My life is going full circle. Witness the fact that one of my interns played football for me on the high school football team I coach. Couple that with the unique situation where one of my clients is the daughter of a long-time client. Hopefully I’ll be hanging up my iPad before I’m calling on his grandkids.
This week the circle has almost become fully linked. As part of our ongoing staff training program, we’ve decided to hire some consultants to teach an introductory IMC (Integrated Marketing Communications) course to our most junior staff. We’ve really pumped our training the past few years and have found that besides conference attendance, we’ve invested in an intensive combination of in-house courses, tutorials, executive coaches and ICA programs.
One gap we saw was in marketing fundamentals. It was really a simple conclusion. We have a very smart staff base. The typical profile is a Queens or Laurentian grad who then added a post-grad PR or sports marketing program to their degree. Or, in the case of the SPAD kids, a kick-ass internship at a place like IMG. However, as our agency becomes less about events and more about campaigns, the need to hone our marketing knowledge and really understand the language of our clients has become critical.
The answer? To custom develop an IMC course with some consultants to be taught to our up-and-comers. Here is where the Mark Harrison flashback comes in… The consultants we hired were my old marketing prof from the University of Guelph and his son. (Here comes that age thing again.)
We hired him over some of the other bidders for the simple reason that Professor (Tom) Funk was one of three profs I had in my university and grad school days that left me with lasting lessons.
Professor Funk and his wife Jane were both profs of mine at the U of Goo, where he taught for over three decades. His impact on me came in two distinct channels, although if you looked at my grades in his class you may not know it. What struck me about him as a prof, and I had him for two, maybe three semester courses, was his passion. I had a lot of smart professors in university. One might argue that all professors are smart… but don’t confuse the ability to read and regurgitate with smarts. But I felt that more than half of the time I was being guided by smart folks.
What separated Professor Funk from the others was a quality near and dear to me. Passion. I can’t remember one lecture that didn’t feel like he was so consumed by the material it was bursting to get out of him. He led by example and expected his class to be equally enthralled with what we were learning. Given that many students were not interested in the material, his ability to create that environment was impressive.
The other thing about Funk I loved was his clarity. He created a soft copy Marketing Management manual that I candidly used for many, many years in my work life. It was orange and cerlox bound, decorated with my in-class notes… and I am sure many a staffer thought I was a geek… but it was one useful guide to marketing!
The other prof at Guelph who really left a lasting impression was Dr. Richard Phidd, my thesis advisor. Phidd was just as happy to conduct class in the local pub as he was in an auditorium, but don’t think of him as the stereotypical prof from Animal House. (Especially not the Donald Sutherland character!) He was a deep thinker, constantly consumed by his craft and always egging me on that what I was doing wasn’t good enough. But in a way that kept me motivated, hungry and productive.
Phidd’s contribution to my life was teaching me the ability to problem-solve. For he was a systems theory expert and he got me captivated by policy, systems and the machine. Because he also allowed me to integrate sport into my thesis (I wrote about how the federal government used sport in the 1970s as a policy instrument), my fascination was complete. As a young adult, I went from reading the many books he coauthored with Bruce Doern to the likes of Peter Senge.
If you’re having difficulty understanding how your organization truly works, read The Fifth Discipline and you will uncover the answers. Thanks Professor Phidd.
My third influencer was from my MBA days at York. Emphasis on York for all you young Schulich grads applying for jobs with TrojanOne. When I went there it was still York. So don’t open with the line, “Oh you went to Schulich as well?” Yes, this grumpy old man went to York!
I can’t say I loved my MBA program. Maybe it was because to graduate you had to do a group project called the “601”. As part of the process, you didn’t get an individual grade. The profs gave us a pile of grades which we had to divvy up among our group members. One slacker in our group didn’t love the low grade we gave her. Candidly, it cost her, her MBA. So she left death threats on the answering machine of our group leader. (Google “answering machine,” youngsters, if you don’t know what I mean.) Yes, this is a true story!
But while at York, I had a great prof called Larry Ginsberg. Don’t know if he is still there but he taught some excellent courses on entrepreneurship and consulting. In his own consulting life, he worked a lot with dysfunctional family businesses. Not that the businesses were dysfunctional, but the families were and he had to repair their working relationships. Made for some great classroom stories.
Ginsberg taught an awesome course where not only did you have to get a real-world consulting client, they had to PAY the university for you to pass. This was the best real-world class I have ever had in academia. I watched several of my classmates fail; to land clients, and some land clients who wouldn’t pay up. Let me tell you folks, it’s the first order of a running a business. Creating a customer. (Thank you Professor Ginsberg and Peter Drucker!)
I often get asked by people whether they have what it takes to start their own business. I suggest to them that if they go to the busiest intersection in their city in their “birthday suit,” they will quickly find out. Those who can get someone to buy them some new clothes before they are arrested will definitely be able to start their own business and they would have passed Ginsberg’s course.
Don’t worry; while this is a flashback to my school days, I am not going streaking through the quad!