Team Building Corporate and Social Responsibility

Polycom Take-Away Can’t Be Beat!

February 24, 2010 12:30 PM
I was honored to facilitate yet another event into the fantastic on Feb 1st and 3rd, at the Sheraton Harbor Island, San Diego. A special client of mine since 2008, unified communications portfolio giant, Polycom , matched its marketplace renewal by enlisting the acumen and energy of our unique team. A renewed force of customer-driven sales and marketers under veteran strategist, EVP Andy Miller, along with strategic alliance partners Microsoft, Cisco and Siemens, and others, gathered to make a beautiful noise from four Theaters of the world: North America, APAC, EMEA and CALA.

Toward the end of our first program for Polycom, after reminding the sea of nearly 850 participants that the cool drums weren’t part of the company’s give-away, a man approached me, cowered in humility, hands in pockets. He’d been in attendance a couple of years before, when a significant number of conference-goers mistook our drums for swag. He was again wowed by his experience with us.

He described in colorful detail how, back in 2008, so inspired, he excitedly grabbed a djembe, cut out the doors, ran up to his room, and immediately packed it to go home with him. He pulled out a picture of his two-year old, “my little angel,” he called her. I was enthralled. “I couldn’t wait to get home and teach her what you taught me during the program—how you put your hands on the drum, how you rumbled. Like me, she was amazed by it, absolutely loves the music!”

Nevermind he’d taken one of my drums, hearing that made me want to give him another! He went on to tell me how the djembe has become a means he and his wife use to teach his little one discipline. “We give it to her when she’s well-behaved, and take it away when she’s not.”

The drum means so much to me. It’s the perfect tool to bring people together in unison, from their hearts, purely expressing, connecting with joy. I love that first-rate companies like Polycom understand—or even just want to experience time and again, what Drum Cafe has to offer their corporations. And, with the magical drum, this man’s little girl, at age two, learned to take responsibility for her actions. Apparently Daddy had, too.

He didn’t come up to entertain me or excite me with story of the passion he’d brought home to his family; he needed to get into integrity about taking something that—he later found out—didn’t belong to him. In good faith, Polycom had long ago paid Drum Cafe for the missing drums, apologizing for the mistake. So, I wouldn’t accept his money or the amends he felt he needed to make. What an example of partnering for end-to-end communications! Because of Polycom, Drum Cafe, and an inspired introspective man profoundly affected by the power of this instrument, integrity lives.

Plus, there’s a spunky Little Angel out there that just might grow up to be a drummer. Full, full circle.

Living in integrity,

Natalie Spiro

Posted by Natalie Spiro at February 24, 2010 12:30 PM

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