MFA Not MBA—The Creative Side Of Business

If I had a dollar for every time I heard the word e-commerce during UCLA Anderson's second quarter forecast I would have left the room a lot richer. E-commerce hasn't just changed how we get our cat litter and clothing, it's also reworking cities and that's about to change even more. With both Walmart and Amazon offering one day shipping, this creates a need for more warehouses closer to urban areas. I wonder if I'm the only one having flashbacks to Kozmo.com and the early promise of immediate delivery.

Industrial real estate used for e-commerce is different than other industrial real estate. There is a lot more coming and going from the space and a need for more parking. This may change in the future as robots start to handle more of the package gathering and shipping but for now, e-commerce is people-driven at every turn.

So if cities need warehouses, the challenge facing developers is to make them palatable to the community. This means making warehouses look a little more like creative office space and also making them better places to work. Sprawling boxy warehouses surrounded by acres of parking lots are not city-friendly. While multistory warehouses are the norm in other countries, it hasn't hit most U.S. cities yet. According to the panelists at the UCLA Anderson forecast, it's coming, and soon.

Earlier this week, Diana Olick ran an interesting piece on the rise of more cold storage. Despite the fact that Amazon has made big inroads into the food world through its purchase of Whole Foods, groceries only represent a fraction of e-commerce. While plenty of retail stores are closing down and a smattering of fast casual restaurants are also shrinking, for the most part food has remained immune so far. However as Uber Eats and Postmates take over that may shift.

Driving to the conference, I listened to an interview with Tyga on the radio. The interview asked if he cooks. He said no but said he loves to eat and waxed rhapsodically about Mr. Chow's being available on Postmates. I found this particularly interesting since Mr. Chow's has long been a place that celebs went to see and be seen. If young rappers are essentially "showrooming" their food, visiting restaurants occasionally and ordering the food at home more frequently (in addition to using services like Plated and Blue Apron), we may be in the midst of the next wave of industrial — the e-commerce kitchen.

At Propmodo's MetaTrends event, I picked up a copy of their MetaTrends publication. The publication is a roundup of their most important real estate trends. One article that I found particularly interesting was Antony Slumber's piece on #SpaceAsAService in commercial real estate.

The piece (read online here) chronicles the shift in commercial real estate from agents being a provider of space to providing spaces with a menu of services. Some of the biggest commercial real estate companies from CBRE to Tishman Speyer are aware that today's tenant is looking for more than just keys to an empty space. Tenants now want spaces that are both turnkey and flexible and that above all are irresistible to people working in the spaces. These types of services range from concierge-style support to seasonable art leases to community development, catering, and more.

Often trends move from residential real estate to commercial real estate but this may be one in which commercial real estate is leading the way. The current nascent trend of co-living has emerged from coworking. The two prioritize service over space, making revenue not just through a dollar per square foot rate but through a wide variety of offerings. Large apartment buildings are experimenting with this through the adoption of the Hello, Alfred platform and other platforms. Increasingly apartment building apps aren't just a way to pay rent or schedule maintenance, they are a portal to an entire ecosystem of events, services, and amenities to make the residential living experience more complete.

Part of a larger project I’m working on, a meditation on the nature of home...

If we write about the American Dream of home ownership we have to start at the beginning, not of exploration, but of community, of the thing that is sellable. The dream of a life that centers not on a town square or a plot of land but on the structure and the street.

The American Dream as a post-war concept speaks in many ways not to community but to individuality. The nuclear family is a separate unit, held away from the whole. The American Dream is about the intrinsic “mine-ness” of a home of one’s own. A thing that cannot be taken or usurped.  The home becomes the illusion of being separate or independent within society. Ownership bequeaths safety, a sense of having a fortress, of having a place. it is the most simple and yet the most elevated need and when we market, we market more than the home, we market the emotion. 

The only innovation left, when we consider housing, is to make it truly mutable (perhaps using virtual reality) or truly mobile. Technology is moving in both directions. Culturally the obsession with tiny homes and living in vans is part of this, it’s really a prelude to the idea that home isn’t grounded in physical place anymore.

Posted first on LinkedIn after attending two conferences where technology and innovation were the main focus.

We know privacy is gone; we just don’t like to think about it. We hand over little bits of our lives to major corporations without much consideration. In fact we pay great sums of money for the opportunity to do so. We ignore terms of service and we funnel every last bit of ourselves into the cloud.

When it works right, it’s brilliant. Things are seamless. Food arrives nearly instantly, our homes seem to understand our tastes and habits almost better than we do. It’s pleasant to coast in a cloud-based world rather than constantly transferring information from here to there.

My week in New York began at Hacker Connect but where it really began of course was in traveling to NYC where my information traveled with me. I’m old enough to remember pre-printed tickets and reservations. Now I just slide a card in and off my data goes, securing me a smooth transition at all my points of contact.  

I began to re-think that ease though with Hacker Connect’s first presentation by Molly Sauter, who researches and writes about privacy and what can go wrong. As she explained it, when things go wrong, they can really go wrong. She told the story of how a pushed update to Nest left thousands of Nest users without heat in the middle of a cold winter night. That example is fairly tame compared to what could happen when our appliances, our home security, our bank accounts, and our medical records are all connected through the cloud.

Molly explained how Amazon Echo, Samsung Family Hub, Google Home etc. are also listening devices. Samsung hub takes a picture of your fridge which is great to remind you if you still have eggs at home but could reveal who is on what medication etc. and could also “tell on you” to an insurance company. Data on you is passed on to the company who created the device. And yet we treat these devices like family as they build relationships with us through our queries.

No cloud is an impenetrable fortress, but there’s also little likelihood that we will stop using these things. It’s simply too easy. I’m reading a book called Head in the Cloud which explains why it’s important to still know things. It’s almost amazing that a book promoting personal knowledge (versus easy access to a browser) has to be written, but this is where we are.  

In New York, there is citywide wifi. As much as the idea of always being connected sounds awesome after all the years I spent searching for wifi connections when traveling. I wonder how much data is being gathered and how it is being used. Uber recently published its data as a service for urban planning. A lot of good can be done with that data, and yet, each individual data point represents a person, on a journey.

It seems to me that we are almost reaching a flat plane of innovation. Everyone seems to have similar technology. What is increasingly important is each company’s data, how much of it they have and their ability to wrangle it into insights and distribute it or market it. The cool app or the SaaS product is in some ways just the gateway to get the thing every company seems to be most hungry for, our information.

Personally, I can’t seem to take a side on this. I’m flatly positioned between “isn’t this cool” and “isn’t this scary” when it comes to every technology knows and can do for us. I’ve been quietly fascinated by blockchain for years as a way to create safe transactions and when Ragnar Lifthrasir spoke on it at Hacker Connect I saw even more its incredible potential as a way to do truly linear record keeping in a way that makes tremendous logical sense. And yet, I am not quite sure I trust it.

My logic brain and my emotions conflict on this one and I see no easy answers in the immediate. What I’ve noticed for myself though, is that my love of technology diminishes a little with its invasiveness. At a talk this week, I heard a Microsoft exec explain  Hololens and while the tech seems amazing for the consumer, my mind immediately went to the data gathering potential.

In my youth, I cast a lot of tarot spreads, mostly about love for my twenty-something friends. I don’t pick up a deck too often anymore but they can be a way to connect symbolism to experience. I put little faith in any forecasting ability delivered by the cards. Instead they relate to thoughts and ideas.

I cast this spread with the Salvador Dali deck right after we slid into 2017. There has been a lot of complaining about 2016, and justly so, we lost many artists and visionaries including my uncle whose passion for zen guided his existence.

In 2016 we learned something profound: the masses disdain nuance. It could be claimed that this is an intellectual viewpoint or liberal outlook but as I see it, this is not a question of intelligence, it’s a question of overload. Simply put, we are too distracted to hold large complexities in our heads.

Sometimes I imagine our collective consciousness as a night sky. The stars and galaxies, the whole vast universe is displayed, bright, vivid, awesome and terrifying, each evening. However, the bulk of us never see the stars. Ambient light has blotted out the night sky. We key in on the moon, the constellations that we can still see, but the overall scope of the universe is mostly hidden from view.

This reading is a reminder that sometimes we just want to believe. We want simplicity. We crave it. We want action and activity, good versus evil, superheroes and swelling soundtracks. Idealism tempered with reality can feel like a compromise, especially when it comes to marketing.

Keep it simple, focus on easy-to-understand images and clear benefits.  Use emotion. I see too many brands opting for more text and for long advertorials but that’s going to appeal to a smaller and smaller subset of viewers. It’s hard for me, I love words. I’m comfortable with living in the shadows and staying out of the spotlight. I prefer subtlety and quiet. Those values are the moon not the sun.

When I was young and required to eat at a restaurant, I’d often opt for the vegetarian or pasta option. This was not just because I already had misgivings about eating animals, it was also about narrowing my choices. There would likely be only a few options to choose from, all at the lower price tier of the menu, and, if I was lucky, no follow up questions on preparation or side dishes.

I have always had an uneasy relationship with making decisions.

There is an assumption in the world, that more is better. The more choices, the better, options upon options, new flavors, new colors, new features. It’s supposed to stimulate interest. I’ve always found it profoundly fatiguing and it continues to get worse and worse. Whole grocery aisles full of a mad proliferation of breakfast cereals, crackers, sauces. Media has bloomed into thousands of podcasts, streaming services, channels, shows. Online shopping has led to an explosion of brands. Choice no longer is about having options, it’s more about wading through page after page of potential decisions.

This choice is often an illusion. Major conglomerates tuck hundreds of brands under a single umbrella. A consumer can believe they are choosing one brand over another but often are buying a thing made in the same factory or by the same company, as the thing they did not choose. Our choice muscles are fatigued, worn out but the endless deciding and selecting. I heard it around the election. People were simply weary of deciding, especially in states with a long list of propositions. Freedom to choose, one of the things this country was built upon, has become an obligation rather than a privilege. We are so exhausted by small choices that we are no longer inspired by the big ones.

I’m not alone in this. Part of the rise of services like Blue Apron or subscription boxes from Birchbox to Stitch Fix are about reducing choice, about letting someone else, computer or human, choose for you. It becomes easier to let Amazon recommend your next book, to let Netflix choose what you watch, to give choice to someone, anyone who will pick it up.

They tell me nobody reads anymore. No one reads long form. I’m a relic. I should use infographics, images, and video to get my point across. My new tools are bitmoji and Snapchat filters. No long paragraphs, just captions, spelling is irrelevant, sentence structure meaningless and in some cases punctuation isn’t just unnecessary, it’s considered rude. A period, that humble ender of sentences, is now seen as abrupt and abrasive, too final in a world of ellipsis and emoji as sentence enders.

Nobody reads. And I’m supposed to accept that and write small.

In the weeks leading up to the election, President Obama repeatedly said, “Don’t boo, vote.” It wasn’t just a cute soundbite suitable for quoting on your social media. It was a plea and a reminder that quiet action is as necessary as loud protest, that we can’t just stamp our feet about what makes us uncomfortable.

In the days after the election, we’ve seen protests in the streets, young people leaving classrooms, and social media becoming twice the battleground it was before the election. The reports of racism, hatred, and violence are rampant. Some are not true, some, sadly, are.

The ideals, values, and plans of the new regime aren’t hidden. They are open and available for anyone to read at greatagain.gov. it is not festooned with pretty pictures, there are no infographics or ‘explainer’ videos. Other websites will do that. There you just find the words in all their plain declaration. I say don’t protest, read. Read the plans for energy, for healthcare, for immigration. Read every official word put out by the president-elect and his team directly at the source. Don’t rely on others to give you the highlights.

Where you go from there is your choice, the action you take, as public or private as you like. All I know is that despite the television ads and the viral videos many, many people did not vote on Tuesday. Of those that did vote, on either side, I’m not sure how many will really read the new regime’s new plans. They may be without hope, they may not want to know, they may be happy and trust the new President enough not to concern themselves with the details.

The roots of our great nation lie in the printed and distributed word. We have methods of communication now that our Founding Fathers never dreamed of but that does not mean that the words do not matter. They left their words for us, as guidance and vision.

It’s an accepted practice that many professions have continuing education as part of their requirements. Whether it’s the formal mandates of CE hours and relicensing or the more informal needs to be trained in new procedures, new laws, and new technologies, it is accepted that few professions today exist with a static knowledge base.

However, when it comes to writing, it’s often an assumption that little changes. We learn the basics of grammar and vocabulary and off we go into the world. Perhaps we study literature or veer off into the mysteries of linguistics but overall, once we graduate we are considered fully trained in language. We become better writers over time through practice, not education.

The older I get in this career, the more I realize that this is a false and foolish assumption. Writing is always changing. Since I was in high school learning how to diagram sentences, language has undergone tectonic shifts. Some would argue that all of the changes have been negative but I posit there is no point in judging change, only in studying it and adapting to it.

My personal continuing education curriculum takes two forms: remembering/refining the traditions of writing and learning the emerging trends. The first is satisfied mostly with vocabulary drill (I’m a big fan of the Merriam Webster app’s quizzes) and grammar review (the Grammar Girl podcast is essential) as well as reading books and essays that are written at a level challenging enough to have me reaching for a dictionary a few times.

The second part of my continuing education is one we are all collectively involved in as a society, adapting to new communication. This consists not just of understanding slang like “on fleek” or “yaaaassss, queen” but also the ways that informal structure and idiomatic usage have become acceptable.

When I was learning to write essays, a one-sentence paragraph was deemed unacceptable; today it is a way to draw attention to a point.

I’ve written before about the return of pictographic/ideographic language through emoji but what I didn’t quite understand until a recent article on teenage flirting in Wired, is how wildly interpretive emoji-based communication can be. I suspect a similar phenomenon was in place with ancient languages to some extent as well, we just review now through the gloss of a history that demands discrete answers. Any one who has ever translated poetry from one language to another knows just how foolish this is.

Chasing changing language is rife with uncertainty. We are all in the lab and today’s trend could either be inscribed in canon or lost to time and only laughingly remembered during bouts of nostalgia (like the exuberant kitsch of Valley Girl speak). Many sneered last year when the Oxford Dictionaries made the “tears of laughter” emoji the word of the year but the good folks at that venerable institution are engaged in the work of enshrining this moving target of language.

Some imagine that writers have it easy. The alphabet doesn’t change. But of course it has, sometimes slowly, sometimes more quickly. Sometimes the letters themselves, other times our relationship to them and their general usage. In grad school, I once wrote an impassioned essay on the use of brands to establish time and place in literature. Now in the wake of so many brands passing into the dustbin of history it could be argued I was wrong, or one could look at the use of brands as positioning and storytelling in rap and hip-hop and argue I had it right all along.

In the last year, I’ve been more open about being an introvert, a fact that seems sort of paradoxical in itself. I’ve written articles about it and last week, I was quoted by the BBC which was a true honor. 

Why does it matter so much to me to identify as an introvert? I’ve been called shy or quiet my whole life. I’ve received more than one of those crappy “still waters run deep” awards designed to somehow honor those who don’t make a spectacle of themselves by then making a spectacle of them. I tried for years to fix it. Alcohol helps, sometimes. But, as I get older, I get weary of trying to “fix” myself to suit the world. 

Some people have said I’m not an introvert. After all, I’ve given lectures and speeches as well as public readings. I can even be a bit of a ham sometimes. But introversion isn’t always about being shy it’s more about the need or lack of need for external stimulation and about having a larger interior world. It’s about reclaiming solitude, not just for myself but for anyone who feels like the weirdo for wanting to not be always relentlessly out and for anyone who feels like the world judges them for being shy. 

I write specifically about introversion in business because I’ve been told more than once that I could achieve more if I were more extroverted if I “put myself out there” more. I’ve never felt this to be the case, instead I’ve felt my ability to filter the experience of the external through the depth of my internal experience has been a great tool and gift. However I know my inability to speak up in or run meetings and my utter lack of salesmanship is perceived as a deficit. I have let the world make me feel less than. I’ve worried that, in our world, to be quiet is to be forgotten. 

On a personal note for me this summer was one of learning that friends can really be incredibly valuable in life. When I uprooted my California life to be near my mother, who is experiencing health challenges, and my sister, who was getting ready to deliver her son, it was my friends and former co-workers who applauded my choice, who lifted me up, and made it possible to keep going.

Crisis teaches you who your biggest fans are and they aren’t always who you think they are. One of the projects I’ve been working on lately centers on the value of fanbases and I recently finished the upcoming book Superconsumers by Eddie Yoon, which centers on this topic.

Superconsumers represent a small portion of your overall database but command an outsized influence. They are your ambassadors, your fan base, the ones for whom a relationship with you and your brand isn’t just transactional, it’s relational. They like you, they really like you, and if you don’t find a way to reflect all that love back at them, not just through great service, but through making them feel special then you are missing out.

Small businesses do this instinctively. Alan Janoyan, a friend of my husband, started his own coffee roasting company (JRC Coffee/Janoyan Roasting Company) over a year ago. Alan worked at Starbucks for years and is passionate about coffee. So he got himself a coffee roaster, created a cute logo, and started selling coffee. Alan has a good friends and family network, the tagline on his website and materials is Coffee for Friends which already makes anyone, whether they are actually friends with Alan or not, feel like they are part of a club. He’s the type of person you naturally want to support. Last year, my holiday gift for friends and co-workers were bags and bags of JRC Coffee. It was fun to support a friend and the coffee is great so not only did my car smell like heaven for the month of December, but my friends liked the coffee and ordered some after their gifts were gone.

Alan started working the Brentwood farmers market selling coffee drinks and started building a new network of friends and advocates. A lot of people go to the farmers market every week and Alan started to see the same people who got to know him and look out for him. He posts on Instagram from the market also has a fun seagull toy “mascot” Paco who appears in his social posts.

He then found out that Kanye West sometimes goes to this market and started at #coffeeforKanye movement to try to get his coffee in Kanye’s hands. He created special blends include one named for Kanye’s mother and one called Paco to Pablo and was eventually able to get his samples to Kanye. He continues to reach out on social media to local notables offering them coffee and custom blends using the #coffeeforfriendshashtag. People support Alan because he not only makes great coffee, he makes it fun to be part of his circle.

In the book SuperConsumers, Eddie Yoon shared the story of how Keurig became the coffee machine of choice. It didn’t start out as a home system, it started in offices because people loved Starbucks but couldn’t always leave the office. Keurig let you have coffee that is better than the shared pot that sits around all day. How did they convert people from a system that had been in place for decades? Free samples. People loved the coffee at work and then wanted it at home. Not everyone loved it, but enough people did, and those people told other people.

I believe a lot of times, we spend more time trying to gather large groups of “followers” than we do loving the ones we have. That’s true in consumer goods businesses but also true in service industries and even in writing. I’d rather have 100 people read my work than have 10,000 people click “like.” But I believe more than ever, that if someone does give you attention, in today’s world, that’s gold, that’s a real honor because everyone is clamoring for attention. It’s the currency of the internet. If someone gives you the gift of their attention, give them yours back. Like, interact, figure out how you can help them. It’s simple.

Fifty years ago, the United States created the National Historical Preservation Act was enacted. In those 50 years both the role of preservation and what we consider preservation has changed dramatically. Increasingly preservation is less about saving a pretty house and more about preserving a piece of history in the most responsible way.

This weekend I read three interesting books that touch on preservation, two directly about historic preservation and one about natural wine. What does wine have to do with historic preservation? In many ways, For The Love of Wine, Alice Feiring’s book on exploring the natural wines of Georgia fits right in with the other books I read because it was about preservation in action.

Preservation is less about keeping something in stasis these days. We don’t have enough time, space, or money to preserve every historic house. Not only that, some of the most historic sites aren’t the most beautiful. So preservation isn’t just about the pretty stuff, sometimes as Stephanie Meeks explains in The Past and Future City, it’s about the uncomfortable, such as preserving Shockoe Bottom, one of the largest slave markets.

The confederacy creates an interesting preservation problem. The South is full of statues honoring Confederate generals and battles, less so of the free people and their journey. It was a form of propaganda in the Reconstruction Era South, a reminder that while everything had changed, nothing had. However removing the monuments isn’t the answer either. 

In Why Preservation Matters, historian and professor Max Page talks about the difficult challenges of preservation as well. Both Page and Meeks also talk about adaptive reuse and gentrification. Gentrification isn’t always negative or positive. Too much gentrification that is purely market-driven will squeeze out the residents of a place and create a sanitized and homogenous neighborhood. But freezing out developers could mean that some neighborhoods won’t the economic wherewithal to continue at all. 

The places we preserve are also the stories we tell. Saving a building alone is not enough. We need preservationists and archivists to make sure that the stories stay with the places. 

The more I read about artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and machine learning, the more I realize that as humans we have two key skills that remain: the ability to relate to other humans and the ability to make non-logical thought leaps. Just about every other skill can be automated, taught to a machine, and handled without human intervention. 

More and more companies are focused on how to teach computers to better read emotions and facial expression to respond appropriately but as Geoff Colvin has shown in his work is that human-to-human connection still has this intrinsic magic. For the extroverts of the world, the relating, the meat of connection is where the future of much of the future of work remains. It’s in service industries and people-based jobs in everything from customer care to medicine. People who can truly, openly, and joyfully connect with other people have a built-in value.

What about those of us who aren’t so good at relating on that level? If we get easily worn out by interaction, if we prefer the shadows, if we are drawn to reading, learning, coding, analyzing, will there be no jobs left? After all, those are the skills that computers do best. 

I believe that what computers can’t do in terms of thinking is make magical leaps. Computers can connect things in ways that make sense but I still believe in the magic and innovation of the human mind, In the ways that we can not just connect dots but create new things in unexpected ways.

This I believe is where the introvert shines and it reminds me how important the care and feeding of the mind truly is. I just finished reading Too Fast To Think and it was a good reminder that creativity isn’t just making art, it’s making innovation, it’s making life on a core level. We need sleep and time and space to dream and try and fail. We need the wisdom and discernment to sort and attempt, to winnow and refine. We need the deep quiet space of the temple of the mind, the holy space where thoughts dance. 

As a country we moved from a manufacturing economy to what is primarily a service economy (it's a transition that we are seeing in China right now to some extent). More recently, our consumer habits started to shift primarily from one where "keeping up appearances" switched from acquisition of goods (status as possessions) to acquisition of experiences (status measured generally by social media). Younger people are less attached to owning things and more attached to having what they need in the moment.

It's something we've see in industry too. In the book "Value As A Service," Rob Bernshteyn, CEO of Coupa, traces the evolution of software from discs in a box to cloud-based and says the next evolution from software as a service is value as a service. He sees a world where the end result is quantifiable success based on agreed upon metrics from both sides. He says customer success not customer satisfaction is the end game.

I believe this on a lot of levels. When I first started in the working world, show up and do your job was enough. Now it's different, we are closer to "live your job" than ever and there's no resting. Mere attendance is not enough, if you aren't delivering over and above what it costs to retain you, you'll find yourself out of a gig pretty quickly. One of my first jobs, working as an insurance adjuster, required me to log my time on per project/client basis. I've recently gone back to that old model (although I have better ways of calculating it now).

Sometimes proving value can feel endless but when we aren't able to prove value, we can get lost pretty quickly. So much of what we do these days "feels like work" but isn't work. Even writing this post may feel like work because it's similar to what I do for some clients (writing/strategizing/organizing) but isn't work. Focusing on metrics and value forces me to work smarter not harder and avoid the empty calories of a day spent working but not really delivering.

Is quantifiable experience the next evolution? Right now we rate service from a pretty subjective place. We are using data to determine some things but not always connecting it to the satisfaction/success plane. What if, instead of rating your Uber driver subjectively, instead your experience was rated for you by the app based on a series of mutually agreed upon success metrics (time, speed, cleanliness etc.)? What if instead of paying the same fee every month for your internet service you received a bill that varied based on outages, interruptions, and average speed. When the experience didn't fully measure up, you paid less.

For a business owner, it feels like a high wire act. Success by mutually agreed upon factors may also be subject to all sorts of variables not in our control. But I believe this is where the service/experience economy is headed, partly because it continues what I've dubbed the ease continuum. Innovation moves continually toward ease and so quantifiable success fits into that paradigm.

The only problem is that living by data does take out the human factor. In the example above, an Uber ride might fail in the quantifiable success metrics but if the driver and passenger have a great talk or the driver provides information that was unexpected but still helpful, that's a success outside the quantifiable data. Even in the software or goods industry, measured success can be the main yardstick but personal satisfaction will always be the lagniappe. We are wired to relate and if the quantifiable success doesn't also result in a feel-good moment of goal achieving, then victory might seem hollow.

Two of the best nonfiction books I read this summer, In The Kingdom of Ice by Hampton Sides, and The Dragon Behind The Glass by Emily Voigt, dealt with unsuccessful journeys that were also significant accomplishments. It’s fitting for a summer that for me has brought change although not always at a speed I desired. There’s been great joy but also a feeling that everything I’ve set out to do has been left undone. 

As a writer who bends toward depression, I can tend to use the unfinished to declare failure, a path that is aligned with ruin. Unfinished is just unfinished and not every journey resolves as we imagine it might. One of the things I most admired about Emily Voigt and her journey to discover rare fish in the wild, is that she handled defeat very well. Even after not one but two journeys to the depths of Borneo ended without her achieving her goals, she found new destinations and channeled the energy into the next quest.

In an Olympic summer we talk about the gold medal winners and tend to only mention other athletes only if their stories somehow merit interest. Those whose journeys end without the medal become lost to history. And so, we perpetuate that idea that accomplishment is everything and attempt is simply a good try but ultimately meaningless.

You could call this my summer of dark reading. I followed up reading Dark Money with The Profiteers, Sally Denton’s deeply researched exploration of the Bechtel company. Business biographies aren’t exactly beach reads but this one is a page turner and a history lesson. 

Bechtel is interwoven into America’s rise to power, from FDR and the New Deal to the post-war boom, the Cold War nuclear fear, and our current uncertainty, Bechtel has built, and profited mightily, using influence and strategy but in a far different way than the Koch Brothers or other influencers. Bechtel is both highly political and apolitical, driven purely by expansion and profit. There’s a reptilian cleanness to their motives, it’s all about growing the company. 

There’s been a lot of talk over the book’s slant on Bechtel and questions of bias. It is there, perhaps especially in the exploration of the Reagan era, but it seems less politically driven and more aghast that the level of influence went on unchecked. 

Bechtel is notoriously private but like the Koch brothers, it’s been driven out of the shadows in the past couple of years. Its response is fascinating to me from a PR perspective. There was a very stilted article in Fortune that ready so much like an advertorial I kept looking for the fine print. The company started a blog about a year ago focusing on projects for the next 100 years of growth. If there’s anything I learned from Denton’s book, it’s that Bechtel has a strong survival instinct. This is not a company that will disappear. Their social media presence is highly focused on volunteering and corporate social responsibility. The company uses the succession angle (the new 35-year-old CEO is the latest in a long line of Bechtels groomed for power) to position the company as a family business. 

 I’m doing a lot of reading this summer, much of it in prep for a book I’m working on about the history of real estate public relations (which has sent me on a deep exploration of the role zoning has played in defining our cities and towns, the two being inextricably linked). I love these times in my life where I deepen my knowledge in a particular subject even though they always dovetail with loneliness. When facing disruption, I give my brain a project.

In so much of the world’s current turmoil I see this profound longing for place, people wrapping themselves in rhetoric to cover outrage, sadness, and fear. How do we fight multi-faced enemies, how do we fight if we are the enemy ourselves? 

Dark Money might be the most interesting and important book I read this year. It’s about the radical right wing agenda in terms of content but what it’s really about it is using money and power in the shadows to control how people think and act. 

How do you change people’s minds? For the Koch brothers and those of their ilk, it’s about using money to create a political machine that spreads into every area of society.  Black hat PR starts with messaging, with using words, phrases and images that feel like unassailable rights: heritage, freedom, wellbeing. Who could be against a group for those things? A fund supporting a study of history or democracy or free-market economics isn’t scary is it? 

The Kochtopus as it is called in the book also infiltrates academia through think tanks, professorships, and funded programs. He or she who donates the money often gets to set the rules as to how it is used, who is appointed, what books are used, and what messaging is taught. This is how to build the next generation of leaders and it also confers and idea of trust. If you don’t have your own legitimacy, borrow someone else’s. We call it the halo effect or borrowing cool in PR sometimes but it has a shadowier purpose of obfuscation here. Instead of laundering money, we are laundering thought, a radical idea is made more mainstream through the pool of academe. 

How do you make the “overdog” look like the underdog? It helps to have a great spokesperson to help lead what looks like a movement by and for the people but is actually a crafted political agenda. 

The book also used the chilling term “weaponize philanthropy”--showing businesses how to take giving and use it to help advance their political agenda. 

I read a lot of books on social media and branding which makes perfect sense, it’s the work I do and I find that I always learn something.

I am a fan of Karen Leland’s books because she stresses the action rather than theory and her latest book on brand mapping is no exception. It’s like she lifted the playbook right out of my head. Her systematic review of every aspect of both personal and company brands is on target.

More importantly, one thing she stresses is that sometimes you need help. Part of that is just good marketing. After all, she’s in the business of providing consulting, but it’s more than that. I’ve learned over the years that any book, no matter how awesome, is nothing without someone to implement it.  Clients care less about theory and more about practice.

I didn’t know this when I first started training people in social media and brand building. I’d explain all the reasons to do it and the principles behind it but I didn’t provide next steps. They’d leave excited but ultimately never followed through. I realized quickly that I had to assign homework in small achievable sections and set dates for followthrough, the same way I would in a classroom setting. The concepts had to be broken down into pieces and handled that way. Even better, if the person I was working with had an assistant, we could get started that much faster and had a much higher rate of success.