Are You Going Stale?
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010What scares you? What keeps you up at night, and nags at the back of your consciousness? There are few things that frighten me, one of them being that I have stopped learning and, like old bread, have gotten stale.
Can you imagine waking up one day to discover that your capacity to take in new knowledge has ended? That everything you are going to learn has already happened and that your brain, now filled to capacity, was blinking “hard drive full”? It can happen. I have experienced it.
One thing that occurs when you are the custodian of a marketing budget is that everyone wants to meet with you. If you allowed every new vendor to come in for a pitch, you could literally spend every day watching Power Point slides. To better manage your time you set up protocols and processes–your staff and agencies screen new opportunities and vendors and only highlight those that they feel are right and likely to interest you. This frees you up to focus on running your marketing programs, driving your business, and managing your time.
But all those protocols and layers are traps. They isolate you from the marketplace and insulate you from innovation. Your ability to compare and make decisions on new opportunities based on your firsthand knowledge/exposure diminishes… you are going stale. So what can you do to stay current and in-touch with new options and changing landscapes without being capsized by solicitation? Here are some fuel for thought suggestions:

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