Proactive vs Reactive

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak at a Pecha Kucha in Greenville. This is a speaking format where each speaker gets a total of 20 slides for 20 seconds each and they have to time their presentation to fit. It was much hard to do than I though it would be. (There is a video of my presentation at the bottom of this post if you're interested. My topic was Business Networking.)

One of my friends, Olivier Blanchard, was speaking as well. While there, I gave him one of my Wolff KAI 5220's to take home to his wife as a gift. This is what he said about them on Twitter.com:


Okay...so he was one number off. Shortly after, he received this note from one of Fiskars friendly Fisk-a-teers:


He then wrote back and said:


To which she replied:


To which I responded:

and:


Well, I waited and waited. Two weeks to be exact, and guess what, no shears. So I made good on my promise and bought a Fiskars Razor Edged Shear, sent it to Olivier with some testing cloth, and then put this on Twitter:


So far no reply from either, but I've heard that a third party that helps Fiskars with some of their online marketing has taken it upon himself to see that some shears are sent.

So why am I writing this to you? To show how important it is to DO what you SAY you are going to do! Now don't get me wrong. I think Fiskars is an excellent company and they have a dynamite selection of craft shears. The Fiskars Razor Edged shears I sent Olivier are, in my opinion, a fine set of shears that cuts well with a good edge life. The problem here is that Fiskars didn't follow through and now they are in the reactive mode instead of the proactive sphere!

When you tell a potential customer (or promoter in Olivier's case) that you are going to do something, DO IT!!! Being proactive feels great! Being reactive feels awful! I'll let you know how things shake out after Olivier compares the two shears on his blog.




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