Rewind to January 2007. My first day at frog was a cold winter day in Austin. In fact, it was so unusually cold and perilously icy, that the entire city was virtually shutdown-- including my new employer. That next morning, again full of anticipation, I learned that a suspiciously bizarre scene of deceased birds up and down Congress Avenue was going to delay my maiden splash into the frog pond yet another day.
Looking back, the moral of that peculiar start to my frog career was that achieving true success at frog design was a perpetually moving target-- ever shifting and unpredictable.
Two years later, two years older, and two years wiser, I feel like true success at frog, while sometimes still elusive in it's tangible form, is thankfully more predictable. Like life in Austin itself, and the cultural adjustments I made coming from Oslo and Boston, assimilating at frog was not a trivial task for me.
That first year at frog, when I entered the world of consulting and services for the first time in my 15 year professional career, was yet another complex environment for me to adapt to. In general, I believe that skills and expertise of any type, are attainable by most fairly educated people with the right mentoring and 'conditioning'. When it came to the consulting business, I possessed neither on that first day at frog.
Alas, I could sell just about anything. I had passion, knowledge and experience in the computer, Internet and mobile spaces-- with a fair amount of professional success over my career to offer. While that was enough to get me a lily pad on the frog pond, it did not provide the requisite amount of professional conditioning that many of my esteemed colleagues clearly had in the consulting & services arena.
So that first year was scary and humbling for me. Almost like the day I left Boston as an engineer at MicroTouch and arrived in Oslo, Norway as a business developer for Opera. Maybe even scarier than that, because now the stakes and expectations were higher. Life was harder than ever.
Oh, I made mistakes. Some of them the same mistakes I've always made (and probably always will). However, I learned a tremendous amount about the art of delivering cutting edge creative work and the 'business of innovation'. Working and interacting with such intelligent, interesting and creative people has been the most exhilarating...and challenging part of the job for me. While focusing primarily on the mobile industry, I have helped sell frog's impressive array of services (and 40 year pedigree as a premiere global creative consultancy) to Fortune 500 companies all over the world. What a thrill and a privilege to be able to work with the best companies on the planet to deliver products and services that improve the lives of humans (and other living creatures)!
And it's still a thrill to this day. The major difference for me now in the year 2009 is that I feel like I have my frog legs beneath me now. While I still take some lumps from time to time (and by the way, so do all frogs), I have the confidence to clearly articulate the unique qualities and value of frog's people as well as, dare I say-- the predictability of the quality of our work delivery. And this year is even more special as it marks the 40th year frog design has been a globally recognized leader in the 'business of innovation'. How fortunate I feel to be a part of this impressive milestone!
For me, Austin is frog and frog is Austin. They will forever be one in my mind because it was this great city that led me to frog, and frog that makes living in Austin so incredibly gratifying. No matter what happens in the future, I will look upon my days at frog design as the years of my career where I learned the most about global business and mastered the ability to effectively condition myself and continually adapt to a complex, ever changing work environment.
True success at frog? Sometimes it's about selling. Sometimes it's about what you say and what you don't. Sometimes it's about perception and survival. However, it's always about innovating and effectively predicting the future.
The future is bright.
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