What is the difference between the Swiss and the Masaï? Seated on a small mountain overlooking the Serengeti in Tanzania, the question caught me by surprise. I turn to the Masaï warrior who asked it and told him I had no idea.
"The Swiss have the watches," he replied. "We have the time!"
What I’ve always enjoyed about travel is being exposed to different cultures, traditions, accents and ways of doing business. It opens one’s mind and sometimes leads to funny or not-so-funny moments.
Understanding your audience
Like the time we first moved to the U.S. and had a long debate on the phone with the landlord. They wanted to rent us a condo on the first floor, and having young kids, I wanted the one on the ground floor. It wasn’t until later that I realized the first floor in the U.S. is the ground floor in Belgium.
Or the time I presented in front of the MPI International Board of Directors and used the word "household," which, with my accent, sounded more like "a-holes" and got everyone chuckling.
Ignoring those differences, though, can lead to near-disastrous situations. At one of the European sales meetings I organized for a medical device company in Lisbon, Portugal, the keynote speaker was a hotshot professor of negotiations from a renowned U.S. business school. For weeks, he refused to discuss the audience demographics with us, arguing that he had delivered his talk many times and "knew what he was doing." You get the picture and I’m sure you’ve interacted with such divas.
Well, when the day of the sales meeting came, he went up on stage and started delivering his message. Honestly, the first 10 minutes were captivating, and the entire room was listening. Then, he decided to switch to "motivational mode" and said, "So, you are at bat. You want to hit the ball hard and aim for a home run, or at least first base or second base. What do you do?" And he immediately lost the entire room! Besides the salespeople from the U.K. who are familiar with cricket, no one in the room was a native English speaker, and absolutely no one knew anything about baseball. People started to talk, to laugh, and the professor lost it and threatened to leave the stage. So much for ignoring your audience and cultural differences.
Leveraging the power of incentive travel
On the other hand, what I learned from organizing sales meetings, product launches and incentive trips in more than 50 countries is that human beings crave unique experiences. In this day and age where solitude has become one of the major diseases, bringing people together is the best cure at our disposal. This is why I’m very bullish on incentive travel, and this presents a huge opportunity for business owners who understand how to craft and execute a true incentive trip.
For me, three criteria define such programs:
Invaluable experiences: You cannot put a price on what you are experiencing. A media company once offered a brand-new LED TV to their employees, which happened to be on sale at a large retail chain. That clearly diminished the perceived value.
Contrasts in the program: For instance, one night you are attending a black-tie event at the Budapest Opera, and the next day you are in jeans driving an old Trabant car through the Hungarian countryside and prepare goulash for lunch.
Unique moments: These are experiences you will never be able to duplicate if you go back with your family or friends to the same place. For instance, going to Jaipur, India, entering the palace through the private gate of the maharajah and having lunch on the Lalique table in his private dining room is not something many people have done or will be able to do in their lives.
Without these three criteria, you are not organizing a true incentive trip and are not leveraging the power of such a tool as you should and could.
And that brings me back to you, the business owner in our industry. The opportunity that lies in front of you in terms of differentiation, positioning and growth is precisely to create unique experiences and let companies, their employees and their clients discover the world in such a memorable way that they will keep telling the stories to their grandchildren.
As Mark Twain wrote, "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
