Again, I’ve failed to post every day, but I have managed to post more than once so that’s an improvement on that metric. Quality-wise, it remains as terrible as ever.
This week has been wrestling with something that I really shouldn’t be wrestling with: project management. This has come about because of a skills boundary and so I’ve been brought in to fill gaps and expand the skills on offer. This is what happens when you spend 30+ years doing a thing and applying it across different media and roles.
However, it did demonstrate to me, again, that brand exists across everything. That it’s an innate part of the modern world, and the talking about it is the PR bit. Two sides of the same coin. If you do brand well people will talk about it, or you’ll want to tell people; if you do it badly, people will talk about it but you may want to do some crisis communications or, what might be best called propaganda.
I managed to be politely rude to someone. What I would say was I put someone in their place as they were attempting to suggest that they were the expert and everyone else was an idiot when actually they aren’t the expert and the reason we’re where we are is because they’ve been unclear in their own mind what it is they want to buy. And then been unable to articulate it correctly. Oh, and they wanted a lot of things for free and there was no way I was going to do that.
I also did my ‘say nothing’ routine when faced with someone trying to be all mansplainer and macho (what I mean is go on dick-swinging duty during a call to attempt to assert authority where they have none). I find it says more to say nothing in these situations and the subsequent clutching at straws, backtracking and bluster normally settles things down. It’s something I wish I’d learned 20 years ago.
I spent a lot of time on calls this week. It’ll be the same next week. At least I can do these from home, I suppose. Imagine having to go into an office simply to spend your entire day holding meetings via Teams? One of a modern-day Dante’s Seven Circles of Hell, no doubt.