RESUME: LONELY PLANET
- The best bit: working with authors, plus a bit of authoring of my own.
- The stuff I did the longest: New Zealand travel and guidebooks.
- What they actually hired me for: Pacific Island travel stuff.
- Leading a team: creativity, fun (also see the "how").
- Commissioning content from cool people, such as Wizards, Booker-Prize and Pulitzer winners, rock gods, poets, circus performers, politicians/Rastafarians and Knights of the Realm.
- Science nerdery & number crunching: new ways of doing finances, detective work. Helping non-scientists with sciencey things.
- Creating user-friendly tools and "dashboards" to make people's jobs easier, and help them devote time to the important stuff, not the number crunching
- Financial/commercial whizzery: pioneering treatment for combining content, modelling costs/profits from different content systems, break-even calculations (and philosophy), changing cycle (involving actual maths). Cultural stuff too: changing the way commissioning editors treated commercial decisions.
- Disaster management & problem solving
- Working with national and regional tourism organisations in New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, Australia and Asia.
- On the organising committee for LP soccer.
- Height of the Eiffel Tower, and assorted other mythbusting
- Lots of Media work (TV, radio, print), mostly for New Zealand, Australia and Pacific travel stories.
- Resource/workload modelling and scheduling, for teams that don't fit the mould (commissioning editors; authors)
- Clever number crunching: Using market research, competitive information, destination data, to find out what's really happening, then move from that to what we should be doing: Australian domestic travel, Pacific "drop in" guides, NZ "island" guides.
- Finding new ways of creating and reusing content: "drop in" guides and guidebook cascades on wonky, alternating cycles
- Working with Lonely Planet China
- Working on Trade & Reference titles such as travel literature, travel reference, coffee-table books and other fun projects.
