As an agency who’s built our business around gathering your people together in a meaningful way, we hold the original Thanksgiving meeting between the Pilgrims and Native Americans in pretty high regard. Talk about connecting your people and growing your corn recipes…
Yes, Thanksgiving was the original American event – a transformative live experience featuring a can’t-miss keynote from William Bradford and a rousing (albiet horrifying) game of “throw the pigskin”.
Just think of that ongoing, post-event impact! CPG uses internal communications strategies to keep the engagement going long after the event finishes, but those Pilgrims managed to get their event turned into a national holiday.
Pretty impressive. Never mind the scurvy, bears and pretty much instant death waiting behind every bushel of trees, those Pilgrims wore obnoxious hats without fear of Instagram backlash and stood outside Plymouth with the “Occupy New World” signs that our country would be built upon.
Yes, Thanksgiving (or Black Friday Eve as it’s now called) is a special time to send tweets and email blasts to friends, coworkers and clients telling them what you’re thankful for — or, if you’re old fashioned – just mention them to family members at Thursday’s dinner.
Personally, I prefer to write a blog that forces people to read what I’m thankful for. And on that note…
5 Things I’m Thankful For This Thanksgiving:
1. Cheez-its
Let’s just get this one out of the way. I’m not sure how they pack all that cheesy goodness into every bite (and their commercials seem to purposely avoid taking this subject seriously) but I appreciate each grubby handful of those delicious little treats.
2. Company Culture
I could just call this one “CPG”, but I’d rather dive into a specific trait that makes this place work for me, not just me for it. More than just Beer Cart Fridays (yep – that’s a thing – see pic below), culture is the idea of living into the values bestowed upon the company by leaders who are actively creating an environment of integrity, passion, curiousity and more. We even have a Values Team which is a collection of team members from various departments who gather once a month to plan engagements that help us lean into our goals to have curiousity, integrity, growth, passion, communication and, of course, fun. For an agency in its 30’s, this start-up mentality helps fuel our culture and feed our creative.
3. Coworkers
(Yes, I’m
also worried that all of these will start with “C”, but let’s just see what happens.) Another core element of a strong culture, my coworkers are a bunch of rowdy, intelligent hustlers who enter the brainstorm arena with a new idea and a challenging opinion every time. And it’s why this place works. We don’t exchange pleasantries at CPG out of politeness. We don’t defer to weather chatter when cornered at the office. Each of us is invested in the other and we move forward in each endeavor as a team – through successes and failures – which, while soppy, is the only way I want to work.
4. Turducken
Those Pilgrims would be proud to see how far we’ve come as a nation since squash, corn and twigs headlined the original feast. Now culinary innovation has led us to shove birds inside of birds inside of birds. America. The land of possibility. If you haven’t had the chance to partake in the roast with the most, I recommend this chicken inside a duck inside a turkey combination – to my heart-healthy compadres. Plus, this always pairs well with a malbec poured into a syrah poured into a pinot noir.
5. CPGina
(Wow, they almost all
were “C” words.) CPGina is my desk plant. And while I spend my days trying to grow business for CPG, in the background I’m feverishly just trying to grow my plant. Thanks to the help and guidance of my green-thumbed desk neighbor, Vickie Fricke (yes, her name rhymes), we have grown this fledgling orphan into a confident, unofficial mascot of the company.
And for this, I am thankful.
Be Thankful This Holiday Season
So, that’s what it’s all about, folks. All that hard work around harvesting food and cultivating a nation all those moons ago has led me to be raised in a land where turduckens are a thing and people name their plants.
I hope you’re finding special little aspects of your life to be thankful for this holiday season. Sometimes we need a holiday to help spark the conversation around what we’ve been blessed with this year. Feel free to comment below to let us know what you’re thankful for this Thursday, and of course, Happy Thanksgiving!
As a special treat, check out this Turkey Day comic (click to enhance) that we created to take you through the Thanksgiving Journey (a playful nod to our Attendee Journey maps that we create for client communications and events):
