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Among the various newsletters I receive by email each day, a link within one of them stood out to me yesterday, perhaps because of its provocative headline: 10 Reasons Your Team Hates You (They Just Won’t Say It To Your Face). It was a link to a September 2009 blog post at thoughtLEADERS, LLC, and I suppose it was included in the e-newsletter because it offers some opportunities for work-related New Years Resolutions for anyone who has to coexist on a work team.

Each of the 10 undesirable leadership qualities assumes it is the boss who has these negative behaviors. However, in today’s team environments, I would argue that any member of the team can bring down other members, especially on the type of team where each member is subject matter expert for his or her own area of specialization. For example, I am currently on a team responsible for launching about a dozen new products for the personal care industry. We have sales, marketing, engineering and operations all involved in equal (but distinct) roles, and any one of these people could potentially undermine the group’s success even though only one of us is the “boss” of the project.

Overall, I think this is an accurate and succinct list of qualities that can alienate employees and undermine the success of companies or departments. I have worked with people that have each of these character flaws, but thankfully I’ve never worked with any individual who had more than two or three of them. And usually, if one of the team leaders brought down his or her employees with any of these tactics, there was someone else within the organization who made up for it with the opposite behavior. (For example, does it really matter if your boss knows or cares a lot about your personal life so long as other people you work with make you feel like an important individual?)

I even recognize myself in several of the 10 Reasons, and I know other people I’ve worked would say the same thing. (I know this because past employers have told me I created stress among employees when I got too uptight about projects. My response to that criticism was to become defensive and proclaim that I was only stressed out because those other people might not have jobs if we didn’t win the project we were working on – and as team leader I felt it was my responsibility to escalate the urgency of the project. I now realize that’s not good management style after all, but at the time, I thought my stressed out manner was actually a positive attribute that everyone on my team should have shared.)

Another of the 10 Reasons that resonates with me is telling people to have a “balanced life,” and then setting a bad example. It used to drive me absolutely nuts when a previous boss would send me a rash of emails on Sunday afternoon inquiring when we were going to submit a proposal or get paid by a client. “Get a life!” I would think as I stewed over his emails while watching the second half of a football game, half-guilty that I wasn’t working on something productive. 

But now, in my dual roles as a business owner and a part-time employee of another company, I find myself working at odd hours and sending emails to people who may resent my intrusion on their personal time.

I have actually rationalized this behavior as important to my career, and as evidence that I’m a dedicated team player who is always accessible. But maybe that’s not how others see it, and maybe there’s a better way to demonstrate my commitment that doesn’t include making my co-workers feel like they need to reply to me at 10:00pm on a Tuesday. (And make my family feel like I’m working all the time.)

So for 2010, I’m going to make some resolutions to be a better business person and a better team player, even if some of my new behaviors are counter to how I’ve performed in the past. Most notably:

• I will differentiate between critical issues and non-critical issues, and only deal with the most critical issues outside of normal work hours. This will provide more of that elusive work-life balance to me and my family, and hopefully resolve any perceptions that I’m either too involved with work, guilty of brown-nosing, or have expectations that my clients and co-workers should work the same nutty hours I do.
• I will make a better effort to manage my work hours so I’m neither giving too much time, nor too little time, to the people I work for, so everyone gets a fair deal and gets what they need on time.
• And in addition to serving the companies I work for, I will spend more time investigating the technologies and social media platforms that will make me a better marketer and better blogger. And, ultimately, a better person to work with and work for.

Happy New Years!

Marketing

The packaging company I work for has recently developed a proprietary spray frosting technique for glass and plastic bottles which is much more environmentally-friendly than conventional spray frosts that contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The guys at our Technigraph decorating division named it Eco-Frost, which is a great name because it says exactly what it is: ecologically responsible + frosted effect.

We all liked it so much we decided to see if we could trademark it. The process wasn’t cheap, especially when it came on the tail end of substantial capital investments in technology that haven’t started generating revenue yet. The first step was a trademark search to make sure no existing competitors were already using the name. When that panned out, there was a second fee for actually trademarking the Eco-FrostTM name, which we did.

With a soft launch this past September – and a full-scale production launch scheduled for January – we can now rest assured that while people will try to copy the chemistry, at least they can’t commandeer our name.

Since trademarks have been top of mind for me this month, I was especially intrigued by headlines in the St. Louis Business Journal about a local company that was suing Microsoft for alleged trademark infringement. The company, Bing! Information Design, creates charts, maps and other illustrated graphics to visually communicate hard-to-grasp concepts. They say they have been using the Bing! name for nearly a decade, and their logo is a yellow light bulb with the lowercase word “bing” and an exclamation point in the font that makes me think “got milk?”

Identity crisis? Bing! Information Design's suit consistently uses Bing! with a capital B and an exclamation point, but the company's only logomark clearly shows a lowercase "b." How could Microsoft expect to know how a design company will use its mark if they don't even use it consistently?

Their suit alleges Microsoft’s Bing search engine is “causing confusion and diluting the value” of Bing! Information Design’s name. Their lawyer says they have a trademark application pending, and their 9-page suit says Bing! Information Design is the “owner” of the name, and has applied for the trademark in the State of Missouri.

The Federal trademark registry says the Missouri company’s application was submitted May 26, 2009. (Perhaps coincidentally, this was also the same day that PC World announced Microsoft had purchased the bing.com domain name from a series of defunct businesses.) The USPTO shows that Microsoft applied for its trademark on the Bing name on March 2, 2009 (nearly three months prior to Bing! Information Design’s application).

I’m all for the little guy holding fast against the mega-corporation. I believe no company, especially one that makes $58.4 billion a year, should be able to steal the rightfully-trademarked name of a small limited liability company and dilute the value of their business. I want every company in St. Louis to do well, and I would almost always side with the underdog. But, when the plaintiff in this case says Microsoft’s choice of the Bing name was “outrageous due to its evil motive and reckless interference,” and yet this same company did not even bother to register its own trademark until Microsoft had already negotiated ownership of the coveted bing.com URL, I find it hard to have empathy for them.

Bing! Information Design’s suit also claims Microsoft “had knowledge of the (Plaintiff’s) mark and Plaintiff’s expectancy in usage of the mark.” I’m not sure how they can substantiate this. Although the USPTO did question Microsoft’s ability to use the Bing name because of potential competitors who had already trademarked the name, the St. Louis company was not among those established (and registered) companies it listed.

I don’t know the legal ins and outs of trademark law, and I don’t know if filing for a trademark three months after someone else has already filed gives you protection to prevent Microsoft – or anyone else – from using your brand name on a global level. But my point is that if you have a good name and you want to protect it, you need to bite the bullet and spend the money to properly register it. Before someone else does.

As I head into January and embark on a strong push for Eco-FrostTM, I know I’m glad I don’t have to worry about competitors stealing our name, even if Microsoft decides to enter the spray frost industry.

Business, Marketing

They say the camera adds 10 pounds. But in the world of digital photography, it can also distort reality to make already-thin models look emaciated, and bring unwanted criticism to companies who have seemingly manipulated fashion photography to create unrealistic expectations of what the “ideal” woman should look like.

The Ralph Lauren ad featuring Filippa Hamilton may have been the first recent print ad in which a model’s proportions seemed excessively distorted, but this week, the French government has proposed legislation that would require all digitally-manipulated photographs of people to labeled as retouched.

Marissa Miller doesn't need Photoshop to look thin on the runway. Photo from thesuperficial.com.

My first thought is that there is very little value in labeling photos as retouched when probably 98% of them have been manipulated, and simply saying they’ve been doctored does not help us understand what the model really looked like prior to any Photoshop work. My second thought is that whether or not photos are being altered to actually make women’s waists and hips look smaller, there are still an awful lot of runway models who are a whole lot thinner than they used to be — and they look that thin whether they’re in a still photo or strutting down the runway with a bevvy of Victoria’s Secret Angels.

But mostly, I wonder why advertisers persistently believe that being ultra-thin is better than looking healthy. I don’t understand why elite brands like Ralph Lauren would intentionally manipulate a photo to make a woman look like her head weighs more than her torso.

And really, I don’t understand any brand that didn’t think Marissa Miller was already perfect carrying a few “extra” pounds.

Marketing

December 1 is here, and for bloggers, that means we now have to disclose if and when we are getting paid to blog about any product or service we’re mentioning online. I’m not personally concerned about this new FTC guideline, mostly because I believe in full disclosure in any form of media. And also, because I don’t make my living getting paid to promote products that I wouldn’t be happy to pay for in the first place.

But just out of curiosity, I looked at my small body of blog posts to see if perhaps – in the days before this was forbidden – I might have inadvertently given positive recommendations of anything I received for free.

Unfortunately, I realized I not only haven’t been paid to speak favorably about the products and services I’ve blogged about, but I have actually PAID FOR most of the experiences I’ve shared with you over the past year. A few examples:

• The Eight O’Clock Coffee package redesign I blogged about in February (and March!) was based solely on my love of packaging, and not on the premise of free coffee. I don’t recall if I started buying Eight O’Clock Coffee regularly around that time, but I know for sure I’ve been buying it recently (and enjoying it, by the way).
• Also in March, I plugged a local St. Louis company called Graphic Leftovers that has created a market for the graphical elements that talented designers create for finicky clients who never buy them. Graphic Leftovers has never paid me for that plug, nor do they likely read my blog and realize that I plug them. But I like their resourcefulness, and I’d use them again anytime I have the need for a quick graphic with no strings attached.
• In June, I talked about two family resorts we had stumbled upon through Internet research, and subsequently vacationed at in 2008 and 2009. I wish I could tell you I was savvy enough to call these resorts prior to our visits and negotiate a free week’s stay for myself and my family in return for some positive press coverage (which would be read by my five regular readers), but I was not that smart. Instead, we had two strings-free vacations (both of which we thoroughly enjoyed) that I paid retail price for.
• In the interest of full disclosure, I have also not received any free Obama Chia Heads from www.whatonearthcatalog.com – and I’ll admit I have not purchased any. I love this particular catalog, but the $24.95 price tag is a little steep for my gag gift budget.

Plus I haven’t made nearly enough on my blogging career to afford one.

Business, Communications, Marketing