A few years ago, when I was unemployed and in transition, an
old colleague of mine, Eric, offered me a freelancing gig with his two-man
marketing company. It wasn't too good to pass up unless you were desperate,
which I was, so I took it. The second contract I did for his company was a
project for the Blood Center of Central Texas. I wasn't given a travel budget
or any face-time with the client, so I bullied their IT department into sending
me a comma-delimited file of their ENTIRE donor database, and I spent many
tedious hours creating pivot tables and trying to make sense of all that data.
In the end, the data said exactly what one would have
expected it to say, which is that blood donors are mostly middle aged or older,
white, and college educated. More men donate than women, which is generally
because of women being more prone to anemia. Absolutely NO big surprise
anywhere.
Tasked with putting together a presentation on our findings,
I struggled to find anything interesting to say about all of my pretty,
colorful graphs. I finally abandoned Excel and decided to get groovy with
Google, remembering the Austin that I loved during my college years and looking
for a way to somehow quantify the feeling that is Austin. Eventually I added a
slide to my presentation titled ‘Consider this…” that included some
facts about Austin’s demographics (always votes Democrat, number of musicians
per capita, that sort of thing) that seemed to capture the spirit of the city.
Then I clicked save and emailed the file to Eric.
Eric presented it without me. I wasn't even on the phone. He wasn't the sort of chap to share the glory, or the money, with anybody. But he
did tell me that when he got to that slide, everyone in the room said “that’s
it!” and it was. We went on to create web sites and graphics and marketing
materials and a blood donor store and all the other things that bring ideas to
life. The blood center saw a huge upturn
in the number of donations. I earned about
$6k for the gig.
It is about six years and several jobs later. I live in
Austin now and regularly see the bloodmobiles and other blood center vehicles
on the streets with those angels and flowers. Every time, I wonder how many
lives one PowerPoint slide may have saved. Since one blood donation can save
two lives, probably a lot.
I don’t talk with Eric any more. His little marketing
company is still puttering along without me. We didn't part on the friendliest
of terms; I had gotten weary of being under-paid and invisible. It wasn't a unique experience in the world of business, unfortunately. It seems many people
fail to understand that when you help other people succeed, you succeed. And
more importantly, you have fun and make friends along the way. Generations of
business students across the country have been relentlessly brainwashed to
believe that greed is the ultimate good, and the results of that can seen in
offices and stores everywhere in America – unhappy, unengaged employees, shoddy
products, temps with no benefits and no security, bureaucracy and poor
management. What if we started teaching students a radical new idea about
business? That the point of it is to do good and have fun? That could happen,
right? Can you imagine what that would look like?
