Once a career stretches into decades (showing my age here), there is enough perspective to see seasons. The ups and the downs. The easy money and the no money.

The noughties were a pretty good time.

We did an offsite in Baja for a global team of banking analysts, who were flown into the from around a dozen offices around the world. We were running a keynote presentation and at the coffee break in the first morning, they were all measured by tailors who came to the conference hotel. In the afternoon, there were organised activities such as water sports at the resort, while those measurements were used to design dinner jackets made to measure for every one of the 35 attendees. The jackets were worn with surf shorts and bare feet at a private island dinner that, evening with private fireworks display.

There was the IT networking business who wanted a white Xmas in July in Sydney’s Blue Mountains. They hired a refrigerated truck to drive down to the alpine ski towns, shovel snow into the refrigerated truck and drive it back to Lithgow. It was thrown around the hotel gardens for the enjoyment of B2B enterprise sales people selling routers, switches and hubs.

Or the telco wanting a beach theme and being prepared to pay the $40,000 cleaning fee to allow beach sand to be dumped into the casino ballroom function centre for the evening.

Glory Days.

Half your luck if you saw some of that action, as it is rarer today. However, there are still some stories about.

Like the SaaS business taking the entire staff to a tropical location for 3 days as a reward for hitting targets. Or the magazine publisher flying everyone down to the TV industry awards. But that particular story was fifteen years ago. Not these days. Two people go to those awards these days.

Are the glory days behind us?

How do you rally a team who remembers the glory days? How do you bring a team together who experiences todays’ conditions as far beneath what they remember.

Perhaps the trick is recalibration. Re-calibrating for the world we’re now in. I’ve seen leaders do wonderfully powerful and simple 5-slide presentations that set out the commercial reality confronting the business and the need for a new approach to spending and growth.

Leaders who do this well speak to the glorious past.

They don’t pretend it didn’t happen and isn’t fondly remembered by many in their team. They speak to it and recall its glory and splendour. They then move from the glory to the commercial context that made it possible - the thick margins, the absent competitors, the lack of an internet, the high switching costs, the asymmetry of information.

They then bring the story to the commercial context of today - contrasting those margins from back when, with the ones more readily seen these days. They list off new competitors, pressures and scrutiny that were absent in the good times yet are firmly part of the scene these days.

Which leads to the last part - a message of hope for what is possible despite it all. A plan for success on a revised scale, with different obstacles and refined targets that reflect the times.

Done well we can celebrate our glorious past, link to our current context and describe our new future. And just maybe, there lies some glory in that new world ahead.