Saturday, June 19 2010

The Man With the Plan(ning)

My home away from home in the sky

Ah, another airplane ride, another blogging opportunity! I recently realised that if I spent six hours a day on airplanes, without the internet, telephones or meetings, I could meet all of my writing goals for the next two years in about a month and a half. There’s just something about sitting in a giant Pringles™ can in the sky full of strangers that makes me want to retreat into the world of words and stay there until I can get my feet back on the ground.

On the other hand (the one in the cast, I guess) I want to spend another day on an airplane like I want to moisturise with Tabasco sauce, so I guess I’m not going to be spending all my spare time as a junior birdman.

Aha, moment of amusement here: a lady just walked up to me and asked a question. When I had prised my earbuds out (I’m listening to Stanton Moore’s All Kooked Out, excellent as are all of his CD’s) she asked me with great amazement how I was getting the internet on an airplane. I guess not that many people actually use laptops to write or do presentations these days, surfing instead. Her face really fell when I told her there was no internet, perhaps a sign of her incipient webaddiction.

Gorgeous location. We'll talk about the service another time . . .

I’m coming back from Toronto, after attending a strategic planning meeting with the Global Vintner’s management group, including folks from Operations, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Administration and me. Global Vintner’s is the umbrella group of kit companies that are owned by Andrew Peller Limited (Canada’s largest winery—there’s another winery in Canada that’s a bit bigger, but they’re wholly owned by people from New York). These companies include Winexpert, where I work, Vineco, our sister company that is available in specialty retail (consumer winemaking shops), Wine Kitz, a franchise operation with over 70 stores across Canada, and Artful Winemaker, a specialty division that makes a tabletop/small footprint winemaking apparatus mainly seen outside of Canada.

The companies have different production, warehousing, distribution, sales and marketing teams, and compete against each other, albeit in a gentlemanly way. But because we all work towards a common goal (producing consumer winemaking products) for our parent company, we work to keep ourselves aligned and to try and grow our whole industry, together. While we all love to win market share and I’ve been known to quote Genghis Khan on the rewards of winning, I’d really rather make the whole pie bigger, so our slice grows, rather than just steal someone else’s piece of pie (which is pretty much a deadly sin, way I was raised.)

Frank contemplates while Tim Shaw leads

Plenty of fun was had: the group was lead by Tim Shaw, a business consultant who facilitates high-level planning sessions just like these. He’s an impressive leader—low key, but really able to sort through ideas and opinions and drill down to core ideas and concepts. It really was a room full of strong-minded individuals, none of whom are shy about sharing opinions. Me, I’m meek as a mouse, but we all really like heated discussions, and a vigorous exchange of ideas and challenges. Tim kept us right on track pretty much to the minute, and got the whole thing done. I was geeking out most of the time because I found the whole thing as fun as a box full of Mexican fireworks.

(The whole Tim thing was pretty funny. Not only was Tim Shaw there, Tim Martin from Wine Kitz was in attendance as well. Timothy is not that usual a name so I’m normally the only one around. But for two days anytime someone said ‘Tim’, three heads swivelled or flinched.)

Jason and Jeff (seated) contemplating what they learned. Or, looking the golf course . . .

Due to the way I work, pretty focused on my own stuff, largely unsupervised (I’m mentored, lead and inspired by my boss, but supervising me just makes me all slitty-eyed and mulish) so I occasionally pine for the bigger picture, not only what other parts of the company are doing, but also what’s really happening with the industry and our long-term plans on a really macro scale. It makes me feel like I’m a part of something larger that’s headed somewhere good, and my kicks at the wheel, however small are adding to a bigger result. And bigger picture I got.

Just what we got done I really can’t say in specific terms—secret company stuff, don’tcha know. But we were there to talk about what we wanted to be in the future, not just next year, but in three to five years, both as a specialty manufacturer/distributor, and as a part of the wine industry as a whole. We wound up with a strategic vision of a ‘willed future’ and a bunch of initiatives and programs that are going into implementation over the next half-decade. I’ve got my own chunk of the work set in front of me and it’s a doozey, but I’m looking forward to it with relish.

I also got so infected by the strategic thinking thing that I pulled out something I’ve been working on for a couple of years, a diagrammatic analysis of what a wine kit manufacturer does, and where in the value chain we extract labour (by crushing and pressing the grapes into juice for our end-users) or technical savvy (by blending and balancing the juices in our winery), where we add value (packaging the juice so it can be transported and held for extended periods) and how we help our retail partners and where the touch points are for consumer winemakers. I’m going to fire up a graphics program when I get back to the office and map the whole kooky thing out a little neater than my crummy handwriting with lines and boxes and get some input and review from my peers. I don’t quite know where I’m going with it, but it feels important to look at what we really do, not what we think we do.

Look! A signifier of a thing I will never have!

Dang. I’m sounding so company. I’m in danger of losing my street cred as a rebel without a clue. I think it comes from being a sort of desultory historian of the consumer produced wine industry; partly because I’ve been in it so long that I’ve seen an awful lot of it happen, partly because I got trained by people who had been in it long before I came around, and partly because I’ve done a whole whack of research on the industry, part of it for magazine articles, part to see what has been done before that worked or not-worked, and partly just because I’m curious about our little corner of the wine distribution chain.

It's just a scratch

Friday is another day, with a lot of catch-up on correspondence and projects that are cooking. It also holds a physiotherapy appointment. The surgical wound on the thumb I chopped up with the Champagne bottle is now mostly healed, and it’s time to make it move again. This involves both passive physio, where the nice lady bends and yanks on the frozen digit to increase range of motion, and deep-tissue massage, where she works to separate the scar tissue that’s adhered to the tendon so it will move. I had a wee bitty of a panic attack last week. My thumb got severely jostled, even inside the cast/brace and with the lack of movement I was concerned I’d torn the tendon off again. Fortunately my surgeon says it’s all there, just frozen up with the big lumpy scar. At least by now I can type again, up to 30 wpm and rising! My high school typing teacher would be so proud, if we kids hadn’t driven him to the madhouse all those years ago.

Seriously, this is the way great music sounds

I think it’s the weekend too, which means I have a date with my wife on Sunday! We’re going to the fabulous Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver to see Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. If you’ve never heard of her, she’s a treat. She backs up Amy Winehouse when that person isn’t in jail, rehab or on a rampage, but she’s a lot better than Winehouse. Her version of 100 Days rocks like a rocky thing composed entirely of rockiness. I owe a hat tip to my buddy John Tataryn for turning me on to her music a couple of years ago. Thanks John! The missus is going to be a little sad because she can’t dance right now due to being hobbled by a hamstring injury, which is a double-pity because watching her dance is a real treat for me.

Ah, there’s yard work too, I have to clean out my office (my desk is one paper clip away from collapsing into shards) and I promised Spot I’d take him bowling. Monday it’s back into the editing suite to get another couple of chapters done and rendered to hi-def. Also, I really should go into the office one day this month . . . well, let’s not push things!

Posted by Farsighted Tim AT 1:11PM

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