Matt Elwell is the new President and CEO of The ComedySportz Theatre, and he’s promised to take readers along for the ride throughout his first 50 days in office. As a Certified Professional in Learning and Performance and a Chicago improviser for over 10 years, Matt looks to bring laughter and learning to his new position.

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The Team Drinkz were a success!  The ensemble was even commenting on it on our yahoo group!  Morale is good (and tasty!)

Unfortunately, the shot component is not really happening.  I guess our audience has outgrown shots.  Which is a shame because we're REALLY CLOSE to public transportation!

This week, we announced through our website that we were asking our fans to help us decide whether to sell Bud or Miller.  We've been with one of these companies for a long time, and the other one is doing a full-court press to get us to go exclusive.  There's lots of opinions internally, but I wanted to know what our audience thought.

So, today, the e-mail poured in!  (Get it?  Poured?)

This was so exciting to me, because I'm finally getting to talk to real fans.  They're out there! 

Randy Smock + Beer 



 

Again, busy as heck with scheduling.  Something exciting about this meeting was our review of the Launch meeting.  It's the first step toward After Action Reviews.  Here's the lesson for next time:  ask yourself what questions you'll ask in your AAR during your design face for your project.

Otherwise, you might make the mistake I made where I opened the conversation with, "what were your impressions of the event?"  And then received general, "I thought it was good" responses.  I'm all for open-ended questions, but if you leave them too open you can sometimes just get blank stares.

Do y'all remember about 10 years ago when every sales training org thought open-ended questions were the end-all-be-all.  Now, I think we're all realizing that an open-ended question works best when fronted by a specific kind of closed-ended question.  I call this the "fuse question," because when properly worded, a simple closed-ended question will light the fuse for the explosion of answers to the open-ended question that you really want to ask.  ("Explosion of answers" is trademarked by IckyCorporateSpeak, Inc.  All rights reserved.)

 

The Launch was great, but now I'm behind on getting the ensemble their schedule.  I schedule on a monthly basis using an online database used by most ComedySportzes. 

The exec team puts in the shows that need scheduling.  Then, the performers put in their availability.  Finally, I connect performers to the shows I want them to play. 

(But, they should have gotten all of it for April like yesterday, so I'm going to do that now!)

birthday