Twenty two

BB (Sales) and I had attended a convention and we got caught at an airport for four hours. We’d had our heads down in email for an hour when I had an idea. “Can I see your phone?” I asked. BB handed it to me with a puzzled look. I took the battery out before BB knew what was going on, and handed back the dead carcass. I powered mine down.

We sat there looking at each other. BB didn’t quite know what to say, and I didn’t say anything either.

“Right then”, is all that BB could muster to break the silence.

I explained myself. “All this digital stuff is wonderful, but not to the point where it gets in the way of eye-to-eye, sort of full gesture communication. Yes, ‘full gesture’; reckon I’ll trademark that. It’s real communication, in reality not virtual reality, or augmented reality. It’s Full Gesture Communication™ in Unaugmented Reality™. Two trademarks!”

I think BB thought I’d lost the plot.

“BB, you and I can explore stuff together over the next few months by batting ideas and questions and answers back and forth through the interwebby ether, key tap by laborious key tap, or we can actually have the discipline to make better and faster progress right now that fate has gifted this flight delay. So. What’s bugging you?”

Three hours is such a short time. We covered so much stuff that I’d taken nearly twenty pages of notes by the time we shuffled on the plane. And the in-flight conversation was then primed to take off too.

One of the most interesting threads concluded with our agreeing BB should spend some similar ‘quality time’ with Marcus (COO) to understand the process as well as he understood the product. Our customers don’t just buy a product; they buy a process, and more so given the increasing emphasis on lifelong customer support. And we decided the production processes and post-sales processes are too interlinked to be considered as separately as they have been.