Krug: Kick it Hard Down the Backstretch

Rita lives a great life. She has a vanilla-infused red rubber chicken that she gnaws on all day long. Only Guy Fieri finding an extra drop of barbecue sauce in his goatee could be any happier. When Rita is bored, she naps. When she’s done napping, she eats. After she eats, she lets you know that it’s time to venture outside by jamming the red rubber chicken against your leg until you relent. Occasionally, she catches a rabbit or mole in the yard and goes to town on it. She barks as if it’s her job. Her dance card is pretty full. She lives perhaps the greatest life of all – a dog’s life. But it’s pretty cool to be a human being, too. Or so I’ve been told. Human behavior is non-linear. We have moods – lots of them. We react to challenges, rising up to meet them like a Greek god or shrinking from them like wimps. We positively or negatively influence those around us with our wisdom, experience and level of passion – or purely based on the amount of caffeine we’ve ingested that morning. We have feelings and emotions. We express them appropriately and inappropriately – occasionally in the same conversation. We have good days. We have days that we’d like to forget. We have days that we wish would never end. We have days where we regret we’d ever gotten out of bed. We can attempt to accomplish something with the exact same methodology and achieve a different outcome – for better or worse. We get knocked down. We get back up. We get fired up. We wear down. And, somehow, inexplicably, there is something about this time of the year that seems to slow our roll. What is it about the fourth quarter, that final push through the fiscal year, that last hurrah, that derails us and sends us careening off our track? It’s like a gooey, invisible wall. For whatever reason, as we cross into the fourth quarter, we’ve flipped off the beast-mode switch and become Bambi. You’d swear that the calendar had some kind of crazy gravitational pull associated with it that causes this phenomenon. You could blame the anticipation and celebration of the holidays and the kinda-sorta holidays. They come in waves and don’t stop… because a holiday train don’t stop, y’all. Halloween. Thanksgiving. Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Hanukkah. Christmas. Kwanzaa. Boxing Day. New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Day. The Hangover After New Year’s Day That Makes You Take Your First Day of the New Year Off Day. It feels as if there are more holidays than regular days. And it’s taxing. OK, so that’s part of it. We staff our offices with skeleton crews. And, on too many days at the end of the quarter, our team is in the office but only in body. Their thoughts are elsewhere – perhaps playing a continuous loop of “A Christmas Story” on the VCRs of their minds. But the fourth quarter represents three critical months of each year. It’s not how you start, but how you finish. And whether you are playing with a lead or trying to rally, these three months are like the final three outs of the ninth inning. Our businesses depend on them. Projects are hanging. Our clients need our products and services. Quality doesn’t take a vacation. I know it took a halftime pep talk from Clint Eastwood a couple of years ago during the Super Bowl to convince us that this country was merely gearing up for the second half. Do we really need to pull Clint away from squinting out the window at the kids on his lawn to help us make it through the fourth quarter, too? Love the guy, but let’s give him a break. We can’t approach the year as if it ended on September 30, and the final 90 days were optional. We can’t drive the final quarter lap of the race with the cruise control set at 35. The year isn’t over until it’s over, my friend. We need to find the spirit to push through and finish like champions. We absolutely should enjoy the season. It’s a wonderful time of the year. But if you are spending more time thinking about your Halloween costume than your job, check your driver’s license. If you have a driver’s license, you’ve outgrown that phase of your life. It’s perfectly acceptable to allow the Lunestra-like effects of the tryptophan in the Thanksgiving bird into your life. But to sleep through November in sweet anticipation is simply shameful. We cannot allow the end of the year to devolve into a series of half-days and random email check-ins with a few returned phone calls mixed in to make it look like we gave a damn in December. We have to finish it up strong. We have work to do.

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As always… Stay classy. Chris Krug is president of the progressive media communications firm No Limit Agency* in Chicago. No Limit is a full-service agency whose practice focuses on strategy, brand management, creative campaigns and delivering unparalleled placement in the media. No Limit Agency works with some of the best-known brands in North America, and that’s not a coincidence. Contact Krug by calling 312-526-3996 or via email at [email protected].