After my Professional Certified Marketer Certification by Tony Green

It has been a year since I passed my Professional Certified Marketer (P.C.M.) exam, therefore being certified to call myself a marketer. In the context of marketing what does the designation of a Professional Certified Marketer mean? If the words were to be dissected into their individual words you would have the words Professional, Certified, and Marketing. As for the meaning of professional and certified the definitions are straight forward. The definition of marketing is another matter. There are a plethora of definitions for marketing varying in their complexity and length.
The latest American Marketing Association definition of marketing reads “Marketing is the activity, conducted by organizations and individuals, that operates through a set of institutions for processes of creating , communicating, delivering, and exchanging marketing offering that have value to customers, clients, marketers and society at large”.
Internet Marketer Ben Hart defines marketing in his e-book Automatic Marketing as “Marketing is the process of putting bait in the water to attract leads and then putting these leads into a sifting and sorting system that will allow you to identify your most likely customers”.
Cynthia Holliday of Upright Marketing defines marketing as, “Getting the right product to the right customer at a profit to the business”.
In my view, the definition of marketing is a realization selling anything does not just happen on its own but needs a process to enable success for both parties involved. On one side is the seller your company or your employer and on the other side is the buyer who is your client or your customer. Marketing in my view is about that process on how the supply of one meets with the demand of the other. My certification has helped me to polish my tools to achieve a smooth process which in the long term ensures success for both parties. Who could argue with a win-win situation for both parties? It seems to me that one should not need to be certified to come to that common sense conclusion. In hindsight if that is what being certified means to me then perhaps I have been a marketer all along.

The path from Ex-Navy Nuke to an engineer by Tony Green

I have viewed a few blogs, on MySpace.com among other places that discusses the preparation that being an Ex-Nuke gives you before attempting to make it through an undergraduate engineering curriculum.
I think I have an interesting background to speak on this topic as I completed an engineering degree prior to participating in the Navy Nuclear program. If you are wondering why the hell I did the Nuke thing as an enlisted person after college you have a legitimate question. However, that will be the topic of another blog at some point in the future. What will say is that going through nuclear pipeline gives a wonderful background to aid any potential engineering student.
Normally most professional engineers have a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree and years of practical on-hands experience. The classroom training gives you the tools to enable you to begin learning your engineering craft while you’re on hands experience actually allows to become the trusted engineer capable of analyzing and solving real world problems.
Most of the engineering curriculum is theoretical as engineers are the ones who are trusted to designing equipment. The folks who designed many of the reactor systems that a nuke stands watch on were engineers. It is difficult to make the best design if there is not a decent level of understanding of the meaning of the theory. Nuclear training allows obtaining the on hands experience to attain that understanding. And as we all know the operators are the ones who ran the plant under the guidance of their nuclear-trained chiefs and officers.
Going aft in any nuclear powered vessel in the engine room will yield many on hand applications of these engineering principles. For example, reactor plant fresh water heat exchanger (RFPW) cools the coolant purification loop, the reactor coolant pumps and other loads. Essentially this is a shell and tube heat exchanger covered in heat transfer classes. The operator on watch is concerns that temperature that the RPFW remain within spec while the heat loads fluctuate. Another example is the process from where steam leaves the Steam Generator and goes through the Main Steam stops to the motor generators and turbine generators and exhausted steam that is created is condensed and sent back to the condensate pumps and the main feed pumps before returning the Steam Generator to start the process again. This process is covered as the Carnot cycle which covered thermodynamics courses.
Most Navy ships use an evaporator to distill sea water into drinking and potable water. The underlying principles that govern the process, distillation are covered in classes on mass transfer. The operator on watch is concerned that the water that is created is clean and the concentrated salt, the brine, goes back to the sea.
In my view, regardless of which came first, being nuclear trained or getting an engineering degree success comes down to on how you use all of your engineering training to make the best future for yourself. After going through all the rigors that are associated with being a nuke, all while serving our country; you certainly deserve it regardless of the choice you make for your college studies after leaving the Nuclear Navy.

Selling this pen again by Tony Green

I described the scenario in an earlier entry when I asked to ‘sell the pen’ question during an interview. As you may recall from my previous entry I was on a quest obtain a sales position. The question is a good question to ask because it tests a potential salesperson persistence to overcome rejection and their listening skills, key components of any successful salesperson.

When I was asked the question I failed miserably as I stumbled to describe how this was the pen that they wanted. I resolved that would never happen again reading everything I could get my hands on how to answer the question. Now that I was prepared for the question I figured that I would never be asked again.

Of course, I was asked. Since I had learned from my previous nightmare I was going to jump all over the question. I remembered that I needed to focus on the benefits and not the features and if I got an objection, naturally the interviewer would make it challenging, so I tried to convince the interviewer that a pen was what he wanted regardless of how many times he objected. Once I finished I took a breath.

After I answered the question I thought I was in good shape until the interviewer asked me had you considered whether he wanted a pen? The wind went out of my sails as clumsily tried to recover. I guess I will be asked the question until I get it right.

An Engineer After All by Tony Green

A few weeks ago I took a day off from work to attend a Comsol hands-on workshop at their Silicon Valley office in Palo Alto, Calif. Comsol, formerly Femlab, sells engineering software that models the governing equations of mass, heat and momentum transport using numerical methods to the differential equations that govern many real life processes.
I was considering going back to graduate school to pursue my Masters in Engineering and wanted to see I could really delve into engineering at a higher level.
During my Chemical Engineering undergraduate studies I was not the best student, looking back after 15 years in retrospect. It was not that I had not learned anything but there were so many things going on my in life at the time, mainly growing up, that my main focus was not where it should have been.
During the half-day session a demo version of the Comsol Multiphysics was installed on my laptop and the participants and I were able to work through an example where the voltage of was simulated on a wafer after it had been processed.
I enjoyed working through the technical topics such as Navier-Stokes equations and convective heat transfer equations with my fellow participants. I had been a while that I had used by ebgniernig background since I left my position where I was an application engineer part-time.
Of course, Comsol was not offering demos for people to tinker around with its software. The application engineer whose job was to get people to buy software following the demo period did a wonderful job of following up and giving every opportunity to see the full value of the software. For the record, I would recommend the software for anybody thinking about using it. Ultimately, I felt almost sad that I could not buy the software. The price tag was a bit pricey to buy just to fool around with it once every few months.
Currently I am trying to get into technical sales and marketing and though I have worked to prepare myself I am not sure that it is meant to be. While I explore other career options going back to my engineering roots seems to be an option I should examine closer. Maybe I am an engineer at heart after all.

The value of an M.B.A. by Tony Green

I have been reading in various publications recently about whether the value of having an MBA was not what it used to be. In the past the conventional thought was that getting an MBA was the surest route to higher management. From what I have read in magazines the degree is becoming dime a dozen and not the rite of passage that it was.


Part of the reason is that graduate school enrollment has decreased with the strong job market and universities are offering watered down programs in attempt to encourage enrollment. The value of getting an MBA, in my view, depends on what a person was seeking to get out of the earning the degree.

In my case, I had a technical background and wanted to complement my background with business knowledge. At the time I had lost my job and wanted to do something positive in the event it was a long time before I found employment.


As a veteran the GI Bill could finance the $18,000 price tag. It seemed like the logical thing to do at the time. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and as I was the sole earner for my family I could not afford to take two years off to go back to school and make my mortgage payment.
After 22 months of classes of evenings (and papers during the weekends) I completed the requirements for my MBA. During my classes I leaned a ton of useful information which proved most helpful in position eventually landed after a three month job search. As it turned out it was my first management position.


In the end I am unsure whether I am on the road to path to success that people earn MBA to achieve but ultimately I feel that I am a better professional/person as of the experience. In my estimation the value of that is much more than dimes or dollars.