On Friday, August 23, 2019, J Curve hosted its annual consultant luncheon to honor and thank all of our employees for their hard work and devotion to our clients.
We invited Joe Turner to share his experiences with us.
Joe is an “escaped management consultant” turned author, speaker, and corporate entertainer. His amazing magic has taken him from the Hollywood Magic Castle to the London Palladium, with hundreds of corporate meetings and events in between. Even during his career in change management at a global consulting firm, Joe never abandoned his deep skills in the performing arts including music, theatre, and the illusion arts, especially sleight-of-hand magic and mentalism. He ultimately combined his performing talents with his business experience to create a new business and an exciting new career. Now Joe speaks and entertains at conferences and other events across America as well as internationally. Using magic and illusion as a tool to engage, entertain, and communicate, Joe presents keynotes and programs all over the world as “The Chief Impossibility Officer.”
So what does magic have to do with amazing client experiences?
After some pretty cool magic tricks involving cards, things disappearing and re-appearing, Joe got down to business and helped us connect the concepts we perceive as “magic” on a stage to amazing client experiences.
He presented five kinds of magical categories and their parallel business competencies summarized below:
Magical Category → Business Competency
- Talent: Overt demonstration of skill → Expertise
- Science: Unexpected result of natural law → Process
- Magic: Apparent contradiction of natural law → Empowerment
- Contact: Apparent sharing between 2 minds → Communication
- Vision: Seeing at a physical or temporal distance → Foresight
Joe had many great examples of the parallels between the categories including this story about “empowerment”:
Joe shared a story about one of his visits to the Delta Sky Club before a flight. Hoping to grab a peanut butter or chocolate chip cookie on his way to the gate, he was disappointed to find new lemon cookies instead of his old standbys – but upon eating the new lemon cookies, he loved them! He tweeted his love of the new cookies. (Joe also shared that he traveled often but was not anybody special from Delta’s perspective.) And that’s where he thought it would all end: this is the pattern he expected… the natural law.
But it didn’t end there! He quickly received a follow-up note thanking him and asking him what prompted his flight, upon which he told them he was traveling to speak at a conference. Again, he thought the experience would end there. But wait… As he was about to speak at the conference, he was called to the lobby of the hotel where a Delta flight attendant had brought him 3 dozen lemon cookies on a platter and thanked him for his business.
The moral of the story: Delta had empowered its employees to create an experience that was entirely unexpected (i.e., did not follow the nature law of business). That unexpected experience cost virtually nothing but created a customer for life and a positive experience that has been shared by Joe hundreds of times in his presentations.
Having a magician speak to our consultants on translating magic to business was likely an unexpected experience as well but was both entertaining and informative. We are thankful for our consultants and look forward to ongoing collaboration with our consultants and clients.
Information provided is courtesy of http://www.turnermagic.com
J Curve encourages our employees to continuously strive to improve their value by supporting continued professional education tailored to their specific areas of interest. Events such as the Annual Consultant Luncheon encourage consultants to also expand and leverage their professional network through the resources and knowledge of other J Curve professionals.
J Curve, LLC, provides experienced accounting, finance and audit professionals for projects to enable financial leaders to fulfill important business initiatives.
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