13. One Step Ahead

—Greg Downey (USOC, NBC Universal, and Coca-Cola)

It's not where you are right now that matters; it's where you want to be next. For Greg Downey, staying a step ahead of the game gave him a sizzling career in marketing and entertainment. He started out with a combination business and law degree and is now group director of entertainment at The Coca-Cola Company. If he hadn't thought ahead about where he wanted to be, his future might have been very different. "I could have ended up in some law firm writing people's wills," Greg says.

Not to say anything bad about lawyers who write wills, but Greg wanted a more exciting career than that. He always pictured himself working in marketing and doing something fun. Yet he valued the discipline of law school, so he consciously looked for a way to combine legal training with marketing and entertainment. His technique worked; in fact, he exceeded his dreams when he landed the job at Coca-Cola, the ultimate marketing company.

Careers are a lot like a game of pool. Most casual players are just thinking about the shot in front of them, just striking the cue ball and getting the next ball into the pocket. "But the really good players are thinking about the next shot," Greg says. "When you're making a shot, putting the ball in the pocket is only part of it. The other part is where the cue ball is going to end up when you put that ball in the pocket."

As Wayne Gretzky put it:

A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.

So it's important to maneuver your career so that the skills you're perfecting now will either allow you to move up in your current organization or will get you an even better offer elsewhere.

"If you're at a complete dead-end job, you should look at how to change that," Greg says. It's not enough to say, "Someday I'll have my boss's job." Really look at what people do in your division, how they add value to the company, and ask yourself where you want to be next. For Greg, those questions started in college.

Starting from Scratch

Like many young people, Greg wasn't sure what to major in during his undergraduate days. First, he considered pre-med, but he saw that he liked the business side of medicine better. He ended up with a degree in hospital administration. After some soul-searching, he noticed that a lot of politicians and leaders had law degrees—though they weren't necessarily practicing law at a firm. It's not necessarily their knowledge of the law that makes attorneys successful, but it's that they've all been through mental boot camp. They've learned problem solving and strategic thinking that trains them to stay two steps ahead of everyone else. This is something we can all do if we consciously keep our goals in mind.

It was a law school internship that jumpstarted Greg's career. Internships are very valuable, and they're not just for students. Even if you're no longer in school, an internship may still be a viable way to get you where you want to go. In Chapter 12, "Walk a Mile in Their Shoes," Isisara Bey enrolled in a college class years after she'd graduated and was out in the workforce, just so she could quality for an internship at a local television station. Alternatively, you can volunteer for a job. Many employers are disarmed when a job applicant tells them he or she will do anything just to get a foot in the door (see Kevin Noland, Chapter 6, "Be Distinct or Be Extinct"). For Greg, the internship that got his foot in the door was at Jim Kelly Enterprises, a business formed by Buffalo Bills quarterback Jim Kelly to handle his sports endorsements and charities.

Oddly enough, that internship connection came through when Greg had surgery for a shoulder injury. Coincidentally, Kelly had a similar sports injury, and they had the same doctor. Now it might sound unlikely that you get a chance to meet a professional athlete and arrange an internship, but life is full of coincidences. If we're focused on staying two steps ahead, we're much more likely to take advantage of these coincidences than someone who isn't focused. Greg had always wanted to be in sports and entertainment, so when he saw the chance, he grabbed it.

After Greg passed the New York bar exam on the first try (quite an achievement), the internship grew into a job as a vice president at Jim Kelly Enterprises. It was an amazing way to start his career, giving Greg contacts with media executives and marketers. After working there for 5 years, Greg also helped negotiate Kelly's retirement transition into a job as an NBC sports commentator. At that point, it seemed like a good time to move on. Greg had been a step ahead and thinking about his future after Kelly's retirement. During meetings with NBC, Greg met some guys who hooked him up with the marketing officer of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC). They were looking for someone to run sports marketing. This was in 1996 at the end of the Atlanta games. It was also the year Greg married.

"The day we got back from our honeymoon," Greg say, "we packed up and moved to Colorado Springs," headquarters of the Olympic Committee.

Underestimating Obstacles

In many countries, the governments pay for the training of the country's Olympic athletes—but not in the United States. The government doesn't give the Olympic athletes a penny. Instead, a congressional act gives the Olympic Committee legal oversight to license the Olympic trademark. In some circles, that kind of licensing is frowned upon as too commercial. But the way it's set up in the U.S., those licensing deals are the lifeblood of the Olympic training program.

As director of business development at the Olympic Committee, Greg worked to negotiate some new, creative marketing contracts. It was in 1996, right after the Atlanta games. Although today many of his accomplishments now seem to be everyday practices, at the time they were cutting edge—he was one step ahead in his work as well as in his career.

Corporate sponsors find the Olympic rings to be very valuable. Those linked rings represent fair play, success, and athleticism. It's a very powerful brand. But at the committee, sometimes it took a little persuading to change the minds of people who were used to doing promotions a certain way. For instance, in the lead-up to the Salt Lake City games, Greg suggested a whole new entertainment division to look at licensing rights for movies, instead of the old way of just getting television rights. Greg wrote up a business plan for it and convinced the right people. It wasn't a sea change, but it was a new idea. Greg led the effort, which was kicked off with Miracle, the movie based on the 1980 U.S. Olympic ice hockey team's victory over the Soviet Union at the Lake Placid winter games. It was a win.

Another innovation he came up with was to televise the inductions to the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame. All the other Hall of Fame inductions—such as those for professional football and baseball—televise their ceremonies. People watch them, and sponsors pay for the chance to advertise. It seemed like common sense: Here are great athletes who everyone loves; however, no one had thought of doing this before. Greg recognized an unutilized asset, the induction ceremonies, and turned it into an entertainment property. Again, Greg was a step ahead.

Gradually, Greg was getting more and more interested in pure entertainment, instead of seeing things through the Olympic Committee lens. He dreamed of going to Hollywood. After the Salt Lake City games, he used his contacts with NBC—which had sponsored the Olympics—to get introduced to some network executives. It was a great move.

Building Momentum—Creatively

His next job was as vice president of business affairs at NBC, negotiating contracts with writers, directors, and actors, as well as handling marketing issues such as branding and product placements. He worked on the Tonight Show and My Name Is Earl. His first week in Los Angeles, Greg was in a temporary home while his wife and kids stayed in Colorado Springs working on selling their house and packing. "I was sitting on my back porch looking into the Hollywood Hills and thinking, 'Holy shit, I'm a Hollywood executive now. How did this happen?'"

The way he did it was by staying a step ahead and always looking to the next career move. His network of contacts had become so extensive that as his talents grew, and he was able to get himself noticed where he wanted to go. And it was a very satisfying career move. "I loved it," Greg recalls.

This was in 2003, when NBC was experimenting with product placement and brand integration. Basically, it's the new, creative approach to advertising that may replace the old 30-second commercial spots we all like to skip over with TiVo. Now most reality shows have their advertisers pay to integrate their products into the show—for example, having bottles of Heineken stocked in the fridge for the last episode of The Real World. The old way of thinking is to just blur out any and every product label—but now the opposite has taken place. As traditional advertisements continue to wane, networks look for opportunities to integrate products into their shows—from Marquis Jet in the first season of The Apprentice (see Chapter 18, "Exercise Your Middle Brain") to the Coca-Cola banner hanging in the background as American Idol contestants sing their hearts out to millions of viewers.

The entire landscape of product placement was in the "Wild West" era at the time. "There were no rules," Greg says. "It was like the Internet world in 1998. It was just wide-open sky. Everyone was just making it up as they went along." Only a few years later, product placement has really caught on and become part of the entertainment world. But Greg was a step ahead when the old guard still thought 30-second commercials should be the norm.

Taking the Next Leap

Greg worked hard to position himself as a creative thinker, but sometimes his own good education got in the way. Once, he was sitting in a brainstorming session where the senior executive running the meeting wanted them to come up with a name for a new production division. "We wanted it to be clever," Greg recalls. At the front of the room was a whiteboard filled with ideas that everyone in the room suggested. "Every idea I came up with, the senior executive treated as if it came from the kid's table," Greg recalls. The executive actually said something like, "Maybe we can just have Greg stick to the legal responsibility of looking up the names and checking them for copyright infringements." That got a rumble of laughter from the room. "I'm sitting there thinking, 'If no one in this room knew I was a lawyer, my ideas would be treated exactly like everybody else's,'" Greg recalls. He made note of that and pondered how to fix it.

Overall, his years at NBC were great. "I loved it," Greg says. But things were changing quickly in his life—he and his wife had children to think of. While he was at NBC, Coca-Cola called: "We have this entertainment division, and we'd like you to come run it. You're the perfect fit," they told him. It's hard to say no to an offer like that, but it was also hard to leave NBC. In the end, family concerns decided it. Even though they loved L.A., Greg and his wife agreed Atlanta, Coke's headquarters, would be a better place to raise kids.

Plus, Greg is having fun working with the Coke brand, which is an American icon and a marketing powerhouse. People there feel a certain enthusiasm for the beloved brand, he says, with its bright red logo and artful ads by illustrators such as Norman Rockwell.

And Greg doesn't always tell people he's a lawyer. "Then when people find out I'm a lawyer, it ends up they're surprised. It doesn't change their opinion of me." That may be because he's an upper-level executive now; but either way, he's staying one step ahead. By knowing what we want and thinking one step ahead, we can go for our wildest dreams.