Can This Off-Site Be Saved?

The off-site immersed executives in settings that represented American luxury: a Four Seasons hotel in Manhattan, an architect's loft, a trendy restaurant on the Upper East Side. At each venue, executives heard speakers share different perspectives on what American luxury means to their respective brands: a jeweler from a chic shop in SoHo, a writer from the New Yorker, an auctioneer from Christie's.

"The immersion got them to explore the meaning of the brand," says Carolyn Lantz, executive director of brand imaging at Ford. "The point was for people to stretch their minds beyond the heritage of the car in order to come up with something that was totally different and yet completely brand appropriate."

After the brand immersion, which included designers, engineers, senior executives, and marketing people, Lantz was able to take the team's recommendations and incorporate them into the brand cycle for prototype cars, which

is under her purview. The result was the recent debut of the sleek Mark IX. Details such as the design of the seats, which resemble Charles Eames chairs, came directly from the Ford off-site.

Take-away #4: What people think is influenced by where they sit. You can't drag people to a boring, ho-hum conference center and expect anything but boring, ho-hum results. An off-site's environment -- both the physical and mental surroundings -- makes a huge difference. For a second immersion off-site that focused on exploring the Ford brand, executives gathered in a converted loft warehouse in Chicago that was furnished with IKEA furniture to create the atmosphere of simple, affordable style.

"The place that you choose is critical," says Brenda Williams of the Lab. "We've rented out football stadiums and held sessions in locker rooms for discussions about sports products.

For a meeting about a new cereal product for kids, I might plan a session at a playground. It's about finding a space that reminds people of the meeting's strategic goals and themes."

An environment is mental as well as physical. It's not just the shape or design of a room that makes people feel creative. They also need to have permission to be daring, to risk voicing outrageous ideas, says Geof Hammond, a facilitator and coach for Play, the creative agency that designed Timberland's off-site. "You have to make people feel comfortable about thinking differently and breaking the rules," he says. "You try to create a common language and shared risk around creativity."

For the Timberland event, Play's coaches warmed up attendees by having the three teams design an outdoor recreation area. Because none of the participants were civil engineers, they were able to ignore the rules of "how things should be done." That gave them the freedom to start talking about footwear with similar abandon. "When you say to a group, 'I want you to think creatively,' a lot of people shut down," Hammond says, "because they think that creativity only applies to the arts. You have to give them a safe environment to experiment in."

Take-away #5: To make it work, keep it real. Translation: Go easy on the team building, and focus on the business. Whether it's a ropes course or a game of paint ball, team building for its own sake is a waste of time. "You've got to make it real," Williams says. "Everything that you do should relate to the task at hand. The bottom line is that people are busy, and they have lives outside of work. The only way to justify taking up their time is to solve a real problem that's on their plate."

For Ford, keeping it real meant putting executives in the shoes of consumers (those without six-figure executive salaries) in order to help them understand the trade-offs involved in a car purchase. On the second day of the three-day immersion on the Ford brand, Lantz introduced her executives to the real world. "It was about 7 PM, and I told them, 'Okay, throw your wallets on the table. I want all of your credit cards too.' They thought I was insane, but they did it anyway. Then I gave them each an envelope with $50 in it and loaded them onto a bus to go to Old Navy," Lantz said. "I told them, 'You have 20 minutes to find and purchase an outfit that you have to wear tomorrow. You are busy people looking for great design at a great price. Those are Ford's customers.' "

J Mays, vice president of design at Ford (who bought a dark-blue pair of chinos, a matching shirt, and a baseball cap with his fifty bucks), said that the exercise was a powerful way to make an important point: "Everyone walked out of the store with a new appreciation for the idea that products need to be extremely well designed, but democratically priced. It brought a new sense of purpose to our process of evaluating how a car looks and functions."