We Need Holiday Parties.

The annual holiday party is a curious rite of passage for just about any agency. It’s an obligatory ritual that’s squeezed in among the hustle-bustle of many year-end activities: financial reports, evaluations, and finishing up OPDP submissions before the holiday break.

For those given the task of organizing the holiday party, there’s tremendous pressure, whether it’s for a shop of 20 folks or an agency with 500 employees. You’re charged with ensuring the merriment of your colleagues. You’re responsible for making sure they have a good time. That is the only agenda: to have a good time.

The quality of holiday parties is as varied as the agencies that host them. Some are so monumentally epic that your grandchildren and people in foreign lands will be reading about them in their history books. (If you were there, you’d know what party I’m talking about.) Others are so awful you just want “Die Hard” to happen in real life.

Good or bad, fun or not, one thing is clear: We need our holiday parties. Because holiday parties are cathartic.

They’re not just some drunken convergence of people who go to work in the same building as you do every day. Holiday parties are important milestones in every agency’s year. It’s a time to get together with the folks with whom you spend a majority of your waking hours and reconnect as people, as friends, as trusted partners. It’s a time to stitch up the past year, pat everyone—including yourself—on the back, and look ahead to the coming year. There is always something to celebrate at the holiday party, no matter how big or small.

Extrovertic holiday parties—yes, we have more than one!—have much to live up to. It’s not like we have a choice—we’re called Extroverts for a reason. In a year of such explosive growth, it would’ve been tempting to overdo it and go all out and over the top—“go big or go home” style. 

Instead, the first of our parties, was rather…nice, charming, and a little quirky. Very Extrovertic.

Berklee College of Music students brought the jam.

A tarot card reader helped us look into the future. (Will anyone use this new app I’m designing?) We ate, we drank, we sang, we danced, and we drank some more. And then we all hopped into cabs, went home, and watched the sunrise.

Like I said, cathartic.

Desmond

“Designing” the Service Business Model.

With the passing of Steve Jobs, the central place that design has played in infusing everyday products with value has received tremendous airplay. That got me thinking, how could a design mentality create additional value in the service business? Specifically, the healthcare agency business?

What would a well-designed contact report look like? 

Would the structure of our meetings change?
How would our creative product be affected?

So, for the remainder of 2011, our Extroverts will be devoting time and energy to wrestling with these questions. We will start by immersing all New York and Boston Extroverts into the world of design. Extrovertic leadership will be giving presentations, taking the agency on a field trip or two, and bringing beautifully designed items into the office. We plan to culminate this effort with an Extrovertic idea storm, where we will apply the principles of design to generate ideas on improving our environment, processes, services, products, and work lives.

The inspiration behind Extrovertic idea storms is to look beyond the world of pharmaceuticals for interesting ideas and initiatives. Using a structured brainstorming process, we then develop ways these ideas can be applied to specific business challenges. In this case, how can Extrovertic raise the bar and offer a distinctively different level of agency service? Our clients have told us Extrovertic is different, that we offer a higher level of strategic thinking than most agencies. But we want to take that further.

Until the end of this year, we will be using the world of design as inspiration to offer a distinctively different level of agency service. The world of design has already provided us with a lofty template for our initiative. It comes from Mauro Porcini, 3M’s Head of Global Strategic Design, who was featured in Fast Company’s October Design issue.

“The designer’s goal…is not customer satisfaction. That’s a terribly low bar. You’re just meeting someone’s needs. If you’re a designer who loves your customers, you surprise. You enter the sacred field of the magic, of the extraordinary, of the memorable.”

At Extrovertic, we love our clients, their patients, and the healthcare space. So we will be idea storming on how we can surprise and delight them in 2012 and beyond. Please follow our blog, add your thoughts, and enjoy a design-infused end of year.

Dorothy