WOW Awards
I started paying attention to “WOW” in about 1998 when I began reading some books by Tom Peters. The Pursuit of WOW was the one that introduced“WOW” to me though he wrote more titles where“WOW” factored highly. He writes about making everything in a business be a“WOW” whether it’s a part of customer service, the design of an office memo or how you launch a new product.
When I was executive director at the BC Touring Council from 1998 to 2001, I worked closely with my colleague, Sheryl McGraw, to incorporate“WOW” into everything we could. It wasn’t about money (there wasn’t any) or about other resources, but rather about using any opportunity to do things in the absolute opposite way of mediocre. For us, we responded to emails really quickly and often got comments from members thanking us for being so fast. We supplied more comprehensive information at the annual booking conference for presenters and artist/agents to have at their disposal and had comments from them such as “wow, this is amazing.” We began all of our projects with the question “how can we make this wow?” The results:
- Membership increased 100%.
- Attendance at the annual conference increased immensely.
- Member satisfaction skyrocketed.
It left me in no doubt as to the power of making all projects and services ““WOW.”
One of the best parts of making things“WOW” is that it makes work more fun for the person or organization actually doing it, and often because what you do is more fun, it shows up very positively in the work that you’ve applied the “WOW” to. Though it may be fun, it doesn’t mean it’s easy. In fact, nine times out of ten, making something“WOW” is very hard (but incredibly rewarding).
In a perfect world, everything we do would be a “WOW, knock your socks-off” event, project, service, design. Sometimes we hit it, sometimes we’re close, sometimes we miss the mark and it’s not “WOW” be we have to try.
I’m creating a little “WOW Award” for things I see that make me say “WOW” and I’ll post them here from time to time. My first one will be about a photographer I recently worked with. Stay tuned.
