P3 is hoisting a virtual pint for everyone at Euro RSCG involved in the new Peugot site.  It deserved the FWA.  The explosion/implosion sequences were impeccably well done and the floating cube was a clever navigation mechanism.  Nice job.  Extra props to your editor.  Have a good year.

Matthew Alexander Henson (b. August 8th, 1866 – d. March 9th, 1955)

Today’s entry is on arctic explorer Matthew Alexander Henson. Allegedly Henson, along with several other men, were the “first” to reach the Geographic North Pole. He is also a relative of actress Taraji P. Henson.

Having lost both of his parents at very age, Matthew became a cabin boy, sailed around the world for the next several years, educated himself and became a skilled navigator. He eventually met Robert Peary, an American explorer who later commandeered their expedition to the North Pole. Peary was impressed by his seamanship and recruited him as a colleague.

“For years they made many trips together, including Arctic voyages in which Henson traded with the Inuit and mastered their language, built sleds, and trained dog teams. In 1909, Peary mounted his eighth attempt to reach the North Pole, selecting Henson to be one of the team of six who would make the final run to the Pole. Before the goal was reached, Peary could no longer continue on foot and rode in a dog sled. Various accounts say he was ill, exhausted, or had frozen toes. In any case, he sent Henson on ahead as a scout.”

Henson said of the expedition:

“I was in the lead that had overshot the mark a couple of miles. We went back then and I could see that my footprints were the first at the spot.”

Henson was the one that planted the American flag.

Peary  received much accolades while Henson, much like Vivien Thomas, was left by the waste side, spending most of the next 30 years as a desk clerk at a federal customs house in New York City. In 1912 Matthew Henson wrote the book “A Negro Explorer at the North Pole” about his arctic exploration… “The 1912 book, along with an abortive lecture tour, enraged Peary who had always considered Henson no more than a servant and saw the attempts at publicity as a breach of faith.”

But in 1944 Congress awarded him a duplicate of the silver medal given to Peary and Presidents Truman and Eisenhower both honored him before he died, in the Bronx, in 1955.

What happens when someone makes a mistake that sends you through the roof? What happens when you want to rip a person apart for having made a mistake, even when he or she acted within the established guidelines?

First of all, it is important to recognize that those feelings are not a sign of weakness, they simply mean that you are human. The important thing is what you do with those feelings.

If you act on them immediately, more than likely you will destroy any trust you have established between the person and you. Any progress you have made in convincing people that it is okay to fail can be undone in an instant.

You will be better able to accomplish your objectives if you will abide by this unwritten rule: Never reprimand a person unless you are in full control of your own thoughts and emotions. This way you won’t say or do things that may result in momentary satisfaction in the short term but regret in the long term.

I am not suggesting that you never show emotion to your people that you let them know you are angry or upset. Showing your people how you feel can be quite beneficial at times, provided it is shown in an appropriate way and for the right reasons.

When you respond constructively to people’s failures you are doing the single most important thing you can do to let them know that it is okay to fail.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

For the last 5-6 decades, women and ethnic minorities have sought equal employment opportunities. These include the desire for a) equal pay for equal work; b) jobs for women and minorities in high-pay, high-prestige occupations—in approximate proportion to their members in the general population; c) a fair chance for women and minorities to be promoted to better jobs based on merit; and d) recognition of the special problems women and minorities face.

Even though the number of working women has grown many times faster than the number of working men, they are concentrated in clerical and service jobs, where they earn less than men for the same work—even when education and work experience are equal. Women also suffer from untrue stereotypes and absenteeism and emotional instability. And they sometimes have to do much better work than their male colleagues to be promoted.

Business can help create equal employment opportunity by providing women with role models—examples of productive and successful women—and by promoting them when they deserve it. Business can also offer flexible work schedules, day-care facilities, and leaves of absence for child-care when necessary.

Business can help minorities to achieve equal employment opportunities by actively seeking them as employees, by redesigning job requirements so as to rely more on skills and less on traditional backgrounds, by financially supporting minorities who want more education, and by placing minority employees in mainstream jobs where rapid promotion based on ability is customary. Many businesses are also helping minorities by buying some of their supplies from minority-owned small businesses.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

P3 would like to buy a virtual pint for our friends at VML for securing the digital duties for PepsiCo’s Gatorade brand.  Congrats to everyone at VML, whose tireless work made this possible.  Very special congrats to Gard Gibson for personally drinking 9 gallons of Cherry Rain flavor Gatorade to show how dedicated VML was to the work.  Now that is what we call devotion.

The only good thing

To come out of her mouth

Will be her last breath.

Here is a Virtual Pint from P3 to AKQA.com for the genius work on the Nike True City app site.  We wish it was available on this side of the pond so we could actually try the app out.  The site makes us want to, so we guess you did your job!  Congrats on the FWA, have a great year and keep the work coming.

The P3 team loves sites that break the mold.  That is just what DJNR Interactive did with their new site.  Energetic and fun, it projects the spirit of the team you get to work with.  Here is a virtual pint from everyone at P3.  May your year continue to rock and congrats on the FWA.

Timing is everything when it comes to effective marketing.  I work at a small liberal arts college in the Southeast.  While for the most part my colleagues are good eggs, they tend to make marketing an afterthought.  As such, their publications aren’t well-planned, but typically rushed.

A common scenario?  A colleague is told to devise a way to effect increased participation in approaching project n, which is six months away.  In a vacuum, the colleague sloooowly mulls over what can be done to appeal to project n’s target audiences.  The colleague comes up with pretty good ideas for the marketing approach.  But suddenly, project n is a mere month away.  Proper etiquette dictates that you inform project n’s invitees a minimum of six weeks in advance…. 

The mad, mad, mad, mad marketing rush begins.  Mind you, I (the designer, and colleague who has to bring the “effective” piece to fruition) have not been made privy to the need for a marketing piece until the scant month prior to project n.  Much less have I been told about the goal of increasing participation by X percent.  The colleague calls and frantically spouts, “I need a marketing piece for this project, and I need it yesterday!  Can we meet about what we’re trying to achieve?”  Oy vey….

Timing can easily be our friend, but we tend to make it a foe.  Prudent use of our time makes the difference between optimal pieces that achieve marketing goals and rushed pieces that barely hit the mark.  Trust me, the time to try new marketing approaches lies at the front end of the process.  Give your designer a bit of time to think–about your target audience, about your competition for a given scenario, about clever approaches that garner attention, about a stunning execution that will knock the audience’s socks off and keep them participating, donating, and volunteering time and time again.

It is well worth your time to plan your marketing.  The investment will lead to a strong brand identity that your audiences won’t soon forget.

Call Trottlebee for a Visual Communications Audit, and together let’s strengthen your branding, graphic design, and integrated marketing.  Your time won’t be wasted….

205-226-4902 | trottlebee@gmail.com

The new Verbatim site by IMG SRC is fun as hell.   Everyone at P3 has at least one Media Monster and mine is kicking @## and taking names.  Build your own from Verbatim media storage devices, challenge IBO to a match, and then cry like a wee girl while IBO inflicts pain upon you.  Congrats on the FWA and here is a Virtual Pint from the P3 Team.

It’s devastating when you emailed a colleague who is on sick leave for quite some time to ask how she’s doing, and the reply is this :

Thanks for asking. I have breast cancer and currently undergoing chemo so I won’t be back to work until July or August.

Don’t worry! I’ll take good care of myself! Miss u all so much!

Thankfully, the colleague – aged 28, is very positive about it. I’m sure she’s strong to fight!

P3 would like to raise a virtual pint to the creative team at Bonsajo for the great After Effects work on this animation piece they titled, Vanishing Point.  Smooth, inventive and the color choice in the mountains puts us in the mind of KLEE.  Keep the good work coming.

These are the 5 words you don’t want to hear from any client, more often than not you’ll be having to do your colleagues work that you know absolutely nothing about and just winging it completely. If you break it, guess who’s fixing it… you! If there are more problems, you’ll be the first they contact!

You’ll answer the phone, the client will ask for your colleague, they aren’t there for whatever reason and then they begin to tell you a little bit about the problem. Now is the time to act, you need to sense this and plan your escape, it’ll be better for you in the long run.

If you don’t manage to escape, then you’re trapped. You are trapped with having this client call you back with any other issues now as they will think you’re now their contact. I’ve had it happen to me already 2 times, so don’t make the same mistake as me.

You could interrupt or wait for a little bit of silence and then say something like “I’ll leave a message for xyz to take a look at this” (but you have to be more convincing than that), maybe say they are the expert on the subject, etc.

You may find yourself trapped after those words are said but there is a way to escape, you can try and investigate the issue (not to the best of your ability) and then to kind of give up and say something like “I’ll get xyz to look into this, I’m not sure about it”. There most definitely other ways to escape, so maybe you have one to post?

So I get into work today and all open up my Outlook, funny only 1 email received (normal is about 3 to 5 with things to do that were sent overnight, then during the day I get at least 1 to 3 emails every hour). Somethings definitely wrong here… turns out the web hosting company we use didn’t make changes we requested properly. I go and open up the job again, give them a call and they correct it. I can’t believe we still use the web hosting company we do, most web hosting companies these days actually allow you to change records yourself. It would have been great if I would receive only 1 email overnight or only 3 to 4 emails for the whole day . A few hours later things are back to normal.

Today seemed like a big day even though we didn’t have emails for 1 to 2 hours, contacted suppliers for ETA, looked up some memory configuration for a server, tried contacting Microsoft about Windows Server, installed backup software and configured it for a client, booked in a laptop repair, lots more small things. Had to call up a supplier about a new product, emailed my colleague about it the answer to his question was no, but he won’t take no as an answer and now wants me to call the company that makes the product, sigh…

It gets a bit annoying when clients request a quote for something, you begin it and then when you are finishing up they’ve sent quote requests for other items another 3 times. Most of the time it’s never for something easy, always for something you need to do some research on which takes 10 to 15 minutes each time. Now I have 4 quotes waiting for me tomorrow… each about 15 minutes do so, already an hour on quotes and by then you’ve received more emails and are starting to get backed up on things. Then you have clients new computers coming in and you need to get those prepared whilst doing everything else.

Then you get those emails companies like Symantec, Microsoft, etc, saying that you’ll lose your membership if you don’t complete courses and of course who better to do these online courses than the guy who does everything, i.e. me. So I’ve got those online courses to do which I rarely get any time to do so it’s annoying always seeing that you have it to do but can’t get it done.

Also the problems with quoting things to clients is that once they order, the product is sometimes out of stock, the ETAs are always a few weeks wait and every time you check again the ETAs get worst. One of our clients had to wait at least 2-3 months before receiving their printer order.

Oh and you always have to watch out for manufacturers discontinue products, it seems to happen about every 9 to 12 months. They don’t really notify you about it and they only warning you get is when you search for a product and it doesn’t show up anymore so you start to panic a bit… uh oh.

Other than that, today we didn’t get too many calls, thankfully. So as you might notice, this isn’t a blog just about IT support  so just take note of that since you probably won’t have also do sales/admin like I am…

It’s another gray day in KC but this site by Hello Monday for Chicago based photographer, Tony D’Orio, has brightened our day.  The site won an FWA and we know why.  Clean, fun and never stops telling Tony’s story.  Nice job folks and congrats on the FWA.  Have a good year.    P3joe

New organization and new colleague! We are to work together on a project for two years. That meant there was no other choice but to be friends with one another. Moreover, it adds value to have a friend who is close to your manager. And the way he is interacting with people, I am nothing but wondered about how influential he might be. People are more cautious than they are respecting.

Setting things right in the office, on your first day takes time. By the time I was done, it was half working day finished. We moved out for lunch. Post lunch proceedings were planned, that he would introduce me to the other office staff.

I was eagerly waiting for this time – make more friends.

I wanted to have water and slipped away for a minute to cool my nerves. By the time I returned, he was talking to a lady – middle aged, middle management, perhaps. I walked up to them anticipating my first introduction.

He said to her,

“This is our new project mate. He occupied a cabin next to yours.”

I thought that introduction was way too short. My name had to be mentioned, didn’t it? Perhaps, he left that for me to initiate a discussion. With that thought, I said to her,

“Hello madam, I am Kalyan. Pleased to meet you! ”

Her response was again brief,

“Yes, I know. He told me.”

That did not yield a response I was looking for. People need to know names, don’t they? I hesitantly asked her,

“May I know your name?”

And now he turned towards me to say,

“You must have done your research – knowing people – before coming here?!”

I am sucked in, and it did not take much time for me to realize that. I now understand why people were more cautious with him. I left that place soon, praying god to let me survive for the next two years.

Better, friends always be by choice, never be by constraints.

Happy Friday!

Jennifer Maestre takes pencil art to a new and stunning level.  Everyone at P3 was blown away when these sculptures were passed around.    We hope they usher the weekend in with a flurry of color and wow.  Remember to fill out your time sheets before you rush to the happy hour of choice and we’ll see you on Monday.  P3joe

P3 poses this question to you on a gloomy Wednesday.  What do you get when you pour stunning HD camera work, hot world rock and kick-ass animation into a frosty glass of digital story?  Well my thirsty friend, you get Hi-Res’s new site for Jägermeister.  Great job on the site, the FWA and we hope the payment included a few bottles.  Have a good 2010.  One question.  What the hell happens in the damn meadow?  We watched for five minutes.  Is there a payoff?  Please help.

This posting is for those who #%&^#@! with fonts.  Several talented people in our office are frequently rendered mindless by endless font translation.  This anthropomorphic video is for them and all the wretched souls who search through bloodshot eyes for that perfect gathering of characters that will set copy ablaze in the souls of users who really only care about boobs.   Thanks to Dan Gurewitch and the cast of wingnuts who did such a great job realizing this short.  To those of you that fondle fonts, P3 salutes your ceaseless quest to make your clients happy.

The P3 team loves remarkable work when we see it and Firstborn Multimedia’s work for SoBe is definitely it.  Great photography married with very real testimonials wrapped up in uncluttered usability make one smart site.  Plus, we think you absolutely nailed the demographic.  Congrats to everyone on the development team and may 2010 bring challenge and prosperity.  We hoist a virtual pint in your honor.

I was relocating to a place far from where I lived. And I was to receive my bike through the railway cargo which my friend had booked for me. On the notification of cargo arrival, I went to receive my bike.

The train by which my colleague was coming had come in at 7:30 AM. The cargo office was to open at 8:00 AM, and I decided to wait there instead of going home and coming back. My colleague handed over the receipts and keys to me. Bad beginning certainly! The keys were destroyed making it assumably difficult to turn on the bike. I moved towards cargo after getting my colleague a taxi.

It is 8:30 AM and the office is still not open. I searched for my bike in the open area where cargo is placed, but could not find it. I waited longer with confidence in the notice I received. The railway cargo services were not so dumb though they are far from professional and costlier than others.

At 9:20 AM, the office opened. The clerk certainly was neither fast nor was attractive to deserve that long queue. No surprise; there were people waiting for longer than I did – in days perhaps.

Agonizing wait was ending. It was my turn in the queue now. God Forbid I thought, as the clerk moved out somewhere before processing my request. It took him more than ten minutes to be back – perhaps the nature call. He processed my request at his pace, that of a passenger train I thought. I got the dispatch receipt. The porter brought the bike from within the godown, and unpacked. Now, I only needed to go home peacefully on my beautiful bike.

The porter requested a tip, and I gave him a fifty rupee note. As I kick started my bike to ride it on the new roads, I realized I did not hesitate to pay the tip. Getting my bike back had a priceless happiness. I just discovered the love I had undercover till now.

Love is always within, if only you look for it.