Can This Off-Site Be Saved?

For International Truck and Engine Corp., a Chicago-based manufacturer of tractor trailers and heavy-duty trucks, a soul-searching session around the company's objectives led senior executives to rethink their plans for a traditional off-site. The company had approached Jack Morton Worldwide, a New York - based event-production company, with two goals: to move the selling process online and simultaneously to introduce its newest truck model to its salespeople and consumers. The company hoped that pairing these two objectives would result in a more customer-driven sales approach. Executives planned to introduce the changes at a huge product-launch show for the company's dealers and customers. The experts at Jack Morton talked them out of it. "The more we spoke with them, the more it became clear that one event wasn't going to cut it," says Elaine Honomichl, a regional director of learning and digital media at Jack Morton. "They needed to educate their dealers before the consumers, and, even more important, they needed buy in from their salespeople. This had to be a program that helped them sell, not a decree from above about how to do their jobs."

So leading up to the product launch, Jack Morton designed a series of face-to-face training sessions based on focus groups with dealers. The training included individual homework kits of work to be done before the in-person sessions, as well as follow-up email questionnaires and a CD-ROM. All told, the company ran two-and-a-half-day sessions for 13 weeks in order to reach all of the dealers. At the end of the training, 90% of the dealers said that they not only understood the benefits to consumers of the new truck, but that they were excited about the new sales approach.

Take-away #2: To get the right results, invite the right people. And the "right people" are not always the folks with big titles and corner offices. The attendee list has to include the people on the front lines who actually get the work done, whether they are product designers, engineers, accountants, or vice presidents who can champion an idea through the bureaucracy.

In 1999, the U.S. Mint developed an initiative to get all of the agency's employees to think strategically about the business. And the Mint's leaders decided to advance that goal by holding an off-site. But instead of inviting just the most powerful people, or even handpicking a roster, organizers asked agency employees to apply to attend. They issued a challenge to the Mint's six locations: This meeting is going to be a crucible of innovation. If you want to be part of it, tell us why, and tell us what you'll do with what you learn. More than 150 people applied for 25 slots, and the resulting mix of people included production managers, accountants, and a custodian.

"The application process generated a lot of excitement and momentum and set the stage for follow-up," says Janet Clement, organization development manager at the Mint. "The people who were chosen felt elite, and they also felt that they had a responsibility to represent those who couldn't attend. They came ready to roll up their sleeves and work."

Part of that work included designing a graphic of all of the steps that go into minting a coin, a complex process that few of the individual employees understood from start to finish. Attendees also went through improvisation sessions with a theater company, an exercise designed to help them think about ways to create and improvise on the job. "It was key to invite people from all walks of the company so that employees would feel that we were giving permission to everyone to be creative in their jobs, not just the senior managers," Clement says.

At Timberland's off-site, having suppliers and vendors in the same room meant saving months of development time. Suggestions for new materials could be vetted by those who would have to develop them; new ideas for design could be bolstered or shot down by the engineers who would have to execute them. "We were able to have discussions in real time that would've taken us six months to figure out otherwise," Clark says. "We came up with real product plans that were commercially viable, solely because we had the right people in the room."

Take-away #3: If you want mind-blowing results, expose people to mind-blowing ideas. Especially ideas from outside your company and industry. The most memorable off-sites force people to think about problems from different perspectives, which means feeding them content that is more stimulating than a 500-slide PowerPoint presentation.

Last year, Ford Motor Co. set up an unconventional off-site to explore the challenges facing the Lincoln brand. The brand had always been a domestic one, and the company wanted the option to expand overseas in the future but still retain a distinct sense of "American luxury." At the same time, Lincoln's consumer base was aging, and the company wanted to lower the average age of its customer by about 15 years. That meant wrestling with a difficult marketing question: How do you update and redefine a brand without losing its essence?