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!

As my 2010 evil plans evolve, I thought it prudent to establish a professional outpost for business I may undertake. Lo and behold, I give you @Du4.llc.

“What is this crazy madness?” you might ask. “What the hell do you know, Du4, that entitles you to hang a shingle?”

Well, it’s pretty simple. Over the past year, I’ve digested quite a bit of stuff that’s made me question the concept of “work.” Now, financial issues aside, work has never been terribly fun for me. There have been great jobs and great people, but never anything that exactly flipped my passion switch. Ultimately what I came to recognize is that there was no persistent stream of AWESOME in my work. @Du4.llc gives me the chance to change that.

If you believe all the Gary Vaynerchuks and Chris Brogans of the Web, then you may think 2010 is the year of the entrepreneur. Now more than ever, there are tons of resources available to launch anyone into turning their passions into work… or redefining work as passion. Semantics aside, it was that realization that catapulted me over the edge into launching a business of my own.

So what is @Du4.llc?

In short: @Du4.llc enables AWESOME.

The major criteria for work I undertake through @Du4.llc is that it’s AWESOME. This may entail embedding with a client to determine what’s AWESOME about their company… and what’s not. It may entail speaking to conferences and groups about AWESOME stuff (stay tuned for some exciting announcements about this soon!). It may involve conducting research and analysis programs into the deeper concepts that make up the super-concept we all know as “AWESOME.” It may be taking perfectly mundane and pedestrian tasks and turning them into something AWESOME.

For the time being, Must.Be.AWESOME!!!.com will act as the launch point for @Du4.llc activities. Eventually, I’ll get around to retooling the site to deliver better value for my clients, my raving fans, and anyone else who’s been participating in the convo. But I’ve got plenty to keep me busy in the meantime. In future posts, I’ll describe a little bit about what I’m doing for clients, how I’m designing my business around my own personal brand, and discuss some of the successes and failures that happen to me. If you want to do business with me or just learn more about @Du4.llc, shoot me an email at du4 at mustbeawesome dot com.

Thanks to everyone who’s been supportive of this venture. Thanks to you, @Du4.llc is gonna be AWESOME.

Welcome to 2010. I’m coming for YOU.

My resolution this year is to make everything I do AWESOME. I will launch an AWESOME consultancy. I will publish an AWESOME book. I will deliver AWESOME content to the readers of this blog. I will get married…AWESOMELY.

In this, Our Year of AWESOME, I invite YOU to join me.

Photo by Sarah Austin

This is Must. Be. AWESOME!!! Dot Com.

Required Reading for the New Year:

• Gary Vaynerchuk, author of Crush It!
• Social Business Design in 2010 by The Dachis Group
• Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
• EVIL PLANS by Hugh McLeod
• Tyler Durden’s 8 Rules of Innovation, courtesy of Lateral Action
• The Journal of a First-Time Entrepreneur by Aidan Nulman
• Andy Nulman on the Art of Surprise

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.]

Image courtesy of Brian Lane Winfield Moore

Are you coming to Washington, DC next week for TWTRCON? I’m not terribly certain what the unified purpose of this conference is. Like many “social media gatherings” of the modern age, it may just be an excuse for A) some social media startup to charge the fuck out of its attendees, and/or B) a bunch of social media “gurus” to get together and jerk each other off.

To be fair, the prior TWTRCON in San Francisco seemed to go over well with attendees and guests. There have been quite a few of these types of conferences where people wrestle with what Twitter is and how it can be used for business, marketing, or whatever. I like how inherently social this makes Twitter’s users feel if they can actually unplug from their hashtags and muster up the gumption to shake hands with people they don’t know physically.

Courtesy jdlasica.

So… we’ll see how it goes. One of my ulterior motives for going to this thing is to stalk David Armano and conversate with him about all the cool new things happening at The Dachis Group. Something that’s been intriguing the pants off me in this weltering morass of social media madness has been Armano’s (and now Dachis’s) concept of “social business design.” I think this concept is going to be the Next Big Thing, with the potential for crossing all kinds of boundaries that social media doesn’t. More about this in detail in a future post.

Let it be known that Ye Olde Du4 has actually submitted an idea to TWTRCON’s Open Mike Contest, and that tweet can be found here. The basic idea is an encapsulation of the intent of this blog (and potentially a future business!). I’m not sure how the judging is performed, but keep your fingers crossed that I’ll have an opportunity to wow the crowd with the power of my ROCK.

If you’re at TWTRCON DC, shoot me a DM at @Du4 to link up.