My trip to Heather Hamilton's hideout.... and her intellectual catalysts.

The last time I wrote anything that started with the words .... "My trip to ..." I was at a single digit age and that sentence would end with the words - Zoo. Fast forward a couple of decades forward and starting a sentence with those words - still brings the same set of emotions - Excitement, anxiety and thrill of seeing a celebrity in their natural habitat.

So my trip to Heather Hamilton's hideout started with the pretext of work (which is going to be the central theme of another blog-post) but ended up being frequent reference to the intellectual-catalysts that she had stored in her lil office space. (The intellectual catalysts in the normal world would go by the name of Malibu and Jack Daniels - but I digress yet again.) Anyways it was exciting to finally meet her after almost a year of starting to "communicate" with her on various other communication channels. Shez a lot more fun in person (and I am sure more with some intellectual catalysts) - but at the same time the theme of the conversation did not deviate too much from marketing fundamentals, communication metrics and the core competencies at Microsoft. Yes she still has her USC champions flag proudly displayed.

While I have played my evangelist role for her blog with many of my friends and 2 of them already have got hires. Yes they did email her to get the initial help - and it pains me to no end that they did not turn around to tell her about their successful hires. Networking 101 ppl - if you are given a brick to build a bridge - cement it - and you will get another! Heather did shrug it off with a "Yah - thats normal" attitude - I cant do that. Not responding to ppl who helped you after a successful event is just plain rude, wrong and unsustainable. When they say you work hard at becoming Lucky - they did not lie.

Anyways the scheduled meeting was overshot by by 50% - we had come up with some standard agreements about my group - which will be the central theme of my next post. And yes - I did manage to sneak in a future invite to her habitat for some extended use of them intellectual catalysts.

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 15, 2005
  So I looked at we do have one down as coming from the blog. The other, I put down as a hire from professional networking (I thikn because hshe mentioned that she got to me by way of you), which isn't that different from blogging. I just figure that if I am doing my job right, they are seeing me and hearing me in multiple different places. So I don't worry about it too much.
  
  Anyway, thanks for the nice words. I didn't realize that you could see the Malibu from where you were sitting ; ) Many a bottle of wine has been finished in my office. It's that whole work hard/play hard thing. I can't even open the bottle of jack..just the smell makes me all gaggy. ; )
  
  You are more fun in person too! Good luck with your event tonight!
• Anonymous
  September 15, 2005
  Yah the Malibu was hidden wasnt it (an indication that it was a favorite ;) )
  
  but u forget I stole more than a couple of glances at that stash of goodies :)