Face The Music puts the fun in team, organizational and leadership development work. We provide a safe, supportive and comfortable environment for creativity, risk taking and growth by structuring and channeling client energy in positive ways. Using our unique approach we help client teams to:
Express their views, learn about each other, speak the truth and do problem-solving and team building through song lyrics and music.
Gain insight on team and organizational issues through music performance.
Solve complex business challenges using a fun orientation coupled with expertise in consulting, organizational development and music.
As a result, our clients feel inspired, have greater capability for personal and organizational transformation and are more able to take action and achieve real results.
Our culture and how we manage ourselves parallels our approach with clients. We provide an environment that is safe, secure and prosperous. Our success depends on our client's success and results. Our effectiveness is driven by our values and capabilities, which include:
Being fun, yet focused and succinct
Team work
Holding high standards for O.D. work and music
Pushing horizons in terms of company goals, personal goals and capabilities
Coaching one another toward excellence
Innovation and creativity
Respect and trust
We also seek to support others outside our immediate client/employee sphere of focus - including community organizations that are aligned with our values.
Face The Music History
In April 1999, Mitch Ditkoff called together a few friends corporate trainers, organizational development consultants, and musicians to discuss an idea of taking blues writing to our clients and beyond in the corporate world. Out of this initial meeting, Paul Kwiecinski, an OD consultant, bass player and singer, Paul Duffy, keyboardist and bandleader, and Mitch, an innovation and creative thinking trainer, formed Face The Music to develop the idea. In July of 1999, FTM did their first interactive blues program with GE in at their Crotenville, NY campus, and FTM was off and running.
The seeds of the FTM "technology" go back to the roots of the blues men and women ad libbing and performing blues songs about work and life. Paul and his brother Dave have been enrolling fellow party goers into expressing their blues through song since the 1970's, and Paul brought it along to the word of organizational development when he became a consultant in 1994, playing at conferences like KCC and MetaSystem Consulting Group training events. About 1997, Paul began using drum circle exercises in corporate teambuilding programs, inspired by Arthur Hull, to get the benefits of music, cooperation, listening, etc. when working with teams. When preparing for a teambuilding session in Paris in 1998, he decided to take his guitar and do the ol' blues ad lib stuff with the group there. It was a big hit with the French, but it remained an isolated incident.
A few months later, Mitch was at a blues gig one night, when (as he tells it), it hit him! We could take this blues approach and make it into a regular offering for our clients to express and go beyond their blues. After a couple of months of high energy brainstorming and design, Face The Music put the word out and got the aforementioned first gig with GE at the corporate training center in Crotenville. It was an international group of about 75 people. The original FTM band members were: Ken McGloin guitar, Mindy Jostyn vocals & harmonica, Pat Thorney vocals, T. Xiques drums, Denny Snyder guitar, Paul Duffy keyboards, Mitch Ditkoff MC, Paul Kwiecinski bass.
In 2001, Ken McGloin became FTM Musical Director. Since then FTM has done over 110 events in the US, Canada and Europe, with clients like GE, Pfizer, Bank of America, Ernst & Young, General Mills, Lucent, Bristol-Myers Squibb, JPMorganChase, Astrazeneca, Washington Mutual, Federated Department Stores, Cargill, Panasonic, Allstate, Sanofi-Aventis, and on and on…FTM clients have used the blues to have fun, identify their issues, get to know each other, catch a new attitude toward their situations, and to get inspired to get into action about making a difference in creating the workplace that they want to have.
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