Citizen Brand

Little Miss Sunshine

If you have not taken a break and gone to see the movie, Little Miss Sunshine, do it right away.  It is the best laugh out loud movie since The Full Monty.

While we are discussing movies, another one worth seeing is Woody Allen's latest offering, The Scoop.

There are some good movies coming out this fall.  The Departed looks like a great drama with a killer cast - Matt Damon; Leonardo DiCaprio; Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin and Jack Nicholson.  It is a Martin Scorsese film and perhaps this will be the one for which he finally earns his Oscar.  I believe it might be time.

Retreat XII

The next three days are some of my favorite days of the year.  It is our company's annual retreat.  We are heading to Big Cedar Lodge in southwest Missouri for our fifth straight year.  It is a great venue for this meeting.  It's far enough away but close enough to drive and the setting in the Ozarks is beautiful.

We have taken these retreats for 12 years now and it has become a vital part of the growth and direction of the company.  Each year has added a new layer to our brand or a new initiative for us to undertake.  It reinvigorates each of us as individuals and as a group.  Simply put, the annual retreat is an important part of who we are.

Our focus at this year's retreat will be how to be more creative and powerful in how we present information to our clients, our prospects and each other.  We are honored to have Toni Louw for a whole day to share with us his years of experience working with some of the biggest brands in the world.  His company is one we highly recommend you consider.  He and his colleagues can help in so many ways.

Besides the beauty of the Ozark Mountains and Table Rock Lake, we love Big Cedar because on Thursday night, we get to hear an old friend sing.  Clay Self is just plain fun.  He plays at the Buzzard Bar at Big Cedar Thursday through Sunday.  We are there but once a year and yet he makes us feel like we are there every night.  That is why he is so good at what he does.  He makes you feel right at home.  I can't wait to see Clay again and hear him yell my name out across the bar.  By the way, he's a good singer and songwriter and a great family man. 

One of my favorite songs of his is "Me And the Boys."  It begins talking about how he and his band worked and played hard in his early years and ends with him singing about how his time with his sons are all that matter now.  I can relate to that.

It's retreat time and I can't wait.  Talk to you on the flip side.

Digital Thumb Tacks

I have always loved maps.  I guess we all do.  Maps are unique documents.  They can show us where we have been and where are going all at once.

Here is the modern day version of the thumbtack in the wall map.  Jack Yan passes on a point that allows each of us to create an instant map of everywhere we have been in the world and in the United States as well.  Here are what my maps look like.  I have some places I need to go.

Thanks also to Ben Casnocha, Daniel Drezner and Daniel Nexon who were in the chain on this before Jack. 

And the winner is......

I took a day away from Citizen Brand to travel to New York with our Lee Jeans team.  We arrived in the Big Apple along with a winter storm off the Great Lakes, but we didn't let that deter us from having a little lunch and walk the streets of Soho.  What's a little freezing rain?

We traveled to New York for the 2006 PRWeek Awards.  We were honored to be a finalist in the Cause Marketing Campaign of the year for the 10th Anniversary of Lee National Denim Day.  We were in some great company with four other great cause programs:

Finalists

Barkley Evergreen & Partners Public Relations and Lee Jeans
Lee National Denim Day

Carmichael Lynch Spong and Select Comfort
Beds, Celebs, and a Better Night's Sleep

Carmichael Lynch Spong and Jenn-Air Appliances
Going Pan-To-Pan to Fight Hunger

The Leverage Group and Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide and Jones Apparel Group
Jones New York In the Classroom

AOL and Robinson Lerer & Montgomery and Freud Communications
Live 8 on AOL

The PRWeek Award was given to our friends at Carmichael Lynch Spong for their program with Select Comfort benefiting the Ronald McDonald House.  It was a great program as were all the others.  After all, each made a difference to an important cause.

Of course we would have loved to bring an award home for Denim Day.  The fact is it is a program that has been recognized in the past by our peers and for that we are proud.  But the feeling I had last night was not just pride in our single program, but rather pride in a profession that has the power to make a difference.  It was on display in New York on Thursday night.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country in Palo Alto, our company had two of our folks attending the New Communications Forum.  Jeff Risley and Andy Woolard joined other new media warriors to stoke the fire of conversation about the present and the future of communication.  Every day, new tools and new methods are coming at us from all directions.  We have to help each other keep track of all of them and help each other figure out which ones are the real thing and which ones are not.  Check out what Jeff and Andy had to say from their points of view.

So we were a bit spread out this week.  Plenty of our folks were keeping the home fires burning tending to our clients and figuring out ways to find new ones.  The day to day work continued as some of us were in New York celebrating our past success and others of us were in California peering into the crystal ball to see where our future successes might lie.  Another typical week in this great profession of ours.

Fill 'er up

I stopped and got gas today.  And then I watched a B-2 Stealth Bomber get its tank topped off at 26,000 feet above the ground and at about 400 mph.  Here's the proof:  (click to enlarge)

It all started last year when my nephew, Sgt. Mike Money of the Kansas Air National Guard asked me if I would like to join him in his "office" one day.  His office is a KC-135 refueling tanker that belongs to his unit, the 190th Air Refueling Wing or the Kansas Coyotes, as they are commonly called.

So today, I joined a dozen other civilians at Forbes Field in Topeka, Kansas and we had a truly unique experience.  Mike took good care of me.  He made sure I had the jump seat right behind the pilots during takeoff.

We took off and charted a course for southwest Kansas toward Dodge City.  Then we turned around to begin the trip back toward Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to make the appointed rendezvous with the B-2 and give her some gas.

Mike's job is that of boom operator.  He has been doing it for quite some time now and is now an instructor as well.  The fuel boom is in the back of the plane.  Mike actually lies face down in the back of the plane and controls the boom.  He actually has to fly the boom and dock it with the target plane that needs fuel.  The boom has its own set of wings.

When we met up with the B-2, each of us had the opportunity to lie down in the back and watch Mike work his magic.  Meanwhile, the pilots in both the refueling tanker we were in and those in the B-2 have to fly in tight formation.  The two planes are less than 20 feet apart when the fueling occurs.  It was an impressive performance by all the crew.

We landed a little over three hours after we took off.  I enjoyed every minute of it and hope some of you have the opportunity to do it some day.  Mike and his colleagues do more than just refuel planes.  They fly all over the world shipping cargo to military bases in addition to their refueling activities.  They are also very active in the Topeka area volunteering their time to help on various civic activities.  And of course as part of the National Guard, they are always there in times of natural disasters. 

And they have a great cause program.  It's called Kansas STARBASE and it focuses on helping children in fourth, fifth and sixth grades learn more about science and math.  Thousands of Kansas schoolchildren have already attended Starbase camps in the past several years.  It's primarily funded through the U.S. government right now, but it seems like a natural for the right corporation to take on as their cause. 

Thanks Mike for a great day and I will get you to that Jayhawk basketball game for sure next year.  It's not quite an even trade, but it's the best I can do.