Mobile Managers

Sophomore Program Director Danny Smith has a busy weekend. His own team for the Entrepreneurs Club’s EIP Program is promoting a local start-up at a big event on Saturday and he is also serving as a mentor in the Husky Startup Challenge and a participant in Engineers for the Greater Good, a 72 hour business and engineering competition. Despite this crazy schedule, a weekend like this is typical for Danny. As a senior leader in the Entrepreneurs Club, he makes it a point to not just focus on the program he runs, but instead go out and help with every other director’s program. As a participant, he learns how each program works so he’ll be able to offer tangible suggestions to his manager colleagues. When Danny is an attendee, he doesn’t expect special treatment - he sits with everyone else and goes through the same learning. This attitude is the epitome of what I look for in an excellent leader: willingness to go beyond your own department and care about the success of the team as a whole. Danny’s desire to learn, help and be a part of the community serves as shining example for everyone in the organization.

I recently read a parable about a tribal leader who always stays in his compound at the top of a mountain and rarely comes down to meet with his people and understand their problems. This is of course the opposite of what an effective manager should be doing. Danny’s actions on the other hand represent a much better way to do things: be a mobile manager. These managers:

• Talk: go out and speak to the people you manage and their customers. Gain a deeper understanding for their lives and what problems they face.
• Learn: take what your people and customers say to heart. Go beyond observing and think about what you can learn from the people you manage.
• Participate: be a customer and use the services that your organization provides. You’ll quickly earn a better perspective on what your people need.
• Advise: provide tangible action items that the people you manage or other managers can use to exceed their objectives.
• Go Beyond: go outside your job description and appropriately provide input and participate in other facets of the organization. 

Combined with other important qualities like clarity and respect, having people with a “mobile management” attitude is a great asset for any successful team… I’m glad to have one like Danny on mine.

Managing Event Mishaps

This past fall, my team put on a kick ass event coined the Zaarly Survival Challenge. The event came out of our organization’s Entrepreneurship Immersion Program, headed up by sophomore Danny Smith. The program is a semester long consulting project where a team of Northeastern students partner with a startup to help build the business through marketing and operations projects. 

For the fall semester, we teamed up with Zaarly, a web startup that enables people to ask for anything from other people nearby. Imagine it as modern version of Craigslist, except buyers can post what they want and sellers respond… very cool app. To bring the Zaarly brand to NU, our team created the Zaarly Survival Challenge, where we locked campus celebrity Drew D’Agostino in a homemade glass box in the middle of the quad for 24 hours straight. Drew had to use Zaarly to post what he needed to survive. It was a fantastic event and everyone involved had a blast.

This was a complicated event. We had to deal with:

• a ton of materials… we built a freakin’ glass box
• outdoor electricity and internet
• loads of cash transactions
• hundreds of attendees 
• a team of 20 students working on the event in different shifts
• complying with safety codes to be outside at night at school

A particularly stressful challenge my team dealt with was when we found out 3 hours before the event was starting that the quad we were working in hadn’t been properly reserved with NU facilities. Which technically meant, we weren’t allowed to be there. Panic time? Maybe. Here’s what happened:

I walked right into the Student Activities office, asked to speak to the Asst. Director, sat down with her and explained everything, talked it out, and 10 minutes later I walked out of the room with the proper reservation I needed, despite their policy that reservations must be made in advance. This worked because I handling things personally. Not via email, not on the phone, but in person. This is by far the most effective way to really get stuff done.

So, the big lesson here is that if there are last minute event mishaps (and probability says that there will be), stay calm, handle things personally and be ready to get creative if you run into road blocks.