Last year, I busted out a few guest posts for the blog Please Feed The Animals. When I asked Erik Proulx (the curator of the place turned film director and inspiration for me and countless others to have the courage to just friggin’ do stuff that’s important) how many words he thought worked best on PFTA, he said “between 30 and 3000.”

There’s this famous scene from Amadeus. I don’t understand. There are just as many notes as I required. Neither more no less.

And then this nice article from the ever-reposeful Pico Iyer quotes Thoreau: “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.”

All reminders for me today:

It’s the story, not the tactics associated with telling it, that makes the brand.

It’s the experience, not the degree to which the brand is mentioned on Twitter, that engages stakeholders.

It’s the work of people, making disciplined decisions over and over again, that inspire ideas.

Rules of thumb are only as good as the brain controlling the hand.
“Henry David Thoreau” under CC license by psd

Are values solely the domain of the client? The brand?

Watch this video. Maybe not new to many of you, but important.

I can’t ever remember hearing about the agencies responsible for this kind of work coming under criticism. Can somebody point me to an instance? Because I’m wondering why. Is it wrong to keep the agencies responsible for this stuff out scrutiny? Why are they immune from criticism? Can’t they say no to the work?

Arthur Anderson wasn’t exactly excused in the Eron’s misdeeds.

Values matter. We make decisions based on them. Those decisions create good, spread ideas, move us forward. Or they contribute to the dynamics in our world we know aren’t of value.

I bet that there’re more than a few agencies who’ve turned down work like this. I’d love to hear their stories. Where can you search for Not Agency of Record? I’d like to get inspired by the work of those kinds of agencies. Not these.

I just moved in to a new office. I’m renting an office in a larger space rented by a web design firm (Cirro… check them out). The space is in the Freight building on the Taxi campus. Straight out of FastCompany, this place. Here’s my view through one of my walls, the glass of which was reclaimed from the Pepsi Center when they replaced their hockey glass:

Across my desk, through my glass, across the Cirro guys, through a giant, open garage door, with a view of downtown Denver.

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We need to listen to artists. If you’re an artist this isn’t news. But it is, apparently, a fully baffling notion to the non-art world.

It’s clear that the non-art world needs artists more than artists need it. Since the non-art world has gone out of its way over the years to make itself a downright despicable place for artists, artists have had to find (and have found, thank you very much) plenty of creative ways to survive in and around the non-art world. So at a time when the non-art world is in desperate need for the kind of proclivity that a creative mind or two can bring to bear in solving the challenges of our times, the last place many artists want to spend their time is in the non-art world.

To make things worse, the non-art world, operating under rules established and maintained with a significant left-brain unbalance, has un-arted itself away from any kind of perspective on the matter. Just like the study that shows incompetent people are double-burdened because they’re both incompetent and too incompetent to know they’re incompetent.

The non-art world has become too left-brained to realize it’s too left-brained.

Artists don’t owe the non-art world anything. But the world needs artists. So here’s some thoughts on how an artist might convince the non-art world to listen. If an artist is so inclined.

Here’s hoping they are.

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Let’s get to the simple side of complexity. Try this on for size, fellow branding geeks.

Branding happens in three stages:

1. What you think you’re gonna get
2. What you actually get
3. What you’re gonna do about it

Building a brand is about asking and answering three questions:

1. What do I/we do well?
2. How I/do we do it differently?
3. Why does it matter?

And managing a brand is about one thing:

1. Inspiring a shared vision.

Will that work?

My second guest blog post is up on Please Feed The Animals. It’s about building social capital – an outcome of effective leadership more than effective social media tactics.

And it includes a small nod to Mom.

You can check it out here.

If you aren’t familiar with Please Feed The Animals, you probably should be. Erik Proulx started it to create a space for laid off advertising professionals to reinvent themselves in what turned out to be a serious disruption in the ad agency world. In the process, Erik reinvented himself. I’ve had the chance to work with Erik a few times and I can tell you he’s a rare bird. Creative-brilliant. He’s been a great collaborator for me professionally and an inspiration for my solo efforts.

So when he said that his  his reinvention process has kept him away from feeding the animals on PFTA, and asked a group of us to guest post on PFTA to keep it and the dialog there alive and humming, I jumped at the chance. I’m honored that he asked me to a part of it.

If you’re interested in my take on personal branding, here’s my PFTA post, Personal Branding’s Dirty Secret.