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Preventing marketer burn-out Assignments, attitudes, and acknowledgment – if you take care of the Big Three, your marketing people will do great things.
I have been an A/E industry marketer since the early 1980s. In those 30-plus years, I have been lucky in that I never felt like I was approaching burn-out.
Why? As I said, I have been lucky. I have had a variety of assignments. I have a good attitude toward the work. The value of my effort has been acknowledged by my peers and supervisors. ❚ ❚ Variety of work. My work assignments have includ- ed strategizing, managing, writing, designing, and producing almost every kind of marketing product and plan I can think of. No one marketing activity ever took up more than 50 percent of my work time, and every week’s work included at least three or four of the possible A/E marketing-related activities. ❚ ❚ Attitude toward the work. I started in the in- dustry as a word processor in an engineering and environmental firm. The other operators would have said they typed all day. I thought of it as, Monday, water resources engineering; Tuesday, socioeconom-
ics; Wednesday, hazardous waste; Thursday, cultural resources; and Friday, an environmental “fatal flaw” study. With this perspective, every day was some- thing different, so no burn-out. “I have been lucky. I have had a variety of assignments. I have a good attitude toward the work. The value of my effort has been acknowledged by my peers and supervisors.” As a marketing manager and corporate director, I used to ask my staff what the most- and least-fa- vorite job tasks were. Then I tried, within reason, to ensure that everyone had as much of what they liked
Bernie Siben THE FAST LANE
See BERNIE SIBEN, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER August 28, 2017, ISSUE 1214
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