The Business Girl's Guide to Halloween Parties

Thanks to Jazz Age content marketing, business girls never had to sweat over throwing a nifty Halloween blow. The Bogie Book showed 'em how.

Each October from 1912 and 1926, paper party-goods maker The Dennison Paper Company published The Bogie Book to inspire busy women. (The company skipped a 1918 edition. Halloween was cancelled that year, because the nation was gripped by the Spanish Flu.)

In the 1925 edition, the two-page article, "The Business Girl's Halloween Party," offered all the instructions to plan your blow: 

• Buy a Dennison Halloween "lunch set," complete with a crepe paper tablecloth, paper plates and paper napkins. 
• Buy Dennison crepe paper sashes for the guys, headbands for the dolls.
• Make place cards and a table centerpiece from cardboard and Dennison crepe paper; a chandelier from wire and Dennison crepe paper; and window curtains and valances from Dennison crepe paper.
• Decorate the rest of the room with black cat cardboard cutouts from Dennison. 
• For appetizers, serve pumpkin doughnuts wrapped in Dennison crepe paper; fruit cocktail in a Dennison paper cup wrapped in Dennison crepe paper; candy wrapped in Dennison crepe paper; and apples topped with Dennison crepe paper goblins' hats.
• Keep the main course simple: chicken patties and potato chips. Serve ice cream, cake and coffee for desert. 
• Prepare everything a day in advance, so you can assemble it quickly when you get home from work.

As Dennison was a family-friendly firm, no instructions were included for hiding the hooch (illegal due to the Prohibition).

3 Must-Haves for Every Meeting Planner

"Meeting people in real life remains the most effective way to build a successful business," says Inc. columnist Helene Olen.

But how do you build a successful meeting?

Olen thinks these three tools are essential:

Influencers. Attendees need to know they'll encounter up-and-comers at your event. Before they'll register, they'll ask, "Is this a network I can reach out to in the future?"

Underprogramming. Elbow-rubbing with influencers won't happen if you overprogram your meeting. Be sure to carve out generous breaks.

Starter packages. If you attract influencers, it's guaranteed: you'll be suitcased by entrepreneurs who believe they can't afford your event—nor afford to skip it. So offer price options for the tight-fisted.

Don't Blame the Media

It isn't the medium that lacks depth, it's the artist.

Andrew Wyeth

Dead artist's and writers' homes intrigue us the way their unfinished works do: both are like ancient ruins asking for completion.

I just had the pleasure of touring one artist's home, Andrew Wyeth's, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Wyeth worked in his studio there for 68 years, completing (and abandoning) thousands of drawings and paintings.

Although he used other media, Wyeth mastered tempera, the favorite of Renaissance artists like Botticelli and Raphael. It's made by mixing dry pigment and egg yoke.

Wyeth preferred tempera because it's durable.

"There is something incredibly lasting about the material, like an Egyptian mummy, a marvelous beehive or hornet's nest," he once told a critic. "The medium itself is a very lasting one, too, because the pure method of the dry pigments and egg yolk is terrifically sticky. Try to rub egg off of a plate when it is dry. It's tough. It takes tempera about six months or more to dry and then you can actually take a scrubbing brush to it and you won't be able to rub off that final hardness."

But Wyeth was careful to distinguish the medium's force from the artist's.

"My temperas are very broadly painted in the beginning. Then I tighten down on them. If you get the design and the shape of the thing you want to paint, you can go on and on. The only limitation is yourself. I have always argued this is true with any medium. I have had people say to me, 'Why do you waste your time with watercolor, it's such a light medium, a fragile medium. It lacks depth.'Well, it isn't the medium that lacks depth, it's the artist. You can never blame the medium."

As in politics, when up against our limits, it's easy in creative pursuits to blame the media. 

I hear blame every week in the drawing class I attend. Charcoal sucks. Conté sucks. Graphite sucks. Ink sucks. This paper sucks.

But the limits are in ourselves.

You don't control your chosen medium.

You surrender to it.

But You Must Act

Fantasy football will cost employers $16.8 billion in lost wages this season, according to Challenger.

Workers waste a ton of time not only during football season, but year round.

According to a study by GetVoIP, 80% of workers waste some time every day; and 20% waste one-third or more of each day.

Self-employment makes any sort of time-wasting unpalatable to me (I don't want to wind up living under a bridge).

But far worse-tasting is unconscious procrastination.

Procrastination comes in two varieties: conscious (you play fantasy football, instead of phoning customers) and unconscious (you answer yesterday's emails, instead of writing a strategic plan).

The former is foolish; the latter, fatal.

If you're addicted to unconscious procrastination, ask yourself: Am I too self assured?

That was Civil War General George McClellan's problem.

As you'll recall from your history lessons, Abe Lincoln put McClellan in charge of the Union army in July 1861 after the disaster at Bull Run. McClellan then took nine months to build up his army, swelling it to an immense size—121,500 men (at the time, the largest army ever assembled by a nation).

The power went to McClellan's head. He mistook the office he'd been handed for an elected one, and began to behave as if he had a public mandate. He started seeing himself as God's instrument, chosen by Divine Providence to save his country, and even flirted with idea of dictatorship—an idea that flourished, because he surrounded himself with "Yes Men." And he held Lincoln in open contempt, calling him a "baboon" and "the original Gorilla."

But McClellan failed to use his immense army to win a victory of any size over the Confederates and end the war.

Instead, he focused on parades, supplies, campgrounds and paperwork.

He procrastinated.

An impatient Lincoln soon would fire him; but before he did, Lincoln sent McClellan a now-famous telegram that read:

Once more, let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act. 

Are you too self-assured?

Leave a Trail

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where
there is no path and leave a trail.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dreamforce, "four epic days that fly by, but stay with you forever," concluded yesterday in San Francisco.

Salesforce once again pulled out all the stops to educate, entertain and evangelize an eager crowd of more than 150,000 users.

"Dreamforce epitomizes a new breed of user conference," says Emily He on the DoubleDutch blog.

That new breed of conference "looks beyond the horizon to build a community that focuses on honoring your customers’ and prospects’ needs and desires," He says.

Honoring attendees' desires means delivering "all of the content they care about, whether it involves your solution or not."

How many corporate event producers look past their company's present horizon?

Not many.

I know one major cloud computing company that nearly scrapped its mammoth annual event, "because we have nothing new to say."

If you lack marketing imagination, don't give up the ship. Take direction from trailblazers like Salesforce, He suggests:

Feature diverse speakers. "Think beyond your industry’s usual guest list," He says. "Your attendees care about more than their jobs, and they want to hear from people who’ll change the way they think about the world at large."

Elevate attendee engagement. Deliver a memorable experience through parties and concerts. Facilitate workshops and small gatherings throughout your event. Provide an app that lets attendees make impromptu plans to meet up and amplify their experiences through social media.

Exploit your content. Videotape the best presentations and target people unable to attend the live event. Curate event content as e-books and blog posts. Ask top presenters to join you on a road show. "While a stellar live event can be a large investment, it can be extremely effective in fueling your pipeline," He says. "A single successful event, if done right, can power your entire marketing strategy for the year to come."