Creative Mornings Features Members On Its Intsa

Creative Mornings Features Members On Its Intsa

Creative Mornings provides a monthly talk on a chosen topic (for free) in cities around the globe. Unlike Ted, it’s not exclusive. You can sign up or walk up and enjoy a donut, coffee, and interesting ideas about architecture, design, culture, and so on.

Creative Mornings is also an excellent marketer. The organization is featuring members from around the world on its Instagram page. I am fortunate to be one such featured member.

The answers I provided were in response to a prompt in the submission form. I now have more room to elaborate. I wasn’t happy working in the traditional agency structure, because of the daily diet of shit sandwiches that are required of most ad agency workers.

When you can’t be honest with your clients or with your peers in the agency, you can’t deliver what’s required—thinking and doing that provides a path for greater growth and a fuller understanding of brand value.

CA!

CA!

The person who runs the Communication Arts Twitter account likes to promote my writing. I am grateful. CA is the creative industry’s standard-bearer, and each Tweet sent from @CommArts is seen by a segment of the magazine’s 81,300 followers.

It’s an honor when anyone pays attention to my writing. Given that it’s CA who follows my updates and helps to promote my thinking, I feel particularly grateful for the recognition.

Accountability: It’s Missing, and This Is a Big Problem for Teams

Accountability: It’s Missing, and This Is a Big Problem for Teams

Avoidance of accountability is one of five dysfunctions of a team, according to the author and consultant Patrick Lencioni. His book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable has sold more than three million copies. I can understand why, as I keep coming back to the fundamental concepts in the book to improve my own performance on teams.

Let’s take a look at all five dysfunctions of a team to see the big picture:

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If your team has any one of the five dysfunctions above, you’ve got an open wound inside your organization. A wound that you must attend to and heal.

I’m No Nurse, There Must Be An Easier Way

“Holding people accountable has about as much appeal as holding people hostage,” says Greg Bustin, a Dallas-based executive coach and author of Accountability: The Key to Driving A High-Performance Culture.

“In some people’s minds, accountability is synonymous with finger-pointing, the blame game,” he said. “Yet accountability is actually a support system built on trust. It’s about figuring out what we need to do and making our commitment to live up to it.”

Accountability is built on trust. Bustin also highlights commitment. That’s two of Lencioni’s five dysfunctions in one smart sentence!

Healthy Teams Make Progress and A Difference

Working conditions for today’s thought workers are not ideal. The conditions are not ideal because functional teams are created with intention by design. In other words, you must badly want to create exceptional teamwork and the efficiencies that flow from it, for it to have any chance of occurring.

Sadly, the operative framework in modern-day marketing organizations—to offer one primary and painful example—is the funnel. Isn’t it? The emphasis is not on healthy teams, and of equal importance, it’s not on taking good care of the customer. The emphasis is on chasing data dragons.

“The funnel” is a non-descriptive way of saying we very much would love to send you as much email as you can possibly tolerate. Where there was the art of relationship marketing, there’s now the weak science of digital microtargeting masquerading as spam. Which is a long-winded way of saying that things are seriously out-of-focus, and they have been for so long that we’ve adjusted our eyes to The New Blurry.

What Happens When You Focus On Healthy Teams

Dysfunctional teams brew a toxic workplace culture where bad habits compound into multiple headaches for everyone. Working late and again on the weekends, dealing with petty jealousies, constant backchanneling, poor leadership, no transparency, and so many other unreal expectations that confront today’s laborer, is no way to uplift people, companies, or brands.

By putting your team’s dysfunctions under glass, it lets you open up new avenues for prosperity to grow, and prosperity is the mother of generosity. When you make these conscious moves, you also shift into an “abundance mindset” and leave “scarcity mindset” behind.

Dynamic Teams Make the Best Work

One person with a lot of great ideas can act as an engine for the creative team, but it’s the team/crew/band that adopts the ideas, challenges them, reshapes them, and finally brings them to life. Therefore, the talented individual is only as good as the team she’s on.

People often wonder why so much crap gets made and why it sells. Lack of talent and absence of taste are two possibilities, but I don’t think they’re the culprits. I’ve worked in the ad agency business for 25 years and the great majority of people I’ve been around are smart and come to the table with good ideas. However, without a functional team to protect and advance their unpolished gems, their big ideas never make it into production.

Enter the Consultant \ Coach \ Guide \ Advisor

Think about how you see yourself in the mirror and in photographs. It’s human to stretch or bend reality to our liking. We don’t want to see all the flaws, we want to see our strongest features and we learn to show those to the world while hiding our personal scars and blemishes. The same holds for how we view our companies and our brands. We see the bad sides, but we either look away or learn to cover those up.

An astute and practiced outside observer sees things as they are, and this makes them/us/me valuable observers of objective reality. It’s a point of view worth acquiring, but it takes bravery and a new degree of openness. No one wants to be audited and a good outside observer will do just that, but do it in a way that feels supportive and kind. Everyone makes mistakes until they see or are shown another way. It’s not about judgment, it’s about honest assessments that lead to improved performance.

Obfuscation and rancid behavior are common on the job in so many fields, but it needn’t be that way. If your goal is to achieve great things, it can’t be that way. If you’re honest with yourself, you can see your way to a better you and better teamwork. It’s going to take a better you to uplift the team and get everyone on a trust and accountability page. It’s my contention that whatever pain and effort are required to get there is well worth it. Breaking old or bad habits is not fun, but the results are sweet.

To begin now, perform an accountability self-assessment. Ask yourself who and what you are accountable to and where you might improve. Then turn the lens on your current and past teams. We’ve all been on bad teams. Some of us are on bad teams now. Change is a process, and to get the process rolling it takes motivation and tools. The motivation can’t be supplied by anyone but you. The tools and people to help you use them are plenty available for the betterment of self and team, which ripples out and helps make a better world. Here’s to doing our part!

I’m A Guest on Chiat\Day\NY’s Disruptor Series Podcast

I’m A Guest on Chiat\Day\NY’s Disruptor Series Podcast

David Burn is Disrupting The Ad Trades

The iTunes preview: David Burn is the founder of Adpulp — an advertising publication with a difference: it’s for practitioners, by practitioners. For 15 years, Adpulp has been providing news and perspective from the trenches. Listen in as he and host Rob Schwartz discuss the current state of the advertising industry, where it’s been, and the future of writing and writers.

The Humanist In Our Midst

The Humanist In Our Midst

Do you know media theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s work? It’s intensely human. He’s intensely human.

Allow me to transcribe a couple of key segments from this powerful TED Talk…

Human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. We can’t think that way anymore. We have to stop using technology to optimize human beings for the market and start optimizing technology for the human future.

And this:

Then came the Dot Com Boom and the digital future became stock futures…the future changed from this thing we create together in the present to something we bet on in some kind of a zero-sum winner takes all competition. And when things get that competitive about the future, humans are no longer valued for our creativity. No, now we’re just valued for our data. Because they can use the data to make predictions. Creativity, if anything, that creates noise. That makes it harder to predict. So, we ended up with a digital landscape that repressed creativity, that repressed novelty. It repressed what makes us most human. We ended up with social media. Does social media really connect people in new intersing ways? No. Social media is about using our data to predict our future behavior, or when necessary to influence our future behavior so we act more in accordace with our statistical profiles.

Rushkoff is deep. He’s so deep, you may need to adjust to his waters, which are not quite as warm as the tourist beaches you’re accustomed to visiting. I recommend doing this slowly. Go over and over his passages. Because Rushkoff’s deep is where sharks and whales and eels swim. A place of mystery and truth.

Rushkoff sounds alarmist and he is a bit alarmist, to his credit. He is fighting for what he believes in and he believes in you and me. He thinks we can unlock ourselves from the autocratic rule of screens and once again connect in real life, where our innate human ability to truly understand one another is present and accounted for.

I am on Rushkoff’s side. I believe in Team Human.

People can be weak, ugly, and disappointing. At the same time, people can be strong, inspired, and grateful. Sometimes the same person can be all of this all in one day. To get to our better selves and to remain there—open, grounded, and ready to serve the needs of others—we need strong reminders that help shake us loose from the digital doldrums and bad habits that hold us back. For me, and I hope for you, Rushkoff provides these strong reminders.

CA!

The person who runs the Communication Arts Twitter account likes to promote my writing. I am grateful. CA is the creative industry’s standard bearer, and each Tweet sent from @CommArts is seen by a segment of the magazine’s 81,300 followers.

It’s an honor when anyone pays attention to my writing. Given that it’s CA who follows my updates and helps to promote my thinking, I feel particularly grateful for the recognition.

The 12 Point Plan to Save America

I hear a chorus of cautious and concerned voices in the mainstream media warning Democrats to refrain from pushing their agenda too far to the left. When you’re on the inside looking out, I suppose you’ll do that.

Here’s what I believe: Hesitation kills and this is the absolute worst time in American history to play it safe. The federal government is broken. It does not need a tune-up. It needs a complete overhaul or it’ll never run again.

Were I able to mold a candidate from human clay (as Karl Rove has done), I’d put the following platform forward.

The 12 Point Plan to Save America

1- Reinstate the draft and make military service (or the equivalent public works service) mandatory. It’s the only way to run an Empire.

2- Simultaneously reduce the size of the Empire. We currently maintain more than 800 military bases in 70 countries overseas. Britain, France and Russia, by contrast, have 30 foreign bases combined. Let’s reduce the footprint to 200 total overseas bases and put all those dollars saved into infrastructure and social services.

3- Make Election Day a national holiday and encourage the use of mail-in ballots and paper ballots (to prevent hacking and boost participation rates).

4- Treat guns like cars. Own as many as you want, but each gun must be registered with the state and you must prove you’re competent with firearms (via regular testing) in order to have a license.

5- House the homeless and provide universal healthcare for all people and all conditions. If you need to know how we will pay for it, we will close more than 600 overseas military bases. See #2 above.

6- Outlaw for-profit prisons and turn all but the most high-security prisons into mobile work camps, where people work outside on farms and on other infrastructure projects.

7- Encourage corporations to focus on their triple bottom line and provide job training and jobs via a public/private partnership dedicated to improving our city, county, state, and national parks; providing affordable and efficient public transportation; and creating sustainable energy and agriculture solutions.

8- Make all campaigns for public office publicly funded and remove all dark money from the process entirely.

9- Welcome refugees and put them on a fast track to citizenship and job training.

10- Officially recognize and apologize for our original sins—slavery and genocide—and make restitution to the victims’ offspring. Also, establish two new memorials on The Mall in Washington, DC.

11- Pay our best teachers as much or more than lawyers. See #2 above.

12- Create a North American partnership with Mexico and Canada where all citizens can easily travel and work in any of the three nations.

West on Highway 290, It’s Where the Wine Is

West on Highway 290, It’s Where the Wine Is

Texas Hill Country is the second most visited wine region in the United States today. Only Napa Valley receives more visitors on an annual basis.

The expansive multi-county area west of Austin is home to dozens of wineries and the Highway 290 corridor from Johnson City to Fredericksburg is literally packed with possibilities. The question for the curious visitor is where to turn in, because the invitations all look pretty good from the road.

As a Texas resident for 16 months now, and I have much to learn about Texas-made wines. The good news is I am a fast and motivated learner, especially when I love the subject. Therefore, I do have a few significant findings to share with other wine lovers, and visitors to Texas Hill Country.

Tasting Texas Terroir

One of the things I enjoy about wine and visiting vineyards, a.k.a. wine tourism, is the pursuit of terroir. The objective is to sense what a particular place produces. Here’s the question…What do the soil, the climate, and the vines give a winemaker to work with and how has she decided to express this in the wine?

Making wine is part art, part science and a good bit of good fortune. Wine expresses both the terroir and the point-of-view of the winemaker. This makes wine a fascinating beverage, as well as a favorite intoxicant.

In Texas, a great majority of the fruit is grown in the Texas Panhandle, near Lubbock, and shipped hundreds of miles to Hill Country wineries where the grapes are made into wine and bottled for consumption. Therefore, when you visit a Hill Country winery, it’s highly likely that you will experience the terroir of an entirely different place.

My first question upon arrival in the tasting room is often, “What estate wines do you have available?” Sometimes the answer is none. Other times, the answer is an array of hot weather varietals like Tempranillo known to thrive in the Hill Country heat.

Three Kind Finds

If you want to get right to the good stuff, find Lewis Wines a few miles west of downtown Johnson City on Highway 290. Lewis Wines “proudly produces wine from 100% Texas grapes.” Their tagline is “Real. Texas. Wine.”

Lewis Wines 2017 Estate Rosé — $35

This is the second vintage of rosé produced from the Estate Vineyard, which was planted in 2014. The vineyard has very shallow, well-drained clay soil over limestone, resulting in wines with richness, weight, and texture.  The Touriga Nacional and Tinto Cão were hand harvested at night, whole cluster pressed, then fermented separately in stainless steel.

Ron Yates 2016 Cinsault Rosé — $22

We enjoyed a bottle of this locally-made wine at lunch in Johnson City. The light and bright Texas High Plains fruit was an ideal compliment to my deep fried flounder.

The Ron Yates winery is west of Johnson City, situated on 15.8 acres abutting Highway 290 in Hye, Texas. The acreage is currently planted with four acres of Tempranillo grapevines, with an additional six acres of estate vineyards planned for grapes such as Graciano and Petite Sirah.

Signor Vineyards 2015 Pinot Noir — $44

The kind folks at Lewis Wines directed us to Signor Vineyards, a Texas Hill Country winery that works in partnership with Weisinger Family Winery in Ashland, OR. Signor Vineyards near Fredericksburg ships Texas-grown fruit to Ashland to be made into wine and bottled. The bottles then come back to Texas in refrigerated trucks, along with bottles of wine made from Oregon fruit.

As it happens, Oregon pinot noir is my favorite wine in the world and this Rogue Valley vintage is a classic with hints of raspberry on the finish. Our ability to buy it locally and support this unique interstate connection is also a good thing.

Kickin’ Facts and Countin’ Dollars

Texas was home to the first vineyard in North America, established by Franciscan monks circa 1662. The oldest continually operating winery in the state is the Val Verde Winery, in Del Rio, established in 1883 by Italian immigrant Frank Qualia.

The wine industry in Texas accounted for $2.27 billion to the state’s economy in 2016, employing more than 12,750 fulltime workers and paying them $528 million in salaries and wages. In addition, more than 1.8 million guests visited Texas’ 400 wineries in 2016 and while there spent $482.9 million.

Jessica Dupuy, a certified sommelier who covers wine regularly for Texas Monthly, says, “In the past ten years, we’ve seen a significant boost in quality. New, savvy winemakers are setting the standard for wines that reflect a distinct flavor for the regions in which they’re grown. I think in the next decade, we’ll be talking about wine tasting like Texas in the way that we talk about Oregon or Washington.”

The Humanist In Our Midst

Larry McMurtry’s “Bleached Bones” Come Shining Through

Place shapes people and people shape culture.

Texas writer and literary lion, Larry McMurtry, knows all about this premise. In fact, he has spent several decades making this geocultural reality his own truth and his books are both products of and reflections of The West.

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas is a book of nine essays by Larry McMurtry. The book was first published in 1968.

As a new resident of Texas, I love to hear the stories of this place, and I want to hear from the state’s best storytellers.

It’s interesting to me how dated some of the material is—for instance, he describes Austin, but he does so over 50 years ago and the description, while insightful, is of another city. I blame the fact-based form more than the writer. At the same time, some of the things McMurtry says about other parts of the state ring as true today as I imagine they did then.

Like this one:

In Dallas, a flavorless Protestantism seems to have yielded superpatriotism as by-product. The Dallas true believers have made conservatism a religion-surrogate: they hate liberals the way passionate religious dogmatists once hated heretics.

And this one:

The South is memories, memories—it cannot help believing that yesterday was better than tomorrow can possibly be. Some of the memories are extraordinarily well packaged, it is true, but when a place has been reduced in its own estimation no amount of artful packaging can hide the gloom.

We suck at conflict resolution in this country. We suck because we generally lack the skills as individuals, and we almost always lack the collective will do to the right thing as a nation. The price we pay is, therefore, sky high. Until you resolve the conflict in the right ways, it lingers and festers.

When I lived in rural North Carolina as a teenage boy, my friends would constantly remind me that The South was gonna rise again. I would nod and then ask, “Then what?” No one said they’d reinstitute slavery on Day One. It didn’t need to be said. It was nevertheless understood.

Today, nuance is napping. Today, we do need to say what is. For me, this is what is: I believe We, the People, need to atone for our two original sins—slavery and genocide—and until we do, we’re going to keep paying too high a price as a society. Atonement and restitution will not wipe away racism. This is about acknowledging the damages done. It’s too important to leave the next generation. The time is now to take these immense and long-overdue first steps.

Money Doesn’t Make The Man

McMurtry also examines class in 1960s Texas.

Amid the bland Texas middle class, our vulgar rich can seem baroque and delightful, and indeed, certain of them are delightful. As a class, however, they exhibit all the difficulties of the desperately confused, and they are dangerous in proportion to the amount of power they wield. They are frequently very able and very strong people, but I have yet to meet one whose abilities or whose strength counterbalances his insecurity.

That’s casting some serious shade on your fellow countrymen. Of course, this is often the work of a conscious writer. The dark side is the side that needs words to light it up. Thankfully, McMurty has excellent words to express his deepest thoughts.

I know not which “dangerous men” the author has in mind in the above passage. I do know he shows no indication in his book that he thinks highly of President Johnson, who at the time of the writing, held immense power and did not always use it wisely.

I’m sure there were other men that McMurty considered when he took out his knife pen. He did not write about the Bush family in this book, as that family’s Texas story didn’t fully emerge until the 1980s when Goerge Bush became Vice President, and then President. Even if they had emerged in time, the Bush family are Yankees who emigrated to West Texas for the oil. They’re Eastern prospectors, or they were.

Cowboy Love and Longing

The theme of the collection is the disappearance of the Old West, and with it, a way of life lived by a few short generations of cowboys. The McMurty clan lived this life, and Larry McMurtry saw it fade away and in its place, he witnessed the rise of modern Texas.

Now that it’s 2019, we can argue about what parts of modern-day Texas are worth celebrating and keeping. We can also turn to more books, fiction, and nonfiction by The Bard of Archer County. A friend has recommended Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond.

Prose In Accordance with the Land

“A lyricism appropriate to the Southwest needs to be as clean as a bleached bone and as well-spaced as trees on the llano.”

Damn. That is fine advice for a writer to dispense and for another writer to soak up.