In a few days, I will be attending another one of those all day management workshops. At my age, and after years of participating and leading this sort of thing, I’m more than a little jaded.
Every few years a new management guru comes out with a book and starts promoting his/her revolutionary new principles of teamwork, productivity, blah, blah, blah.
As a former marketing consultant, I admit that I participated in the madness. I’ve lead more than my share of silly workshops where 6 people were bound together in plastic wrap and forced to work together to get themselves from one side of a room to the other. And, who can forget the classic plank walking exercise?

I thought I had left all of that behind four years ago. But, now I find myself in my “I-retired-but-my-husband-decided-to-retire-too-so-now-I’m-working-again-for-the-insurance-since-we-are-too-young-for-Medicare” career.
Fast forward to next week. As the Community Relations Manager for a bookstore, my job is to build the institutional & corporate portion of our store’s business. Next week, our store manager and I will be at this all day meeting. In advance of the meeting, each of the participants must write and submit their “Six Word Memoir”. I’m sure the intention is for us to come up with a bunch of catchy business/sales oriented phrases that will inspire all of us to get out there and sell, sell, sell.
But, I decided to be honest. If they want to call it a “Memoir” then I think it needs to be something I’d be proud to have on my tombstone (If I were going to have a tombstone, that is. Which I’m not, but that is an entirely different blog post.)
Hence, the title of this blog entry – “Get a Passport, Gain the World”.

I’m not expecting that my “Six-Word Memoir” will be singled out for praise and discussion by the group leaders next week.