Get your best players into the game...

Go Team!

I often have the pleasure of working directly with client-side teams of amazing stakeholders in the planning of multi-zone, cross-platform and other integrated campaigns.

As law attempts to keep pace with rapidly changing technology, these teams often include talent with mad skills from sales, risk management, procurement, systems administration, human resources, Information technology, and of course, legal, for starters....

Having ingrained into their corporate muscle memory the benefits (time, cost and potential exposure) of an “advance team” approach, these experienced stakeholders often quickly brainstorm, identify, assess and resolve wide-ranging potential issues that range from local and regional regulatory requirements, potential data privacy issues and security concerns, (un)foreseeable supply or other contingencies, responses to consumer or regulator complaints, as a few examples and all with consistency in messaging, leaving me to act as their humble scribe ...

When I try to convey the significance of these practices, I often lean on analogies.

Some that spring to mind include a hostage rescue team training in tandem for a forced residential entry (as least as I imagine it would be), each team member executing their assigned task(s) automatically, without temporal deviation, without variance or distraction.

The reverential changing of the guard precisely on the hour at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier?

Perhaps a live musical performance? The Vienna Philharmonic, said to be the finest orchestra in the world, has no principal conductor. Instead, the prestigious group collectively decides which conductors to invite back, inviting input from the disciplined and enduring musical sections, whether winds, strings, reeds, percussion, etc.

With a bit of ingrained advance representative collaboration, your promotions can be as smooth and flawless as an orchestral performance.

After all, my musician father loved to repeatedly recount to me that when asked the way to Carnegie Hall, an aspiring young musician was simply told, “Practice, Practice, Practice.”