Cheers for Cheerios

From time to time an advertiser does something in an ad that grabs an undue amount of attention. Sometimes it is positive attention.  More often it is negative.

Recently, General Mills ran a Cheerios ad designed to promote the heart healthy properties of the cereal. You can watch the ad here.  Because they chose to make the family in the ad a mixed race family, it has drawn some attention and criticism that has nothing to do with the message of the commercial.  

To their credit, General Mills did not pull the commercial, although they were forced to take down comments about the commercial on YouTube because of the nature and intensity of some of the negative comments.

Typically, this type of thing gets me depressed.  But there is a video put out by Benny and Rafi Fine that changed that.  The video, found at the bottom of this post, shows the reaction of several young children, aged 6 to 13, to the commercial and to the controversy surrounding it.  The video below will gave me hope in the up and coming generation.  The video below made me realize that the people who brought down comments for an ad on YouTube are the immature ones.  The video below helped me realize that so many of the social/political issues we have been struggling with for decades will no longer be an issue once this generation, and the nation, grows up!

Mostly, the video below will make me realize just how smart Cheerios was to keep the ad up and running!

Bad, Fast Emails

One of the primary wonders of the internet is the speed with which it can disseminate information.  Information, unfiltered and unadulterated, can speed around the world at the speed of a tweet.

This is powerful and wonderful and awe inspiring when it works to share word about a political movement, a scientific discovery or the birth of a prince.

But, when someone makes a mistake on your email address in a distribution list, it can speed around the world almost as fast as word of the latest celebrity arrest.  It can take longer to get things worked out than the endless stories about the celebrity's paroles and rearrests.

Similarly, if a mistake is made in a newsfeed or newspaper, that mistake will be picked up and circle the globe a couple of times before you burn your tongue on your morning coffee.

Now, more than ever, accuracy is important.  It is so easy to fix errors in a document, factual accuracy might not seem that important.  It is not primary document accuracy that is so important but what I like to call the echo document accuracy.   Errors carried by echo documents have the greater impact.  Echo documents are all the reposts and retweets that a primary document creates.  Once echo documents start bouncing around, it is very difficult to contain them.

Now, more than ever, it is important to contain and correct mistakes as quickly as possible.  Nothing is as fast as a bad email!

Ready, Shoot, Aim

In this era of Twitter and Instagram, there is considerable pressure on companies and brands to be timely and topical and try to grab their share of the viral madness of a given issue.  In this era of citizen journalists and a smart phone in many pockets, companies and brands are compelled to try to be the first out of the gate with a comment about a topic.  It is a Ready, Shoot, Aim culture.

The truth is, however, many companies end up doing much more harm then good to their brands  when they display their clumsiness or cultural insensitivity through a poorly written or ill-timed tweet or post.  The chances of this happening go up exponentially when a company is focusing more on timeliness (we want to be the first to comment on this) than appropriateness.

Occasionally a company hits a home run.  Ironically, a perfect example of a company hitting a home run is the tweet that Oreo sent during last year's Super Bowl.  When the power went out and most of us were growing weary of listening to the announcers try to fill an unexpected long period of time, the marketing team for Oreo was working hard and effectively.  They came up with a simple, brilliant, topical tweet.  You can see that tweet here and at the end of this blog.  It was funny.  It was inoffensive.  It filled the time while millions of people were waiting for the Super Bowl to start again.  It got retweeted over and over again.  It went viral.  Opportunities like the Super Bowl power outage are rare. Companies being ready to take advantage of those rare opportunities are even rarer.  Oreo was the company that took the best advantage of that opportunity.  They are still enjoying the benefits, as people like me continue to talk about it and share the tweet.

But it is not easy to do this.  Many companies, trying to be quick-witted or topical or edgy, end up sounding tone deaf, insensitive and just plain nasty.  Take for example, the ads for Blush Lingerie connecting their underwear to Edward Snowden uncovering things.  You can find these slightly NSFW ads here.  The ads are not that funny and somewhat tone deaf.

It also seems as if some marketers can't resist joining in on a world event that is garnering lots of attention.  For example, consider the tweet by Kennith Cole, a clothing designer of some renown, who tweeted ""Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KC"  His next tweet, 2 hours later, was an apology about making light of a "serious situation."

Every marketer dreams of doing what Oreo did in the Super Bowl.  To a marketer, it is like hitting a walk off home run in the World Series.  But (as I totally overuse this sports analogy) every home run hitter says you strike out a lot before you hit a home run.  The trick is to make sure your strike outs don't do serious damage to your brand.  The trick is to make sure your misses are simply misses and not culturally or socially insensitive to the point of being all people remember about your brand.  The trick is to tie your brand to an event that is easier to make jokes about, like the Super Bowl, rather than one in which people are killed and maimed, like Arab Spring or the Boston bombing.

Finally, and I think most important, it is more important when using social media to tie your brand to current events to take a bit of extra time to get your message right.  No one is talking about who had the first advertising tweet tied to the Super Bowl power outage.  Rather, they are talking about the brand who got everything right.  The brand who took the time to aim before they shot!

An Organization of Note...and HBD to Me

From time to time in my blog I like to highlight organizations that are worthy of a bit of attention.  These will be organizations that help to embody some of the marketing and communications concepts I often write about.  They are organizations that, whether by design or happy accident, are sharing their short, simple message in a clear and effective way.  Put another way, they are organizations that are working.

One group that seems to do a good job of that is the International Crane Foundation.  The International Crane Foundation (ICF) works worldwide to conserve cranes and their wetland habitats.  One of the things that makes ICF unique is the depth of completeness of their particular focus.  The mission statement is: "The International Crane Foundation (ICF) works worldwide to conserve cranes and the ecosystems, watersheds and flyways on which they depend.  ICF is dedicated to providing experience, knowledge, and inspiration to involve people in resolving threats to these ecosystems."

Simply put, ICF does anything and everything it can to preserve the 15 species of cranes worldwide.  This means working to save and protect their habitat.  Developing and supporting breeding programs.  Educating students and adults about the beauty of cranes and threats to their survival.

One of the ways ICF's unique focus manifests itself is through their 225-acre Baraboo, Wisconsin main campus.   At Baraboo, among other things, they maintain a captive flock of approximately 100 cranes on   This flock includes the only complete collection of all 15 crane species anywhere in the world.  I took the photos in this blog at ICF's headquarters.

When ICF sends out emails, they are full of news and links to things like the Crane Cam where you can watch nesting pairs when they have eggs in their nest.

The International Crane Foundation has a simple focus which leads to a lot of not so simple work.  If you are interested in finding out more about cranes and ICF's work to save and preserve them, you can find them at www.savingcranes.org.  

I hope you find the organization as impressive as I do!

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Birthday Cake
(Photo credit: Will Clayton)

Today, July 24th, I celebrate the successful completion of another trip around the sun.  I would love to share a slice of cake with all of you, but am afraid you'll have to settle for a byte...(sorry...I couldn't help myself!)

Also, in lieu of the presents and cards I know you were in the process of sending, I would like to ask a small favor.  If you enjoy reading this blog, please consider subscribing by email.  The link to do so is at the top of the column on the right.  If you do, I will try to return the favor by occasionally writing something interesting, informative or mildly humorous.  I won't send you money Thank you!

A Numbers Game

It is very easy to feel overwhelmed by the quantity of data that is increasingly available to organizational and marketing leaders.  It is very easy to find yourself wanting to retreat to a analytic fetal position and ignore the data.

But the reality is that we value what we measure. Similarly, we should measure what we value.  There is a nuance between those statements.

The very act of collecting data on something, imparts value on it.  When my wife and I bought a new hybrid car 10 years ago, one of the things that we were fascinated by was the dashboard graphic that showed us our gas mileage at that instant.  We quickly learned how different ways of driving impacted that all important MPG number.  Our fuel efficiency was important to us in concept prior to that, which is why we bought a hybrid.  But with the graphic in front of us it became much less of an ethereal concept and much more of a focus every time we got behind the wheel.

Similarly, a long time ago, when I worked in an advertising agency, we collected the column inches of newspaper articles that appeared about our clients.  Because we were collecting that data and sharing it internally, it was a frequent topic of conversation.  Eventually, we recognized that as an advertising agency, not a PR firm, we really didn't impact our client's newspaper mentions.  We realized that we were collecting newspaper mentions "because we could," not because it was important.  We discontinued it and the topic of column inches was never discussed again.

With so much of our marketing and communication lives happening online, data collection is no longer the issues it once was. There are metrics galore available to any marketer or communicator who wants them.  The challenge for marketers has shifted from trying to figure out what information to gather to trying to figure out what, of the plentiful data available, is useful data.

Whereas before, marketers measured "what they could," now to a greater extent they can analyze what they should.  It seems to me that easily available data still has that allure of importance.  Like with column inches at the ad agency I worked for, marketers need to be careful about chasing after measures such as Facebook likes or Klout scores simply because they are available.

Just as social media options should be a tool in your marketing toolbox, not your marketing strategy, available metrics should help you measure whats important, not a measure of what is important.

Volunteers as Starting Points

Abraham Lincoln said that if he could get someone to lend him a book, they would be a friend for life.  The act of lending something as valuable as a book was an act of engagement and trust.  After that, it was impossible to be indifferent and indifference is a bigger threat to friendship than animosity.

The same thing is true about volunteerism.  If you can get someone to voluntarily do something in support of your organization or brand, even something small, you have the start of engagement.  Once you have engagement, you have awareness and involvement and all sorts of good things can happen.

I suspect that this is the thinking behinds the marketing campaigns that are abundant right now that encourage readers or viewers to "like" or "retweet" or "pin" the latest page, site, or post of the company.

The trouble is that often the marketing plans don't go beyond the request for the original interaction.  Lincoln didn't change enemies into friends simply by borrowing books.  He used that initial act as an excuse to engage in conversation, debate an issue or lend back a related book.

Similarly, just getting someone to like your Facebook page does little to no true marketing good.  Getting someone who had liked your Facebook page to them sign up for an e-newsletter or to request a coupon for a free sample of what you are selling is a step in the right direction.  The point is it is easier to get people who have taken a tiny bit of time to like you on Facebook to take a tiny bit more time to sign up for something or watch a video. The general public who haven't volunteered their tiny bit of time, haven't made that tiny commitment to you.

Now that you've voluntarily read this blog, please subscribe!

A Strong, Simple Message

One of the most effective strategies for cutting through the message clutter is to have consistency of message.  Convincing non-marketing leaders of the need for consistency of message can be one of the hardest things to do as a marketer.

To be effective your message must be clear, concise and repeated frequently. In a mass media strategy, that means replaying the same ad on the same media over and over and over again. In a new media strategy, while message repetition has a place, message consistency becomes more important. Your message will be displayed differently and probably less frequently on different media. Done well, it could be MANY different media.  So if someone sees your message on a banner ad, a magazine ad, a retweet, in a radio story and on your blog, there had better be the same message elements running through each of those, or you have lost out on a golden opportunity to drive home your key message.

One of the scariest things about social media for most marketers is loss of control of the message.  The conversation of social media is much more difficult to manage than the monologues of mass media.  One of the exciting things about social media for most marketers is that you can interact and engage customers and potential customers directly.

There are some things you can do to help make sure your message is heard:

• Select a strong, simple message and use it consistently and constantly in everything you do.  
• Make sure your message is heard and understood and used by all internal audiences because internal audiences carry your message out into social media.  Make sure they are carrying the message you want them to!
• Make sure your strong, simple message is translated effectively into tweets and posts and blogs, so that wherever and however a prospect or customer is interacting with you, she is getting that same strong, simple message.  This can mean changes in length of message, language of message and format of message.  It should not mean a change of the core theme of the message.
• Use that strong, simple message over and over and over again.  About the time you are getting so sick and tired of that strong, simple message that you can't stand seeing it anymore is about the time that your audiences are starting to notice it.  Continue to use it.  Fight with your boss and your bosses boss when they insist on a new message.  They will be glad that you did in the long run!
• Resist the urge to complicate things with additional messages, sub messages, tangential messages or anything like that.  Companies that have been most successful in marketing and messaging in both traditional AND social media have presented a strong, simple message and stuck with it.
• Make sure your message means something to the audiences that matter to you.  If your strong, simple message is in jargon or uses terminology that is unknown or unfamiliar to your audiences, it is NOT a strong, simple message to that audience.
• I do want to be clear.  A strong, simple message is not necessarily a simplistic message.  "Acme Industries is good" does not qualify as a strong message.  Your message should identify your organization.  It should emphasize or highlight some reason prospective customers should consider becoming customers. This means it should emphasize or highlight a solution to a problem commonly shared by prospects.

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Too much of a good thing

I made a mistake a while back.  I contributed to a political party.  The reason that was a mistake is now they will not stop calling me.   On a recent weekend (not during an election mind you), I got four calls asking for donations.  I have asked to be taken off of their call list.

(Photo credit: :: Wendy ::)

In a similar mistake, I signed up for something online that is supposed to support my high school alma mater. Very soon I was getting emails every day trying to sell me something.  I have stopped even looking at those emails.  They now get deleted as soon as they show up in my inbox.  I haven't yet taken myself off of the distribution list out of some sort of alumni guilt.  That is probably going to change soon.

With the cost of reaching out to customers and prospective customers falling to almost nothing, it is more important than ever that companies and organizations remember who bears the greatest cost every time they reach out to a contact.  The contact does.

Even with permission marketing, you can reach out too much.  Even with those who are already your fans or supporters or customers, if you call four times in one weekend, you are going to annoy them.

Organizations need to understand that there is a cost of time and attention every time they call or email someone.  They need to be sensitive to the fact that both time and attention are in short supply for most people.  IF they are going to contact you frequently, they should provide you something of value with that contact.  IF they are going to contact you frequently, they should recognize that it is easy to cross the line into annoyance and get put on the don't call list.

In the best of situations, organizations create reasons for their customers and supporters to reach out to them!  It's hard to overdo it when you have your customers contacting you!

Buddha Knows Customer Service

I came across a post on Facebook the other night that gave the 5 steps to happiness:

1. Smile more.
2. Think less.
3. Be present.
4. Give more.
5. Expect less.

The watermark on the photo indicated it was from a source called Buddha Heart.

I started thinking that while these were excellent steps for general happiness, they were also a nice, succinct guide to providing excellent customer service!

Smile more.

You cannot go wrong if you are genuinely smiling, whether you are answering the phone or talking to a customer.  A smile shows you are happy to be interacting with the customer.  That goes a long way to helping address customer needs and addressing problems when they arise.

Think less.

I think sometimes we are our own worst enemies when addressing a customer.  If we are busy analyzing "what she really meant" or "how can I get out of this situation" we are not focusing on the person and the issue in front of us.  If you ask many professional athletes, who are in the middle of a slump, what is wrong, many of them will say that they are thinking too much.  Like professional athletes, employees should develop the muscle memory to provide excellent customer service by instinct.  Without thinking.

Be Present.

A lot of excellent customer service involves problem resolution.  In order to help a customer resolve her problem, however, you must be present in the situation, you must own the problem as your own and you must take responsibility for ensuring that the customer leaves satisfied, or at least satisfied that you are trying to help her.  Customer service, and especially problem resolution, cannot be effectively put off until later.

Give More.
Customer service is all about giving.  Giving of attention , giving of status (you have my attention because you are important to me and to the organization) and giving of authority (the customer is always right.)   It is extremely difficult to give too much customer service.

Expect Less.
You cannot do excellent customer service with any payback in mind.  Customers should be able to expect good service.  Customers who have a problem will cease to exist as customers if they don't get some timely attention to their concerns.  At a restaurant, an excellent server does a ton of little things that you might not even notice to help make your dining experience special.  An excellent server is doing that because she wants to do an excellent job and help you have a special experience, not specifically with a tip in mind.

Buddha knows customer service!

Frozen Twinkies

Twinkies (Hostess Twinkies is a trademark of Hostess Brands LLC). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Before last winter, the most prevailing story, or urban myth, about Twinkies was the one about the guy who found a 20 year old Twinkie behind his couch and it was still soft and consumable.

Twinkies were right alongside cockroaches as the things most likely to weather a nuclear holocaust unscathed.

Then last winter disaster struck. Hostess, the company that made and sold Twinkies filed for bankruptcy.  More importantly, they announced the end of the United States production and distribution of Twinkies and several other brands.

Suddenly, Twinkies were the most popular formerly ignored snack on store shelves.  People stocked up with  cases and cases of the cream-filled sponge cake treats, anticipating a healthy black market of contraband snack cakes.  Besides, they last forever, right?

Then the white knight arrived.  Investors came and bought the Twinkies brand, as well as those of several other snack cakes, with the intention of returning them to production.

There was joy in Snackville...except among those who were sitting on cases of Twinkies.

Then strange things started to happen.  Hostess Brands LLC, the new owner of Twinkies, started issuing press releases that included terms like shelf life and talked about selling frozen Twinkies to some retailers to help extend expiration dates.  This was very confusing and contradicted just about everything I "knew" about Twinkies and their lack of a need for an expiration date.

I have come to the conclusion that the masterminds behind Hostess Brands LLC are actually marketing geniuses.  First, they manage to "rescue" a suddenly beloved brand from the expiration bin at fire sale prices, waiting long enough that a frenzy had been built up about the brand that hadn't been seen since the likes of New Coke.

Then, they wait six months to bring back the lunch box delicacies, further tamping up demand.  Then, announcements about the reintroduction include talk of expiration dates and freezing for selective retailers.  Suddenly, we are comparing Twinkies to more delicate baked goods instead of cockroaches.

Well played, Hostess Brands!  Well played!

They Just Don't Care About Apathy

I know many fine people that I greatly respect who work for the United States Post Office.  I marvel regularly at what they are able to do for the cost of one little stamp.  I sincerely hope that the Post Office will prove all the demise-predicting pundits wrong because I think it is an important institution for our society.

If the US Post Office ceases to exist in the next 10 years, it is my opinion its demise will not be brought about by Saturday deliveries or federal oversight that requires onerous pension payments and restricts its ability to compete with private firms.  It will not be brought about by budget shortfalls or cost overruns.

Rather, the US Post Office will be brought down by the most insidious problem an organization ever has to deal with.  Apathy.

I find myself frequently dealing with mailings of between several hundred and a couple thousand pieces.  This is the type of mailing that is often too small to send out to a full service printer but too large to be done internally without a fair amount of effort and time.  One of my practices, in order to streamline things as much as possible, has been to take a prototype of the mailing to the Post Office to make sure that there won't be any problems.

The problem has been that for almost 50% of the mailings I have done over the last few years, what I am told when I take in the prototype and what I am told when I bring in what I thought was a final mailing is different.  Sometimes VERY different.  It often results in a significant delay in my mailing and a loathsome amount of rework.  Just recently, I brought a mailing in to get the cost of postage.  I was told one amount by the clerk behind the counter.  The next day, I brought in the mailing stamped and ready to mail and was told by the same guy that I had the wrong amount of postage on the mailing.  The same guy.  One day later.

I understand that everyone makes mistakes.  It is a part of being human.

I also understand that one of any organization's best chances to provide excellent customers service that is remembered by a customer is when a mistake has been made.  When a mistake has been made and identified, how your organization responds will have a huge impact on whether the customer walks away for good or not.

How your organization steps up to or runs away from problems has almost everything to do with whether the customer experiencing the problem feels that they are important to you, that you care about them as an individual customer, or whether they are "just a sale."  How much customers feel respected by the offending organization has a direct correlation on positive or negative word of mouth, active antagonism or even law suits.

When I told the Post Office employee that he had told me a significantly different postage rate just they day before, that I had asked him twice if he was sure because I "didn't want to have to do this a second time" and showed him where he had written the wrong amount down for me, he just said "sorry."  When I asked him and the other clerk who was present at the time what my options were, they just shrugged their shoulders with a slight smirk on their faces.  It was obviously not their problem.  They were apathetic to my issue.

I know that the Post Office, as a pseudo-governmental agency, might have limited options.  I know that they weren't going to be able to let me mail my mailings with insufficient postage.  But I also know that neither of the clerks who were confronted with this issue took this on as their concern.  I know that neither of the people I was dealing with cared if they had cost me a weeks worth of work and significant amount of money and a deadline I was pushing to make.  

Perhaps the Post Office can afford apathy.  No one else at the moment can send a letter across the country for 46 cents (except email which can do it for free.)   No one else can deliver bills and magazines and personal messages right to your mailbox for pennies (except for the internet which delivers it to your computer, in the house, for free.)

Perhaps the Post Office can afford apathy but no one else can.  Including their customers and former customers! 

Please let me know of experiences you have had with excellent, and not so excellent, customer service in the comments below!  Thanks!

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Republished: The 5th of July

A Fourth of July fireworks display at the Washington Monument. Location: WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA (DC) UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

July 5, 2013

Yesterday was the 4th of July.  The 4th of July is a special day in the United States for many reasons.  It is the birthday of our country and a celebration of our nationalism. It is a holiday of summer, sitting as it does smack dab in the middle between Memorial Day and Labor Day, the traditional bookends of summer.  It is a holiday of contradictions, with military parades and fireworks as well as beer and carnivals.  For example, this year in celebration of the 4th, I had a deep fried peanut butter & jelly sandwich and went to a wonderful symphony orchestra concert...at the same venue!  For the record, the symphony orchestra was better!

The best thing about this holiday though, is that everyone is patriotic, at least for the day.  For at least one day of the year, we all stand shoulder to shoulder and boldly proclaim our love for our country.  It makes me wish, sometimes, that we could bottle a bit of that national pride for the other 364 days of the year.

Anytime an organization hosts an event or a celebration, one of their goals is usually that participants still look fondly on it the next day.  In many ways, the success of the celebration is based on how it is remembered the next day.

With that in mind, I wish you a very happy 5th of July!

The Broken Promise of the Internet

"As an advertising medium, the web is like communism. It's never very good right now, but it's always going to be great some day."        Bob Hoffman, The Ad Contrarian

The promise of the web is intense, amazing, awe-inspiring, breath-taking, mind-blowing, [insert wonderment adjective of choice here].  The reality of the web depends on who you are and what you hope to get out of it.

To the casual user who likes that disputes can be instantly settled with a Google search on their smart phone, the internet meets its promise and then some.

To the teacher who is looking for new tools to excite his students with, the internet meets expectations, even though bandwidth doesn't always.

To my Dad, who knows that he would enjoy the wonders of the internet, but he is a little afraid of doing something wrong and breaking something, the internet represents a tantalizing mystery.

To businesses, who are trying to figure out how to use it as a promotional tool, the internet is often more than a little frustrating.  Banner ads and pop up ads don't usually live up to their promised effectiveness.  Facebook page "likes" and Pinterest "pins" often (usually) don't translate into sales.  

For a business, its all about generating sales.  For businesses born in the time of the internet, like Netflix and Amazon, the internet has been awesome.  For most businesses that had a brick and mortar existence before the era of Google and You Tube, the internet, while awe inspiring, has been less than awesome.

Many companies that were around before 1980 that have had financial success on the internet have basically moved their catalog operation online (think Lands' End).  A few industries have transitioned to providing their services online (such as H&R Block).   

Regardless, the internet hasn't been the land of milk and honey that so many were predicting in its infancy.   It HAS transformed business and the way we communicate and gather information.  It HAS transformed whole industries and created new ones.  It just hasn't been the advertising panacea that some were claiming it would be in the 80's.    

And it certainly hasn't proven itself as an advertising powerhouse as many expected and some promised.  Clicks and likes haven't translated to dollars and cents.  For many, if not most online advertisers, the promise of internet advertising appears to be a broken promise.

Happy New Month!

"Happy New Month!"

In my family, we have a ritual in which we try to be the first to wish each other Happy New Month.  The tradition is so strong that those who dare to marry into the family are quickly usurped into the ritual.  The funny thing is that there is no prize, no keeping of a tally, no punishment or hazing is brought onto the losers.  It is simply a monthly inter-family burst of friendly competitiveness that is forgotten on the 2nd of every month.  The joy is in the execution of the tradition, win or lose.

There is a value in tradition and ritual in families and in organizations.  Participating in traditions and rituals are one of the ways we feel a part of the group.  They are also ways to pass on organizational values and beliefs and to make the group, whether its a family or a company, a unique and special group.

But traditions and rituals can have a dark side.  From an organizational standpoint, traditions can stand in the way of change and progress.  Any one who has tried to enact significant change in an organization quickly learns about the traditions or sacred cows that can't be touched.

"We've always done it that way!" or "We've NEVER done that before!" are telltale signs that your organization has tradition-itis.  The same qualities that make for a charming and endearing tradition when they are a simple ritual like providing employees a cupcake on their birthday or trying to wish your sister "Happy New Month" before she wishes you the same, can be maddening if you are trying to go against the grain of a tradition and enact some change.

Organizations, it turns out, crave structure and organizations.  Structure and organization are perfect breeding grounds for traditions and rituals.

The best way to break through traditions that have become roadblocks is by getting buy-in for the change by the same people who are practicing the traditions.  Through information and conversation, it is possible to get past people's strongly held beliefs and traditions.  While that is much easier to type than it is to do, it is possible to enact change and who knows, maybe even create some new traditions!

In the meantime, Happy New Month!  And if any of my family are reading this, I got you this month!