Passionland

This morning -on the last day of passion trip- I spent some of my breakfast time with Pak Gunadi, and we ended up discussing about positive thinking.
If in my previous posting, I wrote about ‘the power of imagination’, now I would like to share my experiences about + thinking positive +
I planned to go back to surabaya this morning, but I couldn’t find any tickets, then I decided to keep the positive spirit. (at least I have a privilege to taste bu Oka’s suckling pig, though honestly it was the Word of Mouth that made it being scaled ‘world class’, hehehe..)

Back to the topic…
Then I arrived in surabaya.. and when I was waiting for taxi, I saw that there’re 2 types of airport taxies (the old-bad one & the new-vios taxi). I was in queue line, and I tried my ‘think positive’ power, “I’m sure I will have the vios one”, and EXACTLY.. a couple in front of me had the old taxi, and I had the vios taxi.
Yeah, you can say it was coincidentally happened. Okay..Okay.. I arrived at 5.20 PM, and I know for sure it’s gonna be crowded traffic. Then I tried again my power of positive thinking, “I know the traffic is crowded, but I will not get caught in traffic jam, I will have smooth back-home-trip”
And, believe it or not.. it happened guys!

Yoris and Pak Gunadi told me about a book titled “The Secret”. That book discussed about positive thinking. I’m curious enough now to read that book. And if there’s anyone who would like to share about that book, I’ll be more than happy to hear it.

So, guys.. start practicing the positive thinking lifestyle?

Dear my Passionate Team & Partners,

What a year…. Looking back on the past year has left me speechless.
We’ve worked our ass of as if there’s no tomorrow. We’ve overcome so much, achieved exceedingly, and learn tremendously. Just like a child who started by crawling, we’ve grow and now are running on a rapid speed.
It’s been great. Hell, it’s been fuckin’ great.
But how great is great? Will what we’ve won and achieved so far be able to fulfill our Passion for Achievement?
I believe, to grow we need a solid foundation, a sharp mind and a strong physique to enable us to always run and run….

If last August we all have stated that we are passionate beings, I now challenge you to have a very passionate trip full of excitement.
The bottom line is, I want you to go wild and HAVE FUN!!!

Bernhard Subiakto
Chief Passion Officer
Octovate Group

Wieden + Kennedy, Delhi is official as the network expands by partnering with Delhi-based “A”. Wieden + Kennedy has opened its doors in India. Though word of a Delhi office first came last summer, the official announcement arrived today, with a slight change in plans. Learn more.

Mark Zuckerberg declared today at the Facebook Social Advertising Event in New York City.

“The next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today. Yes, today is the first day of the rest of advertising’s life.”

If you wanna learn more about it, just click Facebook Press Release.

The Coca-Cola Company will feature its Sprite brand on a new Facebook Page and will invite users to add an application to their account called “Sprite Sips.” People will be able to create, configure and interact with an animated Sprite Sips character. For consumers in the United States, the experience can be enhanced by entering a PIN code found under the cap of every 20 oz. bottle of Sprite to unlock special features and accessories. The Sprite Sips character provides a means for interacting with friends on Facebook. In addition, Sprite will create a new Facebook Page for Sprite Sips and will run a series of Social Ads that leverage Facebook’s natural viral communications to spread the application across its user base.

Hey all Octokers please learn more about it and share to all. Keep up your PASSION!

please guy…. don’t punish me. I just quote this article from The Independent UK. Blame them, not me ;)

Stay Hungry Stay Foolish
Sumardy

Making ads from your employees
Staff can be effective marketers of a brand, wearing T-shirts or even being tattooed with the company logo. Marketing expert Nicholas Ind reports on a strange trend

Published: 05 November 2007
I once interviewed the chief storyteller for Nike, who was in Europe to tell stories about the heritage and culture of the company to new employees. We spent an afternoon in a hotel lounge in Amsterdam and at the end of the interview he stood up, put his leg on the table and started rolling up his trousers. I started to wonder what was going to happen next. A Masonic handshake? Some strange Nike ritual? But, no, what he wanted to show me was a swoosh (tick) tattoo on his calf.

Of course, there are stories about Harley-Davidson owners having logos tattooed on their bodies, but it’s quite something else to have your employer’s logo. In these days of employment mobility (the average job tenure is now just over 2 years in the UK) most people would end up looking like a Yakuza gangster or Robbie Williams. Maybe the difference with Nike’s storyteller was that he was employee number 18 in the company and had spent his life working there.

Most companies would like their employees to be committed enthusiasts – not because of some sense of welfare, but because loyal employees are more productive and there are considerable costs attached to hiring and developing new people.

When employees love what they do, they expend extra effort, give up their spare time, take responsibility for the company and promote it to people they meet. For example, at the Californian-based sportswear company, Patagonia, very little money is spent on traditional approaches to marketing, largely because the company has a powerful group of employee advocates who have an ongoing dialogue with customers.

Employees talk up the brand because they believe in the quality of the product and the overt environmental stance of the company (their mission statement which was first written down a decade ago is “to use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis”).

Patagonia does not indulge in schemes to motivate or persuade employees to communicate what it stands for, rather people use the vision and values in both everyday and strategic decisions, such as its cast-iron guarantee to repair any product for life, its commitment to give 1 per cent of sales to environmental causes and its recycling of its products and those of competitors.

Employees are free to engage with the company and its purpose as much as they want to. There are plenty of long servers at the company, such as the world freestyle Frisbee playing champion and receptionist, Chip Bell (15 years), who maintain the culture, using a branded Patagonia Frisbee, but equally if people want to spend more time with their family, take time out to go mountain climbing or to take part in environmental protesting, Patagonia support that (they also pay your bail, if you get arrested).

The passion one finds among the employees at Patagonia is rare, not least because rather than recognising the desire of individuals to find fulfilment, companies too often squeeze the enthusiasm out of people by pushing them to demonstrate commitment. Go and talk to front-line employees of banks, telecoms companies and retailers and most often you find disillusionment, a lack of identification and a fair proportion of saboteurs (one in five by some counts) who range from the disgruntled blogger who attacks company policy to the automotive plant worker who deliberately creates a rattle in a car frame just to annoy customers. In spite of all the corporate talk of the importance of people, managers rarely value employees and tend to over-estimate the value of pay and rewards and under-estimate the value of doing a rewarding job well. Naomi Klein, in her book, No Logo argued that this desire to control is prevalent in the world of the “brand bullies”. When companies indulge in attempts to manipulate employees to believe in some bland vision by producing posters and company songs or paying people to be word-of-mouth advocates, depressingly it seems she is right. Yet, while most organisations will probably continue to think that you can make employees identify with what they stand for, there are some that have recognised you can trust employees to do the right thing most of the time. Commitment comes when people believe in a cause and are given the opportunity to be active participants in its development. Ask Chip Bell why he is so positive about his job and once you have got past the surf speak about “feeling genuinely groovy”, his answer is about belief – “I encompass every value of the company” and his ability to influence how the company is seen – “being the image and the voice of Patagonia”.

When I cite stories like this, people say, it’s all very well for sports companies such as Patagonia and Nike to work in this way, but they have naturally passionate employees. That may be true, but passion is not a function of industry, but of culture. The automotive saboteur who was putting bolts in the door panel of cars became a committed advocate for the brand when the plant became a joint venture with a Japanese company that had a more open and positive way of managing the business. You can also find passionate people in such diverse companies as Pret A Manger, Volvo Cars, Apple and Rabobank.

At Volvo’s factory in Gothenburg, Sweden, people read about cars, test drive cars, talk about cars and spend their spare time socialising with people who work at Volvo. To an outsider, that might all sound a bit obsessive, but it’s the result of the feeling of involvement. In Apple you find plenty of passion, not only from designers and software developers but also from those employees in Apple stores wearing company-branded T-shirts emblazoned with the word “genius” advising customers how to get the most from their ipods and Macs. A T-shirt may not have the permanence of a tattoo, but when it is worn with pride by a company employee it can be a powerful marketing tool.

taken from http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article3129883.ece