Just got this picture in my email box.

That’s Charles Gerardi, VP Advertising at a major florida newspaper. He’s standing with his brand new Purple Cow. Here’s his story:

“Coming off of a very difficult year 2001 in our business (newspaper advertising sales), we needed a “rallying cry” to get focused on turning things around in 2002…and your theory of the “Positive Feedback Loop” (Survival Is Not Enough) was just the catalyst. By channeling our energies into positive recognition, we were able to get off to a fast start, making our revenue budget in January (for the first time in many months).

As the achievement momentum built throughout the year, we’d soon adopted Zooming! as our theme for the year. I began getting e-mails from many on my staff telling me about how they were zooming. (By April, we’d even had t-shirts made for everyone with “Zoom!, Zoom!, Zoom!” down the sleeve). When it was all said and done, we’d made our revenue goal in each of the 12 months of the year, and set an all-time performance record for the company. And people were loving their work!

Now for 2003, our focus had to be very different– doing the little things right so that we remained efficient and operationally sound. But this isn’t very glamorous stuff…this is doing the basics, the fundamentals well so that our foundation stayed strong. This time, we went in search of Purple Cows…the remarkable performances from amongst the herd of mundane tasks we do every day.

Well, that’s caught on too…Purple Cows are appearing everywhere…everyone is talking about them, looking for them, celebrating them.

And the excitement really took off yesterday when our new mascot– !Mooz– arrived at our offices…painted purple, of course. Found it on Ebay. Now !Mooz (Zoom! backwards… get it?) travels from department to department each day, inspiring the team to stay focused on doing the little things right to keep us on track. People have even started adding their own personal touches to her…it’s quickly becoming our roving graffiti board for good works.”

Wow. That sure made my day. Thanks, Charles… my guess is that you just drove the price of fiberglass cows on eBay way up!