Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Our two days of SKO (sales kickoff) this week were good. Two days is short and sweet for an SKO compared to most other places I've worked— or, indeed, at this company prior to a few years ago. If today were the day I go home, even if there was a half-day on Day 3 today, I wouldn't mind, especially after a few nicely constructed interactive exercises yesterday broke up the monotony just as it started to... get monotonous. Oh, and the quick walks in this no-casino, no-smoking hotel make everything less of a drag. But today isn't the day I get to go home. And it's not even a half day. It's not even a full day. It's merely Day 3 of 4.

Today we shifted gears from SKO to TKO, technical kickoff. The account executives have gone home, and more of the technical customer-facing staff, such as our consultants and support engineers, have joined us here.

When we've done TKOs in the past it's been for product training. Oddly this time we are not doing that. Instead of the product team educating us on what they've built, we spent the whole day today in team exercises brainstorming for them what they should build. That's... kind of backwards. But it's what a lot of people wanted.

For today's product feedback we broke up into teams by feature-set area and spent the whole day in interactive groups of about 8 people each. The sizing, interactivity, and outline that went beyond just "Brainstorm, for 8 hours" made it effective. But also it was tiring doing active collaboration all day.

Dinner this evening was earlier than previous days this week. We wrapped up the product feedback work at 5, then started dinner at 5:30. Except it wasn't quite "dinner", it was hors d'oeuvres. At 7:15 when the not-quite-dinner was wrapping up my grandboss wanted to take us all out for real dinner. I politely declined two or three times, planning to call it quits early this evening and relax in my room. But he kept asking, and finally I said yes.

I said yes to second dinner because, as my boss suggested, I could have a drink or two and an appetizer, then leave. Well, I ended up staying for the full dinner. Which included an appetizer. After the earlier hors d'oeuvres. I didn't get back to my room until nearly midnight. I promptly collapsed into bed, made a quick phone call to my wife, then fell asleep.