feint hearted, but a realistic option for most, is to get in early. Be on board at a Gazelle business or even an early stage new start up. Googles VP marketing (or th elike) was the girl they rented a room from when they made their first search engine in 1996.

There are two routes- the gaselle, first tuesday clubs. Find out what, who and why and do some targeted homework. Go along maybe in a suit with your tie undone and here are some tips:

• Avoid the issue of who you are or what you are currently doing -
• focus on what excites you about business X. Focus on where you are going with your masters...where you'd like to use your business school education next. Avoid saying that you are a student.
• On the latter - do you homework on who is going to be there, presenting or in the audience. Find something which excites you or is clearly getting near marketing budget time!
  

• Avoid saying you are looking for a job---if you do, then you are just another mouth to feed and not a contributor yet.
  

• Say you are interested in hearing more on this and looking at possible areas you could maybe get involved with early on.
  

• Think of money as the noise you will no doubt make ...even say this..it means getting in early and using your skills and personality is more important that pay per se.
  

• ..say you'd really like to sit down and here about the business model and the challenges ahead and see if you can either do something for them or put them in touch with someone

• If pushed about what you actually are doing right now, say okay, I'm fresh out of business school masters and looking to work really hard in something new where your drive and committment will count more than resting on the laurels of ten years experience! Youhave this advantage over all the family men and the broody brides.
  

• Leave a business card and ask to take theirs and get a meeting on this basis.
  

• In following up, don't ever send your Cv. Kiss of death. Instead get a meeting and talk about what their aims are and what their needs are for people to cooperate on or come on board. Walk away if they are too busy. If you really like the business find another contact at them and say you were speaking to Mr X, and thought it was really interesting....
  

• Get it down to specific projects- make it clear that you have a network of people you can chase around ( your class, lecturers, the local enterprise companies, your family contacts, all these people's LinkedIn contacts, the other people you met punting wares as first tuesday etc ..you do the shoe leather and keep the left hand ignorant of the right...
  

• If it is going no where, get to know who their investors are and who their advisors are. Which names at the LECs, the venture capitalists and the financial auditors/managemtn consultants. You'll soon find it's a small world in any given area and you will start to get referalls both ways int he mesch!
  

Which brings up one point and leads to the next. So point one- this is really all about the elevator conversation / fly pitch when you sneak up on someone using their vanity and enthusiasm to talk about what they do and present your personal brand..which is something like:: business school masters candidate eager to use their grey matter and work really hard, being as tenacious as hell!

Now this takes us to more on networking

Gazelle Advisors

There are swarms of bees on the honey pot of entrepreneurs. Mostly they want to give advice on strategy ( high fees) or link investment to ideas ( small % but lots of cash when it comes).

90% of this for a good business idea in hard working hands, is hot air and slime. But however there are some very good LEC people ( local enterprise) for instance who can often take you on a project with a view to placement or just recommend you. Also there are good, specialist marriage firms who link investment to new ideas glued together with experience and some personnel who can bob in and out of several companies without being a burdon on any one.

There is always a gravy train and a bear train...the gravy is soft capital and government grants while the bear is VC. It is very clear in a company if they are competatn in either or both of these regimes ...you can just smell it in the air. A gravy trainer will be a consultancy who have pressed all the right admin and qualifying buttons at the LEC. ( Or the LEC internal empire itself!) The atmosphere will be excited or glib...they will be arrogant, but maybe a little funny in meetings. They will want to see if you can smooch and not upset or challenge people. They want you to be a nice little girl or boy.

At the Bear Train they are hooked into serious sharp capital who are expecting high competancy. The atmosphere will be like a lamb walking into a corrie with eagles at every precipice. They will ask sharp, challenging questions. They will be expecting sharp, conservative answers to go with the suit and tie. They will be no fun to work for, but if they are a McKinsey of this world in miniature or big, then you will get a couple of hell years on your cv in gilt pen. Worth it's weight in gold to your career, especially with a big name in man'cons' investing in gazelles.

At a failure in either there will be an obvious nervousness. Right from the minute you walk in the door. The receptionist will either be a temp or know that they shoudl be looking for a job. No recpetionist is always a sign of a cash-strapped company. Are there empty desks? Are they moving premises? A bit like the VC advisors above, they will be hawking at you, but nervously and in an agitated way. They are quite likely intereted in either getting you free or finding out if your daddy has money. They are usually the type who butt-in at First Tuesdays when they see you, a young gun, cornering someone older. This is because they are desperate to survive. Usually as a seeker of a job or in my case business, they are only worth the list of their former "client" companies who have refinanced or exited to an FPO/ PLC etc.

The Dirty Tricks book of Job Hunting

Now for those of you who follow this so long, now you desserve a bit of dirty tricks when it comes to getting a job rather than all this networking at first tuesdays and lesbian in business breakfasts.

1) mulitple applications: okay I cannot in writing advocate that you write multiple fictitous applications to jobs from several temporary H-/G-mail accounts which lack mobile numbers. That would be a very unscrupulous thing for a person to contemplate. Perhaps instead you coudl ask your mates in employment to send in a CV and see if they get a bite. Then they can either just cancel the interview or recommend you directly as a substitute available and interested. You swing in to look for cancellations the day they cancel.

Alternativley: if you find a job on more than one web site then you can risk spamming them, especially if it is a rectruitment consultancy. You can always politely explain away three CVs coming to them, but the chances are they will skim read and delete two only to then come back to your latter version with interest once they can't get 20 CVs to forward.

2) work around recruitment consultants...it can be very obvious when a company is starting a new in your country, region or market segment. Use the consultancy to find out who the employer is, politely decline to take it further and then go direct to find the marketign director and the personnel contacts. Go direct, open application maybe a week after the rectuitment contact if they had got your name and details already...darn you slipped up there.

3) Use sales interviews to weed your way in. ( also relating to 2 above) Companies are always recruiting new sales people because like you and me, most people see sales as a cheesy way to make a living. It doesn't have to be at all, but the shit sticks. Use my earlier tactics in a previous blogg to get forward in the interview process to the HQ interview and when away from sales managers get an idea of who they recruit into marketing and if they have vacacncies. Sya to them that if the current career opportunity falls through - you are generally really interested in the company and would move to HQ if something else came up. leave a business card and a very marketing version of your CV at personnel or better yet with the marketing director or a brand manager for example if you get introduced.

4) LinkedIn is a great networking tool with respect to 3) above and many other routes. You can search by company and get introduced. Great way of doing it...but eventually the spammers will get in there. So use it now and get a big network of 100 + in the next year.

5) work around personnel...often they will just black ball you. I worked at one place after many years of 'failed' applications and psychographic tests only to discover they had an unusually high level of roman catholics working there...I never dared to ask if it was truly favouritism, but it was as thick as the south bank of the boyne in 1690 with them!
It was something to do with personnel being able to screen out candidates at will, and as soon as I was at a level to speak to marketing director level I got offered a job---working round in fact a recruitment consultant at the same time.

6) when let down, but asked to keep your CV on file, phone up and make a point of not having it there. Aks them kindly to destroy it or send it back. Don't give a reason. This does two things
a) it means you are fresh each time you take a bite at the cherry. A name is easy to look up in a file of CVs and then say " yeah, we had this guy in before" . It means that you can have a better lookig CV next time even if you didn't get any more experience.
b) it will get them a little interested in you...they will probably say something like " we will quite likely be rectruiting in marketing shortly.." Get in for an open-interview with marketing people on the back of this.

7) do paper CVs..people have overload in box and screen fatigue. Recruitment consultants often have an all whistles web site, but prefer to send paper on because of this! If given the choice send a paper CV in, addressed "private and confidential, addressee only" so your classmate temping in reception or hte mail-room doesn't send it to round filing cabinet, floor located. By all means follow it up with an e-post which takes me to..

8) hit hard on your personal branding and send a CV accordingly...refer to job history as an available addennum. Focus on your can do's, have covered at business school, projects completed or worked upon (incl. univeritys) and most of all your personal qualities and ambitions. This is best for open appliations or just chancing your arm for a brand manager job. Send one (in paper or on their web site) to personnel and find out who the marketing manager / director is and send one by post as in 7) Make an impact on who you are and where you are going rather than where you have been.


9) as on these monster, step stone or large employer web sites, always tease with your actual work history if you can get away with it. Me, i've changed jobs on a regular basis or boredom and malcontention, but hey I'm not goign to be "branded" as that!! Once again focus on your personal brand and where you are going. Leave work history or include the business school course as a cheeky "employer" to give a continuity, leaving it out of education. These things are searched on tick box key words and not firtsly on your academics.

10) Keep in touch with your old mates at the business school. add them into linked in. Many of the MSc students will fail at being able to work in a non structured environment and you can swing in on the ir bad luck. If they are on the up, they should be recommending you verbally or via LinkedIn. Find out where as many of them are working as possible and if you are in a shitty job y1, chase up 12 months later to all these. Some will be "moving on".
Furthermore keeping in touch is great not because they are much more worth than a pint with a view down their cleavage now, but that they will be most important in networking into a better company in five years time from now. I gave up on them all. Shit.

Pick 12 class mates you either fancy or are actually mates with and make a point of seeing one each month AT LEAST. Whittle out the losers and focus on building a career network based on maybe four or five. You may not like them all that much, but their mates may be yet more fanciable or actually work in companies with proper marketing budgets! In terms of mates and jobs, "your people" who will invite you in to play are never more than three degrees of separation away and usually just one or two! God- the shags I've had from ex uni girls and freinds of a friend I just happened to take a pint with. In your late twenties it all becomes network and sublte introductions and mathc making , like it or not. Cold calling ends about 29. Onøly go to a disco with a network thereafter. Same goes in working life to some extent.

12) ladies...women have two big advantages in getting a decent job in marketing in decent company..the work suits a feminine style of agreement seekign while offering companies a chance to even out their gender balance in "management". Secondly they can tart their way in. Sods! A pretty girl even working reception is 10 times more likely to get a job in same company as a bloke from the same MSC or BSc.

Girls, you have it made if you are pretty or at least have a good curve or two. Just remember the whole whoare / madonna thing. Go tarty on days when you are NOT going to the boozer with the guys....when i say tarty, it's got to be short skirts and low blouses or tight t-shirts. On days of going to the boozer, dress conservatively in line with what marketing generally wear. The aim is to tease but be a nice girl. And the same goes for any dating ...just tease and get to know how marketing works- who calls the shots, who is leaving, getting promoted, useless, ugly, unpopular.....never shag in the department until the job contract is signed and you are appointed there!!

girls have the last great advantage of erm, being one of the girls. This means coming in with a marketing MSc to an entry level job where you maybe better qaulified than the boss is ok. Big no, no for a guy to guy thing.


last and only for the priveledged few- nepotism

14) nepotise and be evil: I have never had a good fanily network but you probably do! You are probably only two degrees of separation max away from your dream job and someone in your family 'owns someones' ass" there. They can be a supplier or a customer. This is very, very common amonsgt the lesser public shcools in england. MDs are pissed off that said expensive education has lead to shitty networking and so daddy uses dirty tricks. They coerce either suppliers by force / will of suggestion or bribe potential customers with their secring the business, or discount by employing offspring on other projects. Quite a few business deals are signed on the back of kid A getting into a job, and marketing is often the soft touch for an extra cadavre on the pie charts and point of sale material.

Drags on and on...

It seems like this organisation here is just a little helvete for the time being.

There is nothing too clear to chase after and only competitors and not cooperators for me.

Days were becoming a bit of a carbon copy so today I bought a city bike card and looked for jeans "down town" ...horrid shopping malls....asylum seekers wasting their money in african themed cafes...romanian beggars.

The ony good advice I've had so far is:

1) that networking is the way forward and a focus must be added to that.

2) Also to go with this a personal branding is important and just giving a little interest in the other person and their circle...the step one away is often the one which pays. The elevator pitch with the key two scentences is to be included in all communications

3) there ain't a lot of demand for what I have to sell. Even ford kennedy and schebbie had to move south apparently- so you have to be mobile if you are a specialist.


So what is my key two scentences? My MMO ? My own brand foot print?

Well it also has to be adaptive. I need to work the recruitings byrå with a slightly more KAM / marketing and also maybe some interesting companies on the B2B front for at least an "In"

this is where competanse kartlegging comes in I suppose- to pick out several potential spiss points and to then focus a couple of target messages to the market segments.

The Personal Branding


As pointed out to me today, once again,in life it is all about self-actualising . This is the reason that my seilas career has gone so well...I can use my personality without the feeling of needing to adapt away from that which I am.

This is the key for actually solving this little puzzle- why I am such a good sailor. It is in large

a: competanse finds expression without skepticism
b: I am competitive- I want to do a good enough job to win
c: I like the team, the interaction and being bossy
d: I challenge and suggest and refuse to accept
e: Coinversely I do bend to the consensus / or boss and let them make their own mistakes, biting my lip sometimes without moaning or challenging
f: i am prepared in light of e to talk about things "off line" and seek agreement backstage.
g: I feel equally important to everyone but the owner/driver and I feel in tune with them!

In work on these same points

a: I don't always prepare my competanse. It is often challenged. I listen too readily to criticism. I don't trust my abilities. I don't revise and train often enough eg marketing books, mol biol papers

b: I hide my competitiveness. I bow too much and listen to others opinion - I should learn to listen to myself and them whom I should influence

c: I hate the team because they seem to not like me. I like the boss. I am teachers pet. I give too much when I interact.

d: I show frustration instead of challenging or being able to walk away. I suggest good ideas in front of the wrong people. I should "keep it in the bag" and come up with other suggestions. I give more importance to other peoples ideas.

e: I bend to consensus too early- I show frustration and alienation at this- this is tolked as childish and egotistical behaviour. People bully me , side line me because they find I am like an odd stand off guy.

f: I give up too easily, go muttering away with the 'decision' without playing the houses like Fabienne was so expert at. I don't see the back-stage politics. I don't just walk away with a "I'll think about it"

g: I feel probably as capable as everyone, but end up feeling inferior. I have this strange inferior-superiority complex from the West Coast of scotland. It is to do with bad body language. I should feel the situation more and if I am in a strong posiiton or in a good mood I should focus on my input being equally important as others. I should not be impatient. I should do a jack andreassen and cut off at the right time by reading "interest" body language. Learn to take the conversation when it can be taken. Find freinds instead of enemies, and find resolutiuon instead of conflict on some points.


Adaptive Workstyle
From the DISC I knew I had an adaptive workstyle at IVGN which supressed my

1) enthusiasm
2) drive/ dominance
3) influence

Yet at the same time it did not give me time to develop my precision with admin which I could have jumped the hoop of. In fact, had they screened me with a view to the wee admin lassie thety were really looking for, then my profile would have failed and rightly so. However for a general IVGN PM role, I actually pass pretty well.

On HUPI I go in a little more depth, It uncovers a deep lack of self confidence and a mistrust of people- a healthy skepticism I and tor arne agree on. But also a lack of self-actualisation which also goes hand in hand with a good dose of self-skepticism. A percieved need to adapt my current and future work styles away from that which passes to my personality- dvs- to become more objective, colder, assertive whilst NOT being enthusiastic, dynamic etc

Think of archie paton- he did very little details, he used other people. He was a show man and a mizxer. THen think of louise- she was total control. No one liked her apart from that doormat she had working for her and her boss...get the picture. To be the alpha male like person a marketing guy has to get into something new, early!

TAS recommends a joint KAM- marketing profile will get me at least a lot of airtime with the byrå. So lets committ to that.


It showed very realistic team abilityies in the "medmennesklig" området and very high reasoning abilityies. This would suggest that KAM with an intellectual kind of stand point would be good. Perhaps it's more the people processes I should concentrate on- the customer DISC, the customer's standpoint, the customers' smokescreens.

I still see a lot of drawbacks with KAM for me. I probably need more team interaction, but perhaps can get this on the customer side. Also I don't give a f.. about cars, particularily if it means long journeys and long hours in wet, frozen, snowie, hot humid eastland.

My comfort zone says "go marketing", sit and write reports, attend meetings, build up slowly- but not only will I have to wait for an international job to come up, I am back of the queue as far as the rekrutting byrå go. KAM woudl challenge me to come out this and use:
'
1) influence. Enthusiasm. Drive
2) infomasjonsformidling

all the issues I am good at within

while developing

1) patience, empathy, listening
2) proactiveness, follow through, deliver,
3) sense of achievement- self confidence-self actualisation
4) trust in people and seeing the good.

I have a rather annoying pal who I managed to find an excuse to dump after he tried to invite himself to use our hotel facilities with access 24hours.

What was annoying was his over inflated self image, and his outright bitchiness with mates. His ego got carried away with itself many times but i humoured him because of the links to my better half.

Of course now there comes the flagrant boasting arena of the web and his CV appears for all to see. Also he advertises his services to young ladies via the web. All failry blatant and it wouldn't take a minute to track him down and have him bumped off if you were that kind and knew a cheap and very nasty polak.

His use of the web is unashamed- he even boasts his own name site "dot com" , lucky to get the name. It makes a few of the right noises while still looking like a student project from 1998 with it's landing page and cringing use of 'business people' from the photo libraries. His CV is a download as a pdf, oh yes, he knows a thing or to about interactivity don't you know!

Now on his linked in he goes a little further with the fibbing and smnoke screens than his CV. Probably because he can at the flick of a button, remove the offending items or explain them away. In two jobs I know for a fact that he knew he was leaving, and used a postponement in cesation to get a temporary promotion. He worked in finance sales to the trade, B2B, yet he cleverly avoids any mention of by what value he actually increased the business. Also mysteriously he actually worked for the same company but this was paved over by mergers and a 'secdondment' rather sweetly to avoid the whole issue of 'sticking in the mud' . In fact he makes it look like he didn't bumble along in a crappy sales job for 6 years at all!

I caught him in a sales call once when coincidentally I worked near one of his customers ...they had an all glass, open cieling show room and there he was in the middle of the gold fish bowl, giving it the hard sell like the current idiot of a tory party leader. Forhead forward eyes beady and staring locked on the target ( who was supposedly a mate!) , head tilted " this is important and I am patronising you". In fact I think the whole venture probably came to an end. No doubt he would have stats to support his great rise in the company, but no doubt 50% would be a little stretched of that which is not pork pies.

It's kind of interesting that bloggin began as a psuedonym, anonymous oft fantasy or real meanings/ attitudes outlet( names changed to protect the guilty) . People were afraid of stalkers and afraid of just standing out and being taken at their published word. I took the bait and also the hook of vanity publishing...you do hope that people read the blogg and get some fun or some inspiration out of it.

But blogging is quickly becoming the new personal PR of the ultra yuppie and MBA super manager world. Like music clubs, entry is cheap but only those who give a shit about the turn go in and spend some time hanging out. The magical, what have they got, what do they know, how can I assail their dizzy heights?? all this leads to an ego fantasy which is far less restricted than the go between press. In fact the press probably hate it---full and unbiased story on the blogg a couple of hours after the crafty journalist spun their exclusive article. It's important not for the job they are in but to be headhunted to the next...and the content is probably like watching paint dry...it's not hte content which is talked about, it's the presence...... they just dare to do it and they are known, or should be a 'name' amongst the first tuesday folk and the failed rack of MBAs out in shitty SME land or on the farm at county crappy operational division. All the wankers who want to be in "strategy" rather than getting on with the job at the coal face.

Anyway, it's a place for rampant egoism backed up by the narcisisstic vanity publishing aspect - just as much- as the web is a place for any other freedom of personal expression. $30 per month, ADSL - assymetric digital shite line......the assymetric part being that you feel you are more important than you actually are


I've decided not to Down Size ( see the "dampers are on" blogg ), but to Right Size myself. On the web this means maybe the use of Linked in on a bit of a teaser basis. Keep my career focus and be ready for a stepping stone job. Otherwise I'll leave "super size me" to mr Hosea...

Sooo I took my action to take action and got myself on the course pisslib.

great...we give some lectures and then you do the rest and keep it perpetuating for us at the same time...pretty nice to slip a lot of the sales side in a small business

But it has a very, very high success rate based on the use of the sys concept sell to actually do self- networking .... so out we pop on the streets with the idea and the 'in'. Luckily it works in both types of labour market, but being 'bull market' for we seekers then it is still good to get around the mass of applications from wage-players, dream job upgraders and grass-is-greener chancers.....

Problem now is that we have a surplus of worn out old marketers and the guys my age are all kind of whacky alternative lifestyles in shoes, shops etc ...that is to say no one is a helper and most are a hindrance...and vice versa

The fine arse (with some bum cleavage showing the top of two fine, big buns and boobs to match) which just walked in to hassle me is just an example...people here express opinions and talk about that which seems a little more than 'talk about the weather' but in fact it is just that really

Ossholites are very judgemental and stand-off.....my gang is enough...people never really ask after me or the like...they give opiniions and cut me off and talk about something else....I just don't fit and any case most of them aren't lookign for anything and are a bit injured and lame

I feel so excluded as to really consider not continuing but I need the practical / physical prodcess as the kick in the ass catlyst to my next step.