Graham🐝 Edwards

7 years ago · 2 min. reading time · ~10 ·

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Those heady times and the pursuit of WOW...

Those heady times and the pursuit of WOW...

During the heady times of the 80s and 90s* it seemed you just couldn't get enough of Tom Peters and his endless parade of books on leadership - In Search of Excellence, A Passion for Excellence, Thriving on Chaos, Circle of Innovation and finally my favourite,The Pursuit of WOW! (He has authored more but these are the ones I bought and have read to various degrees)

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Pursuit of

WOW!I would be hard pressed to give you specifics from the many pages after all this time but I will never forget the inherent meaning of WOW - Be it expressing astonishment or admiration or a sensational success or when you impress and excite someone greatly - It's a word that covers a lot of ground and works well with bold colours. 

WOW became the definitive emotional and qualitative measure for me; if you heard someone utter the word WOW, you were onto something**...

                   

                     The bigger the WOW, the bigger the success. 


It even worked it's way into the theme of one of our meetings where I amused the audience with "WOW stories", gifted everyone the book, and presented a teal shirt with the word WOW! emboldened on the front; we could not help but stand out as a united front of teal at that evening's baseball game and even made it onto the "Videotron".***

Why after all of these years was I reminded of The Pursuit of WOW!?

Honestly I could not tell you; maybe I was just day dreaming about those heady times of the past... although more likely somewhere in the "messed up filing system that is my brain", a small alarm went off signalling that I was not hearing WOW enough (either out of my mouth, or someone else's). 

Why did my brain do this? It is because hearing the word WOW tells you that you're "stretching yourself", reminds you to set the bar higher, motivates you to experience something new, indicates sensational success, and lets you know you are impressing and exciting someone greatly. Also, I suspect my brain wants to look back at 2016 as heady times. 

And if you decide to pursuit WOW, please don't turn it into one of those words like "awesome", "genius" or "brilliant" that are now grossly misused and trite.

The Hubble telescope is "genius"; not using two thermal sleeves on a very hot Starbuck's latte macchiato.****


iamgpe


* Were the 80s and 90s really that heady historically speaking? Probably not, but for me it was a time of great learning, experience building, and a great amount of fun & adventure.

** WOW does not replace hard data but it is an amazing lead indicator.

*** The Videotron is the large video screen at the stadium of the Toronto Blue Jays. At the time was called the SkyDome but is now the Rogers Centre. Don't ask me what team they were playing... it was a long time ago and there was beer.



Comments

Graham🐝 Edwards

7 years ago #3

#1
. Off the top of my head I think there is probably a number of things. 1) You are right about the desensitization... there is just so much stuff that it becomes such a blur that when we experience a WOW we don't even recognize it. It is also hard to even get into the detail to determine what something truly is to even appreciate it. 2) I keep thinking of the phrase "familiarity breeds contempt"... meaning that we harshly judge the WOWs and don't recognize them for what they are. 3) We may never have truly experienced a WOW so we just don't know what they are and set a benchmark to measure 4) As we experience more (aka get older) we keep raising the bar as to what a WOW is... and if we aren't exploring and discovering new people, places and things they are harder to find. This is a real great question... thanks for making me think. There are probably others and all this can be expanded on.

Graham🐝 Edwards

7 years ago #2

#1
Thanks for the comment . This is a real good question and worthy of some thought (and a future blog I suspect)

Michael D. Davis

7 years ago #1

Beer? Wow! ......maybe that's the problem Graham. People are so used to being presented with pseudo-wows that when the real thing comes along it's like having heard people crying "wolf!" for so long it makes little if any impression. Although I believe a better analogy is that of hearing a multitude of people crying "fire!" in an overcrowded building for far to long. Perhaps in this digital society we've become rather desensitized to the notion of what "Wow" really is. Your thoughts?

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