Must. Be. AWESOME!!!

In a week full of big announcements, I have another for you, faithful AWESOME-ites. Get ready…

This week I started work for a company called The Rendon Group (TRG) as their Director of Strategic Marketing.

I can hear the crow caws and the cat calls already. Not to mention the sounds of quite a few people going, “HUH?!”

For those of you who don’t know, TRG is a global strategic communications firm that has provided a number of services to the U.S. government and other clients for well over thirty years. John Rendon has long maintained a pedigree of excellence in all the communication disciplines. Whatever you want to call it – strategic communication, PSYOP, IO, public relations, public diplomacy, perception management – at its core, Rendon has always understood the deep power of information and how it can be used for influence. I have been an admirer of their work ever since I first encountered their name upon coming to DC as part of the IED Task Force.

I have worked with The Rendon Group (or TRG as we say around the office) before in a past career, and I can testify that despite what anyone may have heard about them, they always bring their A Game. I have learned a lot from their work, and I respect the company’s people immensely. That said, I also walk into this new role fully cognizant of some of the bad press, ill will, and general myopia directed against Rendon. Part of why I’m coming on board TRG is to address some of this criticism head on. I believe that the creative and good things TRG does far outweighs any bad juju people may have heard about in the past. There are some amazing things happening at this company. Things I can’t wait to share with you.

So in that vein, I encourage people to talk to me about The Rendon Group. What do you think about us? Why? Have you worked with us before? What are your experiences? In the coming months, you’ll start to see TRG move into a number of new conversation channels where we can all talk openly about our shared experiences, needs, and solutions in our chosen field of strategic communication. Feel free to leave a comment below or email me directly with your thoughts. I’d love to hear them.

You might be wondering what the hell I’m thinking with this career move. “Didn’t you just squawk loud about starting your own business the other day?” I did indeed. And @Du4.llc is still growing strong. One of the great things I admire about The Rendon Group is their flexibility in allowing me to continue pursuing my personal passions through a business venture of my own. The crew is extremely supportive to me in this way, which engenders even more trust between us as we move forward. For that level of trust between the gang at TRG and myself, I had to give this work a shot.

I’ll be working in a number of capacities for TRG, from sales to social business consulting (a field I am excited to immerse myself in). I’m excited about the opportunity to create new methods for the company to build relationships with people: between the company’s folks, their consumers, and the many others who participate in conversations about us. I fully expect some AWESOME stuff to fall out of these interactions in the near future.

So it’s full speed ahead over here at Must.Be.AWESOME!!! central, and I hope you stick around for the ride. I expect to be blogging about my Rendon Group experience in the near future, so stay tuned for more. But for what it’s worth, Must.Be.AWESOME!!! will continue to rock your world with badass shizznit that’ll sizzle your shizzle. As always, feel free to holler at me if you want to talk more, online or offline.

HOWF!

Within my community of business owners, contract wranglers, and salespeople in DC, I’ve seen a lot of long faces lately. Since the economy crashed and the new administration took office, business development people have had a harder and harder time selling their wares to federal clients and closing new contracts. Most of what the government does award these days often looks a lot like continuation rollovers, wherein some asshole COTR (that’s contracting officer’s technical representative for you neophytes) finds it easier to perform minimal competition compliance just to ensure he or she doesn’t have to deal with the added headache of transitioning between incumbent contractors and new winners.

Despite the reasons for the recent slowdown in federal business, the bottom line is that many companies are finding it harder and harder to deal with their onetime great clients. Contracting officers (COs) and COTRs have become outright hostile to some companies, turning required program management into offensive, often farcical dehumanization of the performer(s). Folks I work with vent often and loudly about how the typical government contracting churn in Washington has gotten even worse.

Also, as hard as it’s become to acquire a contract nowadays, there’s developed the added insanity of dealing with a growing crop of dickheaded contract administrators. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard from businesspeople in DC complaining about how unmovable, boorish, and downright inappropriate some government agencies can act towards their performers. Some government officials who administrate such contracts blatantly tell their contractors that part of the gig is to take shit from them, from simple incompetent management on down to the most revolting of behaviors toward gender and racial lines. There seems to be this attitude that, goddammit, the government knows best and since I’m the government’s representative on this contract, you better listen to me. This behavior is not just unprofessional, it’s insulting, repulsive, and deserving of public punishment.

This situation – Our Great Client Crisis – is not new and is not AWESOME. In fact, it’s pretty fucking lame.

I have one piece of advice for these folks, and it’s advice that’s applicable to any business, company, consultancy, or individual:

If your client treats you like shit, then kick ‘em to the curb.

Subjecting oneself, one’s company, and one’s people to abusive treatment by a client just because they’re paying you money is ridiculous. Despite how many millions of dollars you’re making or could stand to make, it is simply not worth the emotional loss your business will take when scads of your people begin feeling The Mighty Fed in their poop chutes. Furthermore, the added frustration of trying to secure such work from people who may be willing to pay for your service but not understand it (“Let’s get some social media on this advertising plan!”) will only serve to waste more of your time that could be better spent with AWESOME clients.

Image courtesy of She's Unapologetic.com

So, if you’re in such an abusive relationship, what can YOU do about it? Here are a couple ideas that may help:

• Call ‘em on it: The next time one of your clients purposely demeans you in public, call ‘em out on it. Publicly. Federal workers particularly are often not willing to duel over degrees of impropriety in public. Making the behavior public will often cause them to back down. That said, be ready for the dick move of having your contract terminated for no reason afterwards.
• Make ‘em smarter: In a lot of cases, your clients aren’t acting like assholes because they want to. They just don’t know any better. So defuse the situation by offering to help them out. Tell them about other clients you’ve had who have expressed the same educational roadblocks in whatever specialty you happen to deal. You may even make a friend out of them. And friends give friends work in the future.
• Call Fraud, Waste & Abuse: Each government agency has a hotline set up to report instances of fraud, waste and abuse amongst its employees. Use it. It may take time for your complaint to get addressed, so be prepared to go on the record, which can speed things up. Google your department of choice and be sure you’re calling a number at a high enough level that it warrants attention from that agency’s Inspector General.
• Lodge a protest: Federal contractors in particular have clauses in their contracts providing for their right to raise protest against their COTRs for impropriety. Exercise this with caution however: these protests go in your company’s permanent record and may taint evaluators’ opinions of you during future competitions.
• Find new clients: This is my favorite suggestion. You don’t like who you’re doing business with? Get out. Get out and find some dudes you DO like. If this requires you retooling your corporate offerings or marketing, then maybe you should take a hard look at your business and decide what market you really want to play in. Stop being a slave to million dollar contracts. Trust me: the payoff is not worth the stress and abuse you’ll take over the life of the contract if your client is an asshole.

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Most of you are employed by some company, some organization, some government institution, or otherwise. If you aren’t now, chances are you have been at some point in the past. I even bet you don’t think a thing about being called “employee” of your company.

I would like to put a moratorium on the word “employee” because it sucks balls.

I’d wager that everyone and their dog has been forced to read an “employee handbook” or participate in “employee training” or aspired to be “employee of the month.” We here at Must. Be. AWESOME!! believe that this is a terrible appellation for those of you who are in fact employed by a company. It is the most generic, dehumanizing term possible with which corporate leaders, owners, and human resources people can refer to their workforce. And the idea behind this term, while seemingly innocent, is in fact not awesome. Nay, this ugly word is LAME.

Anyone can be an employee. Corporate training manuals, ethics programs, and all other retarded drivel instituted to keep you in line refers to you as merely an employee: a small cog in a big wheel. Chances are, even if you’re working somewhere you think is badass, you’re still referred to as an employee by someone higher up on the food chain. You may even have a cool sounding title like “Ant Wrangler” or “Strategy Executive.” But you’re still just an employee.

Despite how well-meaning a company may be, especially in this startup-rich landscape In Our Foul Year of the Lord 2009, eventually all the people – the humans - organized under a company get referred to or lumped together as that company’s employees.

I despise this word. It deconstructs the AWESOME of a person. It boils everyone down to a level of retarded standardization. It homogenizes and restricts. It steals innovation and courage. And most of the time, no one comprehends that this word can be so destructive.

I hereby challenge every business leader, every CEO, every HR department, EVERYONE who institutionalizes the term “employee” to come up with a better alternative. Hunt that word down in your manuals, your training videos, and elsewhere, and murder it. Replace it with something creative. Something fun. Something that inspires your people. Something that will make them proud to be employed by you. Something AWESOME.

Startup CEOs, you have no excuse. You’re probably starting out with fewer than 5 people. Agree from the get-go that there will be no employees… but find an apropos yet AWESOME term to describe the types of people you want to attract to your brand.

Furthermore, I implore all of you are now or have ever been called employees… SPEAK! What would you like to be called? What word would you like to use amongst you and your fellows to describe you as a group or organization? What term makes YOU feel AWESOME about what you do?

Sound off in the comments section. Let’s see what kind of creative replacements we get.

{For some additional AWESOME reading about alternatives to employee nomenclature, check out this article, “The chaos theory of leadership” from The Financial Times.}

[Image by Blogowski.]