Feeling human again
Published by on October 6th, 2006
The period in London from Last Sunday, working on the Podshow live event surrounding the Digital Music Awards has been and gone. Some good nights’ sleep in my own bed and I’m finally feeling human and fully productive again today. I’m just not used to being/working away from home - though I’d better get accustomed to it pretty darn quick.
More about the DMAs in my podcast I suspect, likely available tomorrow (Saturday). It was an educational experience. In a way the event was a ‘breaking ground’ moment for Podshow UK. For the UK team, it enabled us to gain one-on-one experience working with the guys who have been about 5000 miles and 8 hours away for the past months - face to face always helps nail down working relationships.
It was an odd experience for me compared to my previous incarnation in a more service-focused role for many years. Although not directly event organisation, I would have been far more involved in ensuring the client paying for the event was happy. This time, I was [part of] the client, and this shift in perspective was a little unsettling at times. I’ll get used to it, I’m sure.
What happened?
Well, we had about 8 cameras shooting constantly all day from around 10am until past midnight. Three of those were being edited on the fly to form a live video feed being broadcast on btpodshow.com and podshow.com, while the others captured pretty much everything and anything that was going on - warts and all.
My role on the day was relatively small. To some extent that meant I sometimes felt underutilised, but in retrospect it was a good thing as I’ve never experienced anything quite like this in the past. Orientation to a new evironment is a fortunate thing. The Podshow UK team is also not established enough to pull something like this together just yet, so most of the driving and organisation was accomplished by the US guys who were over here for the week. This gave us (UK) a great deal of insight into how they like to work, and I have to say for the most part it’s both a strange and wonderful dynamic within the company.
Perhaps what stands out the most internally is a very high level of mutual respect between everyone - at, and between, every level. Most individuals have long working histories in other endeavours, so that is not surprising, but this clearly carries through to the new members of the Podshow family too.
Podshow is an entirely unique animal compared to any of the companies I have worked with/for in the past. There is a distinct confidence and positive attitude to the future which naturally permeates rather than being forcefully imposed (usually ineptly) by the upper heirarchies. To some, this comes over as arrogance, and to an extent that’s a good thing when starting out to shake up traditional ideas within media. Discussions are firm, down to earth, and to the point; there’s rarely any ambiguity about ideas, attitudes or positioning.
We now start the rapid accelleration to the full release of btpodshow.com in what is a matter of weeks. The London offices are being furnished as I type and everything feels to be finally coming together. Life is suddenly going to get extremely busy once again, but it will be a far more rewarding and fulfilling time.
