Over the past week, the entire Motown team has been extremely productive, meeting with potential partners and pushing the initiative forward to meet milestones.   With everything that has been going on, its been hard for us to keep up on blog duty but I think the experiences we’ve had will make for good stories in the coming weeks.   One thing that NY has, that I haven’t found many of in other places, is motivated young visionaries.

Of course these people exist everywhere, its not just a city thing. You could be from the country and still be a thought leader, but considering we brought three new valuable members into the Motown Initiative within one week, I’m gonna tip my hat off to New York.  With that said, none of these people are actually from New York.  In fact, two of them are from Michigan (the other is from Dubai).   While they are all very motivated and experienced, most importantly I see potential for them to be true visionaries.  This is the primary requirement to be apart of our team.

To have vision is to essentially see the future.  Furthermore, it is the ability to actively work towards creating the future. In the business we’re in, we can ill afford to have people that confine their thought process to what exists today.  When we sit down to talk with team candidates about the MI project and how they can be involved, we look for a few key characteristics in conversation.

-Firstly, does the person add value to conversations. I’m not a fan of uneducated questions, and stories about what a person has done and what their friends do.  If I sit down and talk to a person for 2 hours and I remained engaged as a result of relevant questions and new ideas, then I know the person is onto something.

-Secondly, can the person create without bounds. To be a visionary constraints have to be the last thing on your mind.  If i tell you we’re creating a revolutionary way to target consumers with ads, then it should be clear that no framework exists that can help you complete the final product.  Everything is a work in progress.  You have to understand the targeting models of today but you have to then take that knowledge and create the tomorrow.

This is a really brief explaination of my point of view on vision, but these are the key characteristics I look at, the rest is just gut feeling.  This is where the phrase “Game recognizes game” originated.  Its the understanding that everyone on our team ads value and is capable of creating a better tommorow.