Miata - IBM Stream of Consciousness Jul/05/2007

I've been told that Miata, the car name that Mazda Motors chose, means "I peed in my pants" in Spanish.

At the "Olympics of Telecom", an international show in Geneva (Telecom '91), I played a role in IBM's booth. It was a 3 story booth, with an elevator. There were about 150 different demonstrations on and about the booth, and I had produced about 50 of them, including a signature recognition demonstration. I also was the voice over for many of the multimedia presentations, and, either ad libbed or wrote much of the copy.

I had a show badge at a pretty high level (some minor Executive) that got me into any part of the IBM booth. I also had pins from other booths, stuck onto my show badge, but only from companies that had strategic alliances with IBM. So, I had an AT&T pin, one from Sony, from Alcatel and TelMex and I knew what each of the alliances with these companies was...and several people had asked me and I told them why I had on the pins and they appreciated the information...however....

The President of IBM Europe (EMEA) wandered by my station on the show floor and saw my pins and told his staffie to tell my management that I was to remove all the pins from my badge, and even though I explained my situation to my management they had me remove the pins, and so, I removed all except the Radio Bejing pin, with which IBM had no alliance, except in tactics!

I worked with a fellow named Bayou Citizen. Bayou was a good old boy from Texas, but he'd been urbanized and urbaneized too. Spoke with nary a drawl. He was the field sales manager and I was the "Friend from the Factory" marketing guy, and together we'd get announcement activities accomplished.

We would measure the project by how many lives it would cost. We could look at a timeframe, and a list of activities, and decide, in 6-12 weeks time, how many people will have to be put into action for how many hours, and that's how we decided what the number of lives it would take to do the project.

For example, part of IBM's response to the 1987 stock market crash was to host 350 NYSE analysts, brokers, et al at a all day event on an IBM "college campus" (Thornwood). I was asked 6 weeks prior what we ought to demonstrate, and what we showed on the day was exactly what I had envisioned. Total Carte Blanche, I had a charge code, and that was that...(not a clue what the total event cost, but our demonstration included a private courier to transport one of only TWO 4MB cards in the world for the then PC (running OS/2!), so that we could do windows during the demo!)

Well, when we did the budget for this event, we figured it was a 3 life lost project. That's how many weeks of how many people's lives would be spent getting the event accomplished...3 lifetimes!

How many lifetimes?
How deadly Is the project?
We had to access!

Once Upon A Time
In a galaxy far far
Justice Prevailed