Sometimes the past isn't behind you...and sometimes that's a good thing.

The Green Bay Packers are the "home team" where I come from. As you might imagine, I'm relatively pleased by recent events. The Packers won the Super Bowl...their 13th Championship in franchise history-the most in the NFL...the Chicago Bears are in second place with 9, and it drops off significantly after that.

Now...I'm not much of a sports "fan" in any traditional sense. I don't follow Wisconsin's other sports teams very closely, the Milwaukee Bucks in the NBA, or MLB's Milwaukee Brewers...

(though the Football Badgers of the University of Wisconsin are of recent interest lately as their soon-to-be-famous Center, Peter Konz is a former next-door neighbor...I can say I knew him when...he weighed about a third of what he does now. He's as fine a person as a player, and that's what we like around these parts...)

However, the Green Bay Packers are a different story...in fact their story goes far beyond the recent memory of sports fans who will forever associate uber-Quarterback Brett Favre with Green Bay after his 17 seasons playing for

the Packers. In fact, if Aaron Rodgers (who has been the starting QB for Green Bay for three seasons now) stays healthy, he very well could eclipse Favre's performance records if the way he's starting is any indication...and then the intriguing story will be how in the world the NFL team in the smallest market in the league put two QB's with this kind of talent back-to-back.

However, as much as the sports media likes to keep re-hashing the Quarterback questions in Green Bay (though frankly Rodgers answered any questions I had long ago...), the story of the Green Bay Packers and the reason for their global fan-base goes far beyond any two players...or any ten players.

After a friend who I work with in Boston had watched the Super Bowl and we had communicated several times during and after the game, he found a segment from Rachel Maddox' show on MSNBC. Now...this isn't a political conversation, and my friend doesn't really have a taste for MSNBC's commentators anyway... so don't stop reading just yet. She gives a pretty decent thumbnail of what the Packers are about and where they came from...

The Packers have a history. When I watch the players move back to the locker rooms after practice during training camp and I

watch all the school children gather to walk with the players, and to offer the players their bikes to ride back to the locker room as they walk along side...those kids are just beaming with pride, and the players seem to think the kid is more important than any sense of their personal image as they sometimes ride bikes intended for human sizes...and genders that create some interesting combinations.

You might note Punter Tim Masthay riding the stylish little pink number in the left most of the four panels and Donald Driver riding a much littler...little number on the right.

(Four panel image courtesy of The Packer Page, Overhead Image courtesy of the blog Trigg Pack...thank you Mike)

Find me another franchise where parents would even allow their elementary school age children to go hang around an NFL facility with NFL players without supervision... Certainly other teams have good people playing for them, but seeing this kind of mass of NFL players getting on children's bicycles and riding them, however awkwardly, knowing that photos are being taken constantly?  (Some of course are just too big of course...a player like Chad Clifton might walk with a particular child and chat on the way vs simply crushing their bicycle by attempting to ride it...)

These players jump into the stands because they know how their fans feel about them, win or lose.  It's not based on their performance, it's based on who they are.


It's an interesting notion really.  In our world of results and execution, efficiency and focus, how many of your customers like WHO you are as well as WHAT you sell?  There will be times when you encounter a situation that reduces your performance for any particular customer on any given day...is your relationship with your customers based on what you've done for them lately?

I have several clients I do business with that I simply take pride in being associated with...a construction company that diverted incredible resources to the site of a domestic terror bombing attack...and were able to do so because their customers understood them, liked who they are as a company, and any resulting delays on their construction projects were acceptable as they would expect this construction company to do nothing less than what it did, facing the circumstances at hand.

I try to prove myself to my clients by advising them as to what is in their best interests, even when it may mean  changing a project so less revenue comes to me.  It's a long term/short term thing.  In the short term I can cash the check from a project where the work I did was substantial...in the long term, if the client would have solved their problem more effectively with an approach that cost less, or doesn't involve me at all in some cases, then the solution I provided may under perform in some way.   At worst I lose the client and at best, I lose credibility the next time I need to advise the client to do something that they may not agree with, but that I think will serve them best.  It's not about being "Pollyanna-ish", it's about what sort of customer relationships you want to have.

In this period of no-nonsense cost-effectiveness and austerity, you might consider what sort of history you have...perhaps it's the story of who you are and maybe it should be told.

Maybe the fact that the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl after an entire season where their ranks were decimated by injuries and that they even "snuck" into the playoffs with a very mediocre record and a must-win game on the last weekend of the regular season and were considered underdogs almost universally throughout the playoffs isn't what makes them a success with their market...their fan base.  Maybe it's that so many of them come to the smallest market in the NFL and play outdoors (Lambeau Field is almost famously NOT a dome) in a cold-weather state and play for a team that can't be sold or moved...maybe it's that they confidently jump into the stands with their fans who fill the seats of that outdoor stadium whether it's 80 degrees or 8 below zero...maybe it's bigger than the players OR the fans alone...  Maybe it's the relationship built between them.

Maybe who you are is as important as the number you write with that "sharpened pencil" we all have to resort to these days.  And maybe, even if you miss out on some of that work where how sharp the pencil was is the sole criteria...maybe you start some new relationships that will be much longer-term because you can show that you have a soul.

Maybe we can all be lucky enough to have customers who support us in ways beyond paying our invoices...but we need to offer them something beyond invoices first.


TimK