Steve Jobs and Charles Eames were keynote speakers at the International Design Conference in Aspen, in the late 70s. Jobs presented a view of the future where streams of information would be racing towards us like water from a 1,000 fire hoses. Charles Eames, speaking a day later, suggested that information is not the same as intelligence or understanding.

A few years later John Massey was being interviewed, on stage, at an AIGA/Chicago event. Toward the end of the evening John was asked, What is the most important quality a designer should have? His answer, awareness.

Our approach to design and how we do what we do is shaped by understanding and awareness. To us design is both the process and a product. In the same way that work is both a place and an activity.

This methodology may not be exclusive to Essex Two, however we have embraced it as culturally defining.

Joseph Michael Essex, Managing Partner

O B S E R A T I O N S : Why Most Mergers and Acquisitions Fail to Deliver

A classic study by the Wall Street Journal suggests that a significant percentage of corporate mergers and acquisitions fail to deliver on expectations. The caveat here is the word EXPECTATIONS. The unspoken question is, Whose expectations? The answer? Almost everyone’s. 

Mergers and acquisitions carry with them an implied promise of lowering the costs of doing business, thus assuring the success of the merging. However, success is not a by-product of cost management. Numbers alone are doomed to disappoint, because it’s almost impossible to save one’s way to success.

Mergers fail to deliver on expectations because they do too little to integrate the cultures of the different organizations being brought together. Identifying the cultural principles shared by the merging entities can unite even the most bitter of rivals. 

Applying the process of Cultural Branding™ will identify those values, traits and artifacts that are shared by those merging, even as early as the due diligence phase of acquisition. And, by creating communication initiatives and devices that move seemingly intractable competitors toward one another, mergers can result in a well-integrated team of players all focused on achieving the same objectives. 

Former competitors, now colleagues, will soon come to appreciate one another and recognize that they can achieve their shared goals and objectives by cooperation and collaboration.

We’ve had a great deal of success helping diverse organizations focus their efforts toward achieving specific communication goals.

O B S E R V A T I O N S : Why Organizations Change Their Trademarks

There are four fundamental reasons organizations feel the need to change their current trademarks; Vanity, Disaster, Boredom, and Evolution.

VANITY is simply the desire of senior executives to put their mark on the organizations they lead, as though changing a trademark is as inconsequential as changing a tie.

DISASTER is when a plane crash, criminal conduct is uncovered, or negligence causing illness, injury or death is so catastrophic as to require a radical image overhaul. 

BOREDOM occurs when people inside a company have looked at the same trademark for so long they think customers are as bored as they are. Boredom also occurs with newer employees who see the current trademark as a relic of the past rather than a symbol of continuity and loyalty.

EVOLUTION is when the nature and culture of an organization has changed over time, so much so that how and why the company does what it does no longer reflects today’s reality.

Of course, the best reason for changing a trademark is to acknowledge the growth and development of an organization over time. Remember, customers will recognize the difference between meaningful change and what which is disingenuous.

There are other reasons for changing a trademark if only to improve the quality of reproduce for new media. But, let’s not forget that a well-designed mark mirrors the values and culture of an organization. A trademark is just as much about character and reputation as the new and the different. 

Good trademarks carry with them the equity of familiarity, shared memories, and experiences. We’ve helped many diverse organizations achieve success by refreshing the appearance of well-exposed trademarks as well as creating next generation images for organizations beginning their second or third acts. 

O B S E R V A T I O N S : Why Re-examine Your Choices?

In the Spring of 1983 Vanity Fair Magazine came back into circulation. An early addition struck me like lighting, from the newsstand. The cover was designed and photographed by the artist David Hockney. It was a photo of his feet strutting out from a boat dock, over a lake in Gérardmer, France.

The SOCKS! I said it out loud. One red, the other yellow. This was great. Immediately I was struck by the idea, why did socks have to match? Why did they have to be the same color? Why can’t I think about things in new ways all the time, to back up, to start from scratch and re-examine old choices in new ways. 

It isn’t that all previous choices are inherently wrong but things do change and we are not conditioned to regularly re-examine decisions we may have made decades ago. To the contrary, many see examining the past as being indecisive, weak, even disloyal.

However, the two different colored socks idea has become a daily reminder that I can change my mind based on new information or changing conditions. I don’t have to let inertia or worse habit inhibit my ability to consider making deliberate and meaningful choices for myself or our clients. 

Since 1983 I’ve chosen to wear two different colored socks to remind me everyday that I’ve given myself permission to think in new ways. Further more, I should acknowledge and accept change as a constant, continuously examining the past in the context of the present. 

While you may not want to adopt the two colored socks regime you may want to let yourself off the hook or habit, every now and then.

O B S E R V A T I O N S : Why Do Some Names Relate and Others Negate?

Shakespeare wrote, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Gertrude Stein wrote, “A rose, is a rose, is a rose.” Shakespeare implies that names should make little difference in how something is valued. Stein suggests that a thing’s name can only be itself. Here in lies the two principal camps for the naming of new products.

Before any formal introduction, there is awareness: how something looks. If we see a sleek new vehicle named the “Cayenne” we can easily expect it to be a hot and spicy car. The name connects with the image. In this way the name contributes to a better understanding of the product’s implied promise. When a connection is made between the product and its name, there is a good chance the new product will receive an opportunity to deliver on that promise. On the other hand, there is another point of view.

Generally, the pharmaceutical industry and their lawyers seeks to avoid the possibility of legal entanglements by constructing names that neither reflect the purpose nor the promise of their products. If a connection between the product and its name is not made, or worse, misunderstood, more marketing dollars will be required if that product is ever to be taken seriously.

In the name game, there are no easy answers. Hard, smart work is demanded.Tightly defined communication parameters along with experience and expertise are required if new products are to have any opportunity for success. Like most refined skills, from driving a race car to teaching anything, what looks easy is far more difficult (even for smart people) at the professional level. 

O B S E R V A T I O N S : Bourbon is whiskey but all whiskey isn’t bourbon.

Art is design, yet design isn’t art.

In 1965, Congress determined that anything labeled bourbon had to be made in the US from at least 51% corn, aged in new, charred oak barrels for at least 2 years, and without added coloring or flavoring of any kind. In this case the differences between bourbon and whiskey are well legislated. That can’t be said for the differences between art and design.

Art is a noun. Art is created by artists to express their individual visions. The act of creating art is design. 

Design is a verb. Design is created by designers to connect clients with their audiences. Art is an essential element of design.

Like art and design, bourbon and whiskey share common attributes and ingredients. They have a similar nature and character. Yet in their finished application they are each fundamentally different. After bourbon is aged and bottled the barrels are shipped to Scotland to age scotch whiskey. Bourbon is the parent of whiskey. Art is the parent of design.

If done properly, art is transformed into design. Art connects with audiences at a primal level, unconsciously, viscerally and in the process of designing, ideas are transformed into information, encounters into relationships, and awareness into engagement.

Those of us who practice the application of design, connecting ideas with audiences, are simultaneously in awe of and empowered by the familial and symbiotic relationship between art and design.

O B S E R V A T I O N S : Just Like Finding Fifth Gear.

You understand how gears work, don’t you? They’re mechanisms that transfer, hard earned, now spent energy into moving forward, becoming momentum. As energy is continuously expended and one gear is exchanged for another, we not only move faster, we need less energy to do so.

Here’s the thing, even thou the energy is spent, used, exchanged for forward movement we haven’t lost it, we’ve earned it. It becomes part of us as independent vehicles. We carry with us the energy expended in the acquisition and collection of the experiences we’ve had throughout our travels and choices. These experiences, as they accumulate, exponentially deliver greater performance with less effort and even greater control.

Now, because less energy is required to maintain momentum the same amount of energy that produced the movement can now be used to increase performance. This is when we discover a place, a point of balance, where our efforts produce meaningful results, perspective. Like riding in an open car or at the bow of a sail boat in open waters, the feeling of moving without effort is accentuated. This is when the instant access to our experiences shifts into expertise. At this time, when perspective is achieved and expertise is evident, can be our most productive, if only we remember to keep moving forward. To do that, we must do more than accept change, we must embrace it as we’ve always done, looking for forward, for what is next.

O B S E R V A T I O N S : Why Organizations Change Their Trademarks

There are four fundamental reasons organizations feel the need to change their current trademarks; Vanity, Disaster, Boredom, and Evolution.

VANITY is simply the desire of senior executives to put their mark on the organizations they lead, as though changing a trademark is as inconsequential as changing a tie.

DISASTER is when a plane crash, criminal conduct is uncovered, or negligence causing illness, injury or death is so catastrophic as to require a radical image overhaul. 

BOREDOM occurs when people inside a company have looked at the same trademark for so long they think customers are as bored as they are. Boredom also occurs with newer employees who see the current trademark as a relic of the past rather than a symbol of continuity and loyalty.

EVOLUTION is when the nature and culture of an organization has changed over time, so much so that how and why the company does what it does no longer reflects today’s reality.

Of course, the best reason for changing a trademark is to acknowledge the growth and development of an organization over time. Remember, customers will recognize the difference between meaningful change and what which is disingenuous. There are other reasons for changing a trademark if only to improve the quality of reproduce for new media. But, let’s not forget that a well-designed mark mirrors the values and culture of an organization. A trademark is just as much about character and reputation as the new and the different. Good trademarks carry with them the equity of familiarity, shared memories, and experiences. We’ve helped many diverse organizations achieve success by refreshing the appearance of well-exposed trademarks as well as creating next generation images for organizations beginning their second or third acts. 

O B S E R V A T I O N S : Is perfection achievable? If so, how so ? If not, why not?

Dodgers pitcher Orel Hershiser finished the 1988 baseball season with a record 59 consecutive scoreless innings, 23 wins and an ERA of 2.26. He executed one of the all-time great seasons that year. Hershiser would start each game with the goal of achieving total control: winning by pitching a perfect game. If a batter got a hit, Hershiser gave up on total control and set a new goal to pitch a one–hitter. If another batter got on base, he revised his goal again, always keeping in mind that winning the game was the ultimate objective. Rather than a compromise or a rationalization, surrendered control allowed Hershiser to focus his efforts on achieving the best possible outcome: a win for himself and his team. He realized there is always more than one way to win, and a win may come in unexpected forms.

Ultimately, expecting to have total control means that complete success is always just out of reach — there’s no such thing as perfect. But with enough effort, energy and discipline, we can achieve anything. And by surrendering the concept of total control, we can enjoy surprising — and sometimes superior — results.

The definition for the word design is to PLAN; a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something. For many outside of the DESIGN profession, the word design is about the appearance of something; its look or style. For practitioners, Design is about both.

Design as a PROCESS: is a methodology, a protocol and/or a plan. A plan with clearly defined and prioritized goals and objectives, with methods and media identified and articulated for achieving those goals and objectives. Design as a PRODUCT; creates, produces and delivers material for the identified media. The material produced is prepared and presented in ways and by means to achieve those same goals and objectives.

This experience is essentially the same for all serious design offices. However, the size and organizational structures of different offices will FIT different designers, differently at different times in their design careers.

Each structure shapes how a particular office performs. Clients may never notice a significant difference between structures. However, designers who work in two or more of these different organizational structures will be dramatically shaped by those experiences.

Metaphorically speaking The Pyramid, The Picket Fence, The Wagon Wheel and The Tool Box represent the four ways in which most design offices are managed. Future missives will address how the different organizational structures effect how those offices, do what they do, for their clients and their client’s audiences as well as the advantages and disadvantages for design personnel in each of those different offices.

O B S E R V A T I O N S : The Pyramid

It is said that, in the early 60’s in Milan, Massimo Vignelli and Giulio Cittato kept 25 young designers busy implementing their designs. This top-down Pyramid structure of a design office was a direct reflection of the master/apprentice relationship adapted from the Italian Renaissance that began in the 14th century. The only real difference between today’s Pyramid structured design office is that in the Renaissance; parents paid the masters to take-on their children. Today’s novice/intern is paid little or nothing for the experience of associating with their “masters.”

This symbiotic relationship delivers a direct benefit to beginning designers by providing them with a learning-bridge; helping them understand how to apply what they’ve learned in college. The principal of the design office gains relatively inexpensive arms and legs to implement their ideas, even though a great deal of time and supervision is required to maintain the quality of the work produced. The clients benefit by receiving quality work without the additional expense needed to attract and retain an experienced design staff. The disadvantage to the Pyramid structured design office is that frequent turnover is built into the equation. Young people soon want an opportunity to work directly with clients; to present and implement their own solutions. However, the real hidden benefit to beginners, principals and clients is that the energy and enthusiasm of a younger staff bring new ideas, unburdened by self-censorship, into an environment that could become lethargic by doing the expected.

A Pyramid’s shadow, like mountains along the Mediterranean, produces fertile soil that stimulates exceptional growth.

O B S E R V A T I O N S : The Picket Fence

A white picket fence surrounding a suburban home once represented the American dream. The elements of that fence (the posts, pickets and rails) also represent a metaphor for a dream design office; The Picket Fence.

A fence, as a design office, also consisted of posts, pickets and rails. The POST carries the weight and stability of the office, supporting the pickets and the rails. These are well established, senior designers, experts with titles like Creative Directors, Design Directors, Director of Communication etc.

The vertical PICKETS represent designers with some meaningful experience, possibly as a sole proprietor, right out of school and/or those with more than a few years working for others. For the most part they work independently and vertically. They manage almost every aspect of the assignment, from first client interviews, through the exploration process, to and throughout the implementation stage.

The RAILS are positioned perpendicular to the pickets. Both the top and bottom rails represent groups (not designers) supporting and facilitating the efforts and energies of the designers. The rails manage the logistical, clerical, sales and accounting needs of the individual designers and the design office.

Clients benefit because they get the complete attention and initiative of an individual fully dedicated to serving them and the needs of their audiences under the supervision of an experienced and actively engaged principal. While, over time all of the mid-level designers will grow creatively, some will become partners, some will open their own offices and others will move into any number of creative endeavors.

The Picket Fence structure protects and nurtures talented individuals while they focus on productive and relevant solutions

O B S E R V A T I O N S : The Wagon Wheel

In the 1540s, in England, the “Company of Barbers” and the “Fellowship of Surgeons” joined together to form the “Company of Barber-Surgeons”. Surely they joined because they both needed access to sharp tools and bandages.

Eventually surgeons became general practitioners (GPs) treating the whole patient. GPs gave way to specialists, addressing every individual body part. Specialists joined together forming medical or group practices sharing office space, technical and support staff, equipment as well as supplies, accounting and marketing services. The Wagon Wheel structured design office represents this same group practice idea.

The Wagon Wheel structured offices (individual spokes/disciplines, supporting the hub and rim/facilities and expenses) generally, but not always, consist of graphic designers, industrial designers, interior designers, architectural designers and related services. Each would work independent of one another, yet occasionally, collaborating.

The opportunity for collaboration between design groups works best for strategically sophisticated clients that recognize the importance of an integrated communication initiative. The caveat here is for the client that insists on assuming the role of wagon master. They may not fully appreciate the difference between a wagon wheel and a wagon and a wagon train.

The Wagon Wheel structured design office requires balancing and nurturing of relationships between group leaders and the individuals within each group. These are talented and extensively experienced professionals with egos and agendas. Creative and diligent leadership is mandatory for any long-term/generational success.

The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line. However, if the destination isn’t shared by those on the journey, it doesn’t help to get there quickly.
In the 1540s, in England, the “Company of Barbers” and the “Fellowship of Surgeons” joined together to form the “Company of Barber-Surgeons”. Surely they joined because they both needed access to sharp tools and bandages.

Eventually surgeons became general practitioners (GPs) treating the whole patient. GPs gave way to specialists, addressing every individual body part. Specialists joined together forming medical or group practices sharing office space, technical and support staff, equipment as well as supplies, accounting and marketing services. The Wagon Wheel structured design office represents this same group practice idea.

The Wagon Wheel structured offices (individual spokes/disciplines, supporting the hub and rim/facilities and expenses) generally, but not always, consist of graphic designers, industrial designers, interior designers, architectural designers and related services. Each would work independent of one another, yet occasionally, collaborating.

The opportunity for collaboration between design groups works best for strategically sophisticated clients that recognize the importance of an integrated communication initiative. The caveat here is for the client that insists on assuming the role of wagon master. They may not fully appreciate the difference between a wagon wheel and a wagon and a wagon train.

The Wagon Wheel structured design office requires balancing and nurturing of relationships between group leaders and the individuals within each group. These are talented and extensively experienced professionals with egos and agendas. Creative and diligent leadership is mandatory for any long-term/generational success.

The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line. However, if the destination isn’t shared by those on the journey, it doesn’t help to get there quickly.

O B S E R V A T I O N S : The Tool Box

A carpenter’s tool box contains tools designed to accomplish specific tasks. Tools may vary from craftsmen to craftsmen. But, if they’re in the box, they’re necessary. The Tool Box structured design office is prepared along the same lines, individuals with specific skills are selected to accomplish specific tasks.

MANAGERS define what needs to be accomplished. RESEARCHERS gather content, identify and analyze audiences. STRATEGISTS translate the content into objectives. Parameters are refined, measured and recommendations evaluated. CONCEPTUALIST prepare and test language and images. They will recommend methods and media to deliver the content, designed to connect with the identified audience(s). IMPLEMENTERS prepared and produce the core messages/images for delivery. APPLICATIONS deliver the content to the designated audiences, fitting like a key into a lock. Throughout the process these experts will meet many, many times to present the results of their efforts for evaluation and measurement against establish goals.

The Tool Box structured design offices tends to be larger with larger clients, addressing larger more complex issues, requiring multi phased solutions over longer time periods. More than just finding and hiring talented individuals, managers must also hire those willing to trust the collaboration protocol. Each member of the team is dependent on one another to accomplish their individual tasks.

The smaller Pyramid structured design office will follow a similar protocol to that applied by the Tool Box structured design office. The difference is that each of the individual skills wills be applied by one experienced expert, a master with a Swiss Army Knife™.

O B S E R V A T I O N S : Like Diamonds, Design Has Its Own 4Cs

For centuries the value of a diamond has been judged by appraising individual characteristics, using the 4Cs methodology to measure its quality. COLOR: A diamond’s color grade refers to the lack of color. The more colorless the diamond, the higher quality grade it will receive. CUT: The cut of a diamond determines its brilliance. Put simply, the better a diamond is cut, the more sparkle it will have. CLARITY: Almost all diamonds have tiny imperfections. Diamonds with few or no imperfections receive the highest clarity grades. CARAT: This is the term with which people are most familiar, but bear in mind that carat is specifically a measure of a diamond’s weight. The quality of any design undertaking can also be evaluated by it’s own set of 4Cs.

CONTENT: This refers to the quality of the information obtained to identify, articulate and prioritize specific communication goals and objectives. This also produces a language for measuring any and all proposed solutions. CONTEXT: Here is where content lives; with the audiences, environments and systems it is designed to engage and motivate. Once identified, messages and tactics can be tailored and positioned using the vernacular appropriate to that audience. CONDUIT: Content is delivered to its intended audience using a carefully selected communication device, designed to significantly contribute to its acceptance. The content will arrive in ways and places where the audience is best prepared to consider it. CATALYST: The communication device is designed in such a way as to accelerate the rate of the exchange. Awareness becomes understanding, after which acceptance and familiarity may evolve into loyalty.

Quality design is achieved by constructing a process of exploration, examination and application that is unique to each individual endeavor, yet consistent in accomplishing a defined aspiration. More than strategically balanced and aesthetic engaging, this process is applicable to every human endeavor.

O B S E R V A T I O N S : Begin at the Very Beginning

Clients will hire a design office for one of four reasons. “Okay, take the next part slowly.”

BOX 01: they don’t know what they want and they don’t know what they need. BOX 02: they think they know what they want but they don’t know what they need. BOX 03: they think they know what they need but they don’t know what they want. BOX 04: they think they know what they need and they think they know what they want.

For whatever reason they tell themselves, clients hire designers to produce something they don’t feel they can produce themselves. At the same time, clients think they have everything they need, to get what the want from the designer they hire. Many/Mosts clients come to designers already in the BOX 04. They are infinity confident; they know what they need and want. They just need someone to do it for them.

This is not a scenario unique to the design profession. In fact, disciplines requiring skill, experience and some level expertise almost all serve those who think they know best. This is not to suggest that many/most clients aren’t intelligent. To the contrary, almost all clients, in one way or another, are themselves professionals. It’s not that they don’t know what they want or need, they just don’t know more then those with the expertise they plan hire.

Once hired the first task of the professionals is to determine (through Socratic process) in which box is their client. Preconceived notions are set aside, assumptions and past experiences are considered in a current context and are either affirmed or left in the past. Knowing precisely where your client is, is paramount, if there is any hope of getting them achieve their goals and objectives

Designers will never know the business of their clients better than they do. Designers best serve their clients, doing what they do, helping clients connect with those they hope to influence.

Words and Pictures

HERB LUBALIN sat at his board, leaning over a drawing pad, applying his informal yet iterative process to the design of a publication. At some point he would tear the page off the pad and place it under the next translucent sheet. Herb trace out the drawing underneath, changing some elements, repositioning others. He would continue this exercise until he was satisfied with the result.

While, in most cases the copy was furnished, he would apply his process to the copy as well. Occasionally he would rewrite few words or sentences, tailoring them to connect more with the images. Most, if not all of time, his clients were pleased. On this day, without looking up he said “designers should be designing the words as well as the images, telling stories so that everything works better together.

After ordering lunch at his favorite Asian restaurant LOU DORFSMAN handed his menu back to the waiter, looked across the table and finished his thought. “Designers? I never go to lunch with fucking designers, all they ever talk about is fucking design. Salesmen, teachers even bookies have more interest things to say. They know how to get your attention and then tell you a story you won’t forget.”

Speaking to the 11 person jury, at the Chicago International Poster Biennial, JOHN MASSEY wanted to help focus their collective efforts toward selecting the medal winning finalists. He asked the jury to think of the poster as a circle, but only that was only 95% complete. “For the poster to be successful the audience must be able to finish it, making the connections and completing the story the designer was trying to tell”.

Stories don’t have to be “story book” stories but they do have to engage, position, connect and deliver a reason why viewers should care. When the words and the pictures share a vision and a vernacular a connection is made and remembered. Whether “classical or extraordinary” the viewers will learn something real about those attempting to say some real.

I Hate “GRAPHIC” Design

Yes, I hate graphic design or at least I hate the categorization of being a GRAPHIC designer.

Consider this. The best actors don’t think of themselves as television actors or movie actors or theater actors. They see themselves as actors. In fact, most actors consider the name gender neutral. Each performance, within each theatrical medium, contributes to developing expertise without regard for the size or proximity of the audience.

In the same way, good designers should be capable of developing and applying a process unique to each challenge, across any and all applications. Those designers that begin by defining the task to be accomplished, rather than a product to be produced can design anything, from cars to dresses, tableware to trademarks and books to commercials. Designers, should not and are not, limited by assumptions, assertions and/or the categorization of design by the deliverable.

Some designers, Terry Irwin, one of the founding partners of MetaDesign, now Director of the Transition Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, has gone from the micro, to the macro, to the galactical. She and he cadre of Masters and Doctoral students are exploring the next generation of design, applying principles and practice tools to some of the worlds “wickedest” problems.

Anything is possible when design principals are considered and applied in the context of an objective to be achieved with ideas worthy of exploration.

O B S E R V A T I O N S : What is Good Design?

Good design is like a bespoke suit; made to fit one person, to serve his purpose, to support her efforts. In every way, good design is a prototype: it is planned, prepared, packaged and presented to accomplish a specific and measurable task. Good design, crosses all disciplines, even those that may not be visual or material. Good design begins with meaningful communication between the designer and the client. Together they define the goals and objectives to be accomplished, along with the values and character traits being introduced to their intended audiences.

This communication exists on multiple levels; visceral, primal, emotional as well as strategic, theoretical and psychological. It is here where the spoken and unspoken wants and needs of the different audiences are identified and addressed. This happens when words and images are prepared to attract and hold the attention of individual audiences members; from initial awareness, to loyal relationship. Good design is achieved when the end products truly reflects authentic ideas and attributives by engaging hearts and minds, while encouraging active participation. Good design is never too expensive when it achieves its purpose.

Occasionally, under the microphone image, O B S E R V A T I O N S will speak directly to the personal peeves and/or petty, persnickety, preferences of the author.

A natural Sunday morning calm had the emergency room at St. Louis University Hospital almost asleep when it was rocked awake by a crash of thunder followed by electronic snapping and popping from the center’s shortwave system. Usually, the outside voice at the other end was from one of thirteen emergency vehicles that supports the hospital. This time it was the fire department. The voice was calm and dispassionate, as though it were not a person saying such terrible words.

“About thirty people” – he was not sure exactly how many – “men, women and children, are on their way to the hospital from 22 miles away.” They were coming in four private cars, two small pickup trucks, a caterer’s delivery van and four fire department vehicles.

The victims were all members of the Good Samaritan Baptist Church Choir. The church was over one hundred years old and in the process of being renovated. That day’s services were to be followed by a fundraising picnic and raffle in the parking lot of the church. This would have been the first time many of the parishioners had seen the progress of the renovation.

The choir came very early to practice since they had not met as a group for some time. With the church under repair, they had had no place to rehearse. They moved from the parking lot when it started to drizzle to what would soon be the new choir loft. This was also to have been the first time in almost a year that the adult and children’s choir were to sing together.

The loft was not ready for that many people singing so joyfully. As the rain came down, so did the loft and the roof and part of one wall and thirty-two members of the Good Samaritan Baptist Church. It was terrible.

Lumber, drywall and all nature of building materials were either below or on top of the choir. The choir was so intertwined and off balance that it looked more like a box of dolls chucked in with the firewood than people. At first it was quiet except for the rain, and then the thunder came, then the cries and groans that can only come from people suffering the anguish of first pain for themselves, then for each other.

Fortunately, the volunteer firehouse that served Montgomery County was across the street and several members of the company were already on their way. They provided what help they could but they knew they needed to move and move quickly. As the caravan of mercy led by its 25-year-old hook and ladder got closer to the hospital, the rain came down harder and the thunder and lightening grew more frequent.

When they reached the hospital the doctors and nurses from the emergency room were ready. That is, they were ready for the people, not the victims. Many of the injuries were quite serious. Even those whose circumstances were not critical were in a great deal of pain.

The staff moved quickly, assessing which patients needed attention first and moving them almost directly to surgery, where members of the senior medical staff of the University were waiting. They were notified only moments after the emergency call was received.

The most serious case was Daniel Seay. He had multiple injuries, several broken ribs, and a small piece of loose angle iron, used to support the wooden cross beams, protruding from his lower back, near his kidney. Additionally, after he had fallen, something or someone landed on his neck, paralyzing his lower body.

One of the firemen stabilized his head so it wouldn’t move but had him on his side rather than on his back because of the protruding metal.

Daniel’s back was to the surgeon as he was moved into the operating room. He was already unconscious and breathing via machines. The surgical team first had to establish if there was any damage to the kidney or any other internal organs.

Daniel was lucky, if this day for him could ever be called lucky. No kidney damage, and what there was could be easily repaired. A new problem occurred when he was ever so carefully lifted onto his back.

The senior surgeon, the chief of the neurosurgical team and head of the Neurological Department of the hospital and the University said, “Oh no, I can’t operate on this patient. He’s my son.”

Dr. Shawn W. Seay was both stunned and afraid, first for a son, then for a patient. The doctor could no longer continue to help Daniel because of both professional and ethical guidelines. The talented senior surgeon, awarded and certified more than any other doctor in the state, was now just a parent, waiting, waiting, waiting.

There was a phone call to be made. Someone else needed to know about Daniel’s condition. Dr. Seay went to the office and hit the speed dial feature on the phone for home. “Daniel’s in surgery, it’s very serious, Get down here now. Please hurry.”

After what felt like days, the doorway to Dr. Seay’s office was filled with a figure dripping wet, silhouetted by the light from the outer office. They hugged, more to feel and be felt than for support and reassurance. “How is he?”

“He’s in intensive care. We should know by this evening.”

By 7:30 that evening his vital signs had returned to near normal and his systems all appeared to be recovering, but they could not tell how much disability he might have to live with.

As his parents stood over him on either side of his bed, Daniel started to wake, slowly, as though his internal systems were being turned on like a pilot flipping on one switch at a time in a preflight warm-up of his plane. Still dazed he reached his hand toward his doctor. “Hi, mom.”

Yes, his doctor was his mother. Most people assume his doctor was his father.

The old joke about the word assume is that it makes an ass out of u and me. Assumptions are intellectual shorthand that condense experience and past choices into faux facts. Most businesses are managed by assumptions, not consciously, but historically. The decisions and choices that are made to guide the future of many companies are formed using non-technical data, human experiences that address more how things were the last time than how they might be this time.

There are so many options to choose from in our everyday life. Sometimes after we make a choice we assume that the elements that helped us to select that particular option will always stay the same. We assume that the conditions that helped us to understand and appreciate the circumstances around a particular choice will stay consistent.

For example, just because a university has several prestigious graduates from the class of 1965, does not mean the faculty and facilities that helped shape and develop those alumni are still there and performing as they did years ago. The university may not necessarily be the same.

Constant change is a normal part of both business and personal life. However, because people often try to ignore the unstable, the disconcerting, the annoying, even the fearful aspects of change, we choose to be soothed by the cold compress of assumption.

Buckminster Fuller said in both his opening and closing remarks of an almost three hour presentation, “Change is normal, change is normal, change is normal. I say this to you three times so you might come to appreciate its truth.”

Only when assumptions are examined and reassessed can we hope to make business and communication choices based on how things are, not how we assume they are.

It’s late afternoon in Florence, early April, 1504, in a small, poorly lit sculpture studio. The sculptor is Michelangelo Buonarroti, and he has just completed a thirteen foot sculpture of the Bible’s giant-killer, David.

The room is small and crowded with well-dressed, well-educated, well-fed and well-off people. They are seeing the sculpture for the first time. Like a flock of nesting geese, the discussion is heated and unintelligible.

A fine dust covers everything in the room except the onlookers, who make every effort not to touch anything. As time passes, the conversations between the critics move from rhetorical questions to negative criticism of the work.

One group questions the selection of the subject. Another is not sure what’s in David’s hand, and a third group wonders out loud if the money spent for the sculpture – and particularly the expensive marble – could not have been better used to create a fountain that could at least water the livestock.

But the most vehement criticism comes from Giacomo di Medici, the youngest member of the wealthy family who commissioned the work. Although he was only in his early twenties, he had already demonstrated a talent for finance and was thought of by many – including himself – to be a hot property and rising star in the family business.

“His nose is too big,” he said. Giacomo felt that the nose on the sculpture was not representative of the fine aquiline noses that distinguished the well-to-do families of Florence.

“It is a grotesque nose, one that insults the people of Florence and particularly my family.” He demanded that it be altered and made less offensive, or the sculpture would be removed from the city and destroyed.

The mood of the crowd changed from concern to agreement. Their collective protests grew louder and more intense until Michelangelo could no longer tolerate the noise.

He stood in the open doorway between his living quarters and the studio. He appeared calm but inside he seethed.

He walked purposefully through the crowd towards this vocal young man. A few steps before reaching Giacomo, the master bent over and picked up his hammer and chisels from a mound of marble dust on a work bench. He didn’t look at his hands grasping the tools; his eyes were focused on those of his critic. The cackling flock grew quiet as they anticipated what might become a violent confrontation. Giacomo became rigid, like the sculpture.

As the two men faced one another, Michelangelo reached over his critic’s shoulder to retrieve a flimsy work ladder. Without a word he moved toward his sculpture in the crowded but now silent studio, hammer and chisel in one hand and ladder in the other.

Quickly he was at the top of the ladder and hammering his chisel into David’s nose. Clouds of dust swirled up around him. The room was becoming thick with it. The dust settled over the sculptor and his work, into the creases on the faces of the onlookers, and of course, onto Giacomo.

As quickly as the hammering had started it stopped. Without acknowledging anyone in the group, Michelangelo descended his ladder and removed himself and his tools from the studio. Giacomo looked at David’s nose and started to smile. He smiled the smile of satisfaction. Others began to share his smile as they looked from David’s nose to Giacomo, to each other.

They left the studio collectively, honking the geese noises they had displayed earlier in the day. They were walking the walk that can only come from self-satisfaction and a sense of superiority.

The last to leave were the master’s two young assistants. Carlo was smiling as he looked at David’s nose. Anthony was dismayed and disillusioned at what appeared to be the acquiescence of his master. He was also a little surprised to see a pleasant smile coming from Carlo.

“How can you be so pleased to see our master disgrace himself?” he asked. Carlo turned to Anthony, smiling a knowing smile, and said, “It’s only dust. He didn’t change a thing.”

This story could be viewed as a devious attempt to manipulate the public, to manage their feelings and control their actions. It could also be seen as a method for teaching a lesson to know-it-alls who have money and no taste, power without purpose, but it isn’t.

The real meaning of the story is simple: perception is reality. If we believe something is so, then it is. If others agree, it becomes reality. Agreement becomes truth. Therefore, if we want to correct a perception, we must address the perception, not the reality it has become.

Most corporate, commercial and personal communication is about presenting information in ways that promote understanding and foster participation. Acknowledging and defining what people know as well as what they perceive is not a game. Success in this arena comes from honesty and a willingness to share information. The rewards are well worth the effort, with returns in more then money.

Michael Sandro was a young man in the early 1970s, if not in years, then certainly in ideas and energy. He spent many of his early years pursuing baseball success. But his career as a professional major league pitcher essentially ended one hot, dry, midwest September afternoon.

By the third inning, Michael had already thrown sixty hard pitches when it should have been thirty. As he delivered a high, inside fast ball just out of the strike zone he heard a snap, like a brown paper bag being popped. The sound was followed by a slow moving fire that began in his shoulder and traveled throughout the rest of his body. That afternoon Michael Sandro moved out of the dugout and onto the bleachers.

Six seasons later while delivering the high hard ones for UPS, he met 18-year-old Steve Gunderson in the mail room at Sears. Steve was not that big, just short of six feet and maybe 180 pounds. There was nothing special about his appearance except for his walk. It wasn’t a particular step or limp, or even a John Wayne swagger. It was liquid.

In a conversation one afternoon, more in order to avoid returning to an un-air-conditioned truck than a real need for intelligent exchange, Michael learned that Steve liked “throwing” baseballs.

The next day, Michael questioned Steve about his “throwing.” Steve told him that when he was six he discovered a discarded drum filled with very old, very brown baseballs in 18 inches of collected rainwater. The drum was under a pile of broken down bleachers that were part of a field which had been used by the old Negro baseball league. Some of the baseballs were so water-logged that they flattened like balls of wet string, which is what they had become.

After two or three weeks of drying out on Steve’s back porch railing, most of them were almost as hard as new. As an only child growing up in farm country, kids, much less friends, were scarce. So Steve fell into a routine of school, chores and throwing. Since there was no one to throw the balls back once he threw them, he put an old wheelbarrow up against their galvanized storage shed where Steve’s father kept everything he wanted to keep that should have been thrown away. The balls would hit the shed and drop into the wheelbarrow. When it was full, Steve would move the wheelbarrow to where he was just throwing, dump the balls and replace the wheelbarrow.

While Steve liked the throwing part, what he really liked were the sounds. First the woosh of the ball in the air, then a thunk of the galvanized wall, followed almost immediately by a metallic echo from inside the shed, to the clunk rattle of the ball in the wheelbarrow. Woosh, thunk, clunk, rattle, over and over again. This was how Steve spent his summers. Woosh-thunk-clunk-rattle, woosh-thunk-clunk-rattle. To make things more interesting he would speed up or slow down the process: woooosh, thhunkk, cllunnk, rattttle. Sometimes he would move closer to the shed, sometimes farther away to vary the sound. Summer followed summer and years followed years. After a while, it wasn’t just the summers, but every day it didn’t rain, sometimes even when it did. By the time he was sixteen and almost fully grown, he wasn’t throwing baseballs. He was making music.

On his next delivery to Sears, Steve ran out to the truck with a ball and two gloves, insisting that he and Mike have a game of catch. The idea of Steve getting to toss the ball around with a former major leaguer, no matter how brief the career, was too much for him to resist.

Michael agreed; it made him feel special again. He reared back and steamed one into the kid’s glove. To his surprise and disappointment, it didn’t seem to bother him at all.

Steve’s return pitch took hold of Michael’s glove with a snap. The snap was the sound of two bones in Michael’s hand breaking.

This wasn’t fast. He had a step up on fast. Even in Michael’s intense pain he knew that this was not an ordinary young man with a normal talent. He was a natural.

That evening at the emergency room Michael called a baseball scout at his old team, the same man who helped him get his tryout in the “show.” He told Sid about Michael’s fast ball and exactly where and how many bones were broken. Sid was on a plane that evening.

This could be a story with a very happy ending. It could, but it’s not. Steve could throw all right, fast and straight. The ball would go where he wanted it to fast, very fast. The scout and the next two professional major league catchers who tried to catch his fast ball also broke bones in their hands.

Okay, so he throws a little slower... no dice. The slower he threw the less control he had. Only when he gave it everything could he control the ball’s flight. If there had been a way to make a career out of this boy’s talents, the money people in baseball would have found it.

Most communication turns on the same premise. If your message cannot be prepared in a way people can perceive it, it doesn’t make a difference how clever or creative it is. If the message is not understood and appreciated by its primary audience, it’s just so much wind whistling by.

Great products can usually overcome a lackluster presentation. The Walkman would have succeeded had it been sold on street corners. But why take that chance? In this competitive environment, most new products and companies need to be prepared, packaged and presented in ways that focus attention on the qualities they represent and the benefits to the customer.

It is naïve to assume that superior products and services will prosper without an aggressive, intelligent communication and awareness program that helps their potential customers recognize and appreciate the virtues and values inherent in their assets.

The ideas of Christopher Columbus were more monumental than any of his discoveries.

Most of us born just before World War II as well as the baby boomer generation born just after, were taught that “in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” This was also the time when the notion that Columbus may not have discovered the New World was being presented. In fact, many suggest that it’s ludicrous to credit any individual with the discovery of a continent already inhabited by an entire culture.

Political correctness aside, it is not important who discovered what when. What is important is why. Why did Columbus go? Why did he spend most of his life either in pursuit of funds to test his idea or living with the consequences of his discovery? Most of the questions were explained by Columbus himself upon his first return to Spain from America.

The news of his return preceded Columbus by several days. Smaller, faster ships met him at sea, provided supplies and returned to Spain with word of his arrival. When he arrived on shore, he still had to cover a tedious distance over land before he could present himself and his discoveries to his benefactor, the Queen.

This gave the Queen more than enough time to prepare an elaborate homecoming celebration. No detail was overlooked. The finest foods and wines were delivered. The castle and the grounds were prepared as though a visit from the Pope himself was expected. This all needed to be done for a variety of reasons. There was an enormous I-told-you-so that the Queen had for almost everyone in the royal court, including the King, and it needed to be said without actually saying the words. This level of celebration said it loud and clear.

People and egos being what they are, in Columbus’s time as well as today, nobody liked to have an I-told-you-so hanging over his head. To dilute the Queen’s triumph, several of the ministers who spoke against the Columbus exploration started a rumor. They said that while what Columbus did was significant, in a way it was inevitable that someone would have bumped into the New World eventually, even if by accident. By the time of the dinner in the great hall, everyone was feeling quite smug and self-satisfied, to the point that several ministers were openly hostile and sarcastic toward Columbus.

He was again alone with his ideas, without support. As the dinner went on, the Queen, almost in desperation, asked Columbus to respond to these comments. He was seated at the head table next to the Queen with over thirty ministers and bureaucrats all around him. He stood up and called for the chef. When he appeared, hot and sweaty from the kitchen, Columbus asked him to bring everyone in the room a raw egg.

When everyone had an egg, Columbus said, “I can make my egg stand upright using the small end. Can any of you?”

A combination of laughter and ridicule escaped from each participant, something like bad-smelling gas. Columbus’ face changed from the warm, round countenance of an intellectual cherub to that of a slave driver as he said, “Do it, if you can!” Without a sound they all attempted the challenge.

After only a few minutes, no one at the dinner was able to complete the task and all had quit in frustration. With new-found courage, those ministers who had started the rumors said in protest that it could not be done and that Columbus was trying to avoid their assessment of his accomplishment as a lucky accident.

Columbus cleared the space in front of him on the dinner table. He reached for the salt and poured out a small mound, no bigger than a button. He placed the small end of his egg in the mound of salt and it stood up. He then blew away the mound of salt, and the egg still stood.

The ministers began to protest. “This is just like the discovery of the New World. Now, we can all do the trick!” Columbus stopped everyone with a look. “Of course you can now do what has already been done, but only after someone has shown you how.”

Some good ideas survive obstacles. Many do not. Successful new products and services prosper because of the entrepreneurial spirit in senior managers who recognize that ideas are America’s products, and that we have a penchant, an aptitude, a talent for innovation and creativity. Original thinking starts with original thinkers.

Michael Bourdouklis was born at a time when the world had started to shrink. He was not aware of the shrinkage, nor were his family or friends, but it was shrinking. It started after World War II and has continued on through to the present at a logarithmic rate.

This was not the kind of shrinkage that occurs when a wool sweater takes an unfortunate trip in a clothes dryer, or the kind of shrinkage when an old high school band uniform can no longer be buttoned. This is a shrinkage of proximity, of closeness and distance. Not measurable distance, but one of awareness, acknowledgment, recognition – things, places, people that just a moment ago were very far away are now so close you can count nose freckles.

For Michael, his awareness of a shrinking world started the first time his mother took him and his seven-year-old brother to a baseball game at Griffith Stadium to watch the now dissolved Washington Senators play the New York Yankees in the summer of 1955. Michael was eight.

The trip to the stadium started with a car ride from their small apartment in suburban Maryland to the home of Michael’s grandparents in Washington, D.C. From there they took a trolley car down Georgia Avenue to the ballpark. Like some lovesick golden retriever, Michael’s paws draped out the open car window and his head hung in the wind for almost the entire trip. That is, except for the hundred or so times his mother told him to be careful and sit back in his seat. They parked the car at Grandmother’s and took the streetcar.

Again, shrinkage. This time not outside, but inside. Michael had never seen such people, each with a different skin color, their eyes different shapes. The materials and textures of their clothes were all new to him. Even their words were different. While he understood some, others sounded like singing and talking at the same time. Some people even spoke to him. He didn’t understand a word they said, but somehow he understood their meaning. This was so exciting. He stood the rest of the way to the stadium and never looked outside the trolley.

When they got to the ballpark, the shrinkage accelerated. As he stepped from the trolley to the street, holding the railing in one hand, his mother’s hand in the other, all he could see were the bottoms and backs of people all around him. Everyone was moving in the same direction, making the same kinds of sounds you might hear from the other side of a wall, noise but no words.

They walked into a large building with very tall wire fencing where walls should have been, and the further they walked the more people there were and the less light there was.

As they started up a large open stairway it felt like he was walking up to go outside. Then there it was – the field. Green, like a green he had never seen before, buttered with sunlight, salted with running men in white uniforms, more like something to eat than to look at.

Michael looked around at those to his right, left, in front and in back. People and more people. He did not know it at the time, but because the Senators were playing the Yankees, the game was sold out with standing room only.

At the bottom of the first inning, a player on the Senators got a hit and everyone stood and cheered. That’s when it happened. Michael realized that the red, yellow, blue, white and green patches he’d seen on the other side of the field, directly above him, and to his far right and left were people. People with faces, hands, eyes, ideas, minds, wants, needs – people, hundreds, thousands. Over 29,000 people.

Before this, he had no idea that there were so many people in the world. He had no idea that a world like this with this many people existed at all, much less in the District, Maryland, the United States, North and South America or the world.

All of a sudden, surrounded by loud, cheering, happy fans, Michael had a sense of how big the world was and how small his own world would be in the future.

As we get older, most of us tend to forget that markets, crowds, audiences and consumers are words that represent groups, yet are all composed of individuals. People, one at a time, who act and react individually – people who have choices and make decisions based on individual wants and needs, not a collective personality. We can create an ad that is placed in the Wall Street Journal that will be seen by almost half a million people, but it will fail if we forget the fact that it is read by only one person at a time.

While the world is smaller today from a communication point of view, it is also much more personal. There are more magazines, for example, than there have ever been, and satisfying individual interests is their focus. From personal computers to the Internet, to the next generation of direct access to information and services through what is basically a glorified television device, systems are bigger and communication is more intimate.

Products and services need to be presented in ways that are just as personal and individual as a kiss, just as direct as a handshake and just as unique as a fingerprint. Technology in terms of access and usability is being transformed from a laser scalpel that only a few can use to a pair of round-nose scissors.

To be successful in a multi-disciplinary marketplace, our ability to communicate must also transform itself from a public address system to word of mouth. If a business is to not only succeed but to prosper, it must prepare its communication and marketing materials in ways that appeal to the individual within the groups.

It has been said that the United States is a fat lady restlessly sleeping in a twin bed with Canada, her skinny lover. Even her unconscious movements rock his world. Maybe so, maybe not. But it is true that ninety percent of all Canadians live within ninety miles of its 2,600 mile border with the U.S. Even though Canada is over 170,000 square miles larger, with 60% of the continent’s total natural resources, its population is just over one-tenth that of the United States. If you were that skinny man, you would have to move quick and think even quicker just to survive.

If you had been trying to jump-start Canada’s sickly economy after Word War II, you would have done almost anything to get your people to move north where the natural resources were. And the Canadians offered a lot. Top money, more than most could earn elsewhere in a year, was available in just five months, but it was not enough. Because it was cold and isolated from the rest of Canada, and with poor transportation and inconsistent deliveries of food, supplies and communication, life was hard. Electric power was primitive in the territories, the daylight was always too long or too short. It was a difficult and lonely life.

The Canadians that took up the challenge were tough people who needed money to support themselves and their families living a long way away. While these individualists could tolerate the harsh conditions, being out of touch with family and friends was an almost intolerable burden.

The reason for the lack of telephone service was simple. Calls were sent on cables over poles powered by electricity. When it rained, the water froze on the cables and continued to build up and weigh the cables down until they broke. Both the calls and the electricity that carried them were stopped.

Repairs took forever, because it took forever to first find the break and then to fix it. In some winter months, communication to the border did not exist.

The managers of the Canadian phone system were desperate for a solution. Pressure from the government – unlike their service – was continuous and plentiful.

A collection of senior and middle managers was brought together from throughout the phone system’s service areas and disciplines in the hopes of generating a solution. After days of almost fruitless conversation, a new voice was heard.

It came from an administrative assistant who was in the room checking to see if anyone needed anything. She heard someone say, “If we could just make a cable that would shed water, then the lines wouldn’t freeze and snap.”

Without thinking she said, “Well, if we could train birds to fly very low over each phone and electric power cable, the wind from their wings would sweep the rain water off of the cable so it wouldn’t freeze.”

First there was silence, then there was a laughter that turned back into silence. But this second silence was not the stunned silence of surprise but the thoughtful silence that usually follows a good idea.

Some were thinking why it wouldn’t work. Others were thinking, “What should I be thinking?,” and the rest were trying to find ways of making the idea happen.

Someone did find a way. Trained birds flying over cables was not the answer, but clip-on plastic propellers on each cable driven by the wind with a flipping mechanism at the point where the cable meets the pole to return the device back the opposite way did the trick.

The following year, phone and power disruption dropped by 82 percent. With a few modifications to the flipping mechanism, the disruptions were completely stopped except in the most northern provinces.

Most problems are problems only because they have been defined in ways that inhibit, even restrict, possible solutions. This is not incompetence, but habit.

People develop patterns of thinking and acting based on past successes and failures in their own lives. Stepping back from a problem to examine its components with an open mind is the only way to solve seemingly unsolvable problems.

When this “examination attitude” is adopted company-wide, where open-minded thinking and the willingness to challenge old or out-dated concepts are encouraged, the possibilities are endless.

There is no such thing as only one idea or one solution to a problem. There is, however, only one attitude that fosters problem solving. A willingness to openly evaluate and examine the components of the problem with historical prejudices and personal agendas removed. Decide what you want to happen, to whom you want it to happen and what results you expect before the problem is defined. In this way, when solutions are proposed they can be evaluated against a specific list of communication goals and objectives. Each proposed concept can then be ranked to determine which idea has the best chance of success.

Unlike most television stories, there is not always a happy ending to corporate communication problems. Less than satisfactory results or outright failures are sometimes inevitable, but again, unlike most television stories, it is not over at the end of the show. Creativity and imagination are part of a process, not the end result.

If it’s broke, fix it. If it’s not broke, make it better.

Balls, chutzpah, moxie, guts, pluck, tenacity. These are all qualities that describe the successful management style of the 1980s. Whether times are good or bad, it’s always important to have energetic go-getters managing the corporate throttle.

The early part of the ’90s introduced the team builder, the facilitator, the collective thinker. The skills that will be valued in the late ’90s and into the next century are those of the professional amateur. At first thought, this term sounds like an oxymoron. To some, the two ideas expressed are at opposite ends of the spectrum. We suggest, however, that the qualities that define the professional and the amateur are not oppositional, but separated only by a subtle nuance of understanding.

The qualities of a professional seem so obvious as to be universal, spanning boarders, continents, cultures, race and gender. Obvious to some maybe, but still worth restating.

The first thought is that a professional is one who gets paid for what he or she does or knows. She is that person who goes about performing a talent in a diligent and practical manner. Additionally, many professionals have a code of performance that corresponds to how other professionals in the same discipline apply their abilities. In fact, many professional disciplines have educational requirements along with years of consistent application of their skills before certain government boards allow them to be licensed, linking their names to an association of like professionals. For the most part, these external requirements are for the protection of the public, or to distinguish from those without degrees.

The word itself – professional – implies credibility, superior performance, expertise, as well as getting paid better than those who are not professionals. The implication is that an amateur is none of these things.

So, must an amateur be the opposite of a professional? Not necessarily. While an amateur may not have a degree or credentials from a governing body or board of review, he could still have the expertise to perform the tasks required at a level equal to that of a professional.

Some college, even some high school, athletes have the physical skills and natural attributes to perform their sport at a professional level. Their gifts may be honed with additional practice and experience, but many are capable of competition their first day on the field.

Outside of athletics we’ve all heard stories, maybe even know people, whose natural gifts and abilities have rocketed them past peers with more formal education and years of experience. But for the most part, these definitions and descriptions of amateurs and professionals are as out of date in the contemporary business vernacular as the typing pool.

The only real and substantial thing to remember about these two positions is that they are more about attitude than anything else. An amateur is more about the details of how something is done than degrees or affiliations. It is about work ethic, discipline, dedication, commitment, responsibility, loyalty and honor. These concepts not only define professional performance, they are also the values that congeal a corporation’s character into its culture.

People with these qualities on your staff have always been sought after and valued as corporate assets. Just as some of the new composite metals are stronger and more flexible than steel with a quarter of the weight, the professional amateur is a new breed of corporate executive who will bring new strengths to his or her business.

The key to this new position again is not training but attitude. The amateur brings “why not” to an environment of “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”

What is it that has created a space for this new position of professional amateur? Change. This is the kind of change that is inevitable, normal, consistent and continuous. With this new kind of change, success is not the destination but a stop along the way. This kind of change demands attention to detail and the constant and continuous re-examination of every aspect of corporate performance and product fulfillment.

The “amateur” in professional culture is someone who is open to criticism, experimentation, tinkering, adjustment, even failure. This kind of person is willing to ask the dumb questions. Like an amateur athlete, while she wants to win, her first objective is to get better, improve and learn.

Add to this passion and a quest for excellence, the attributes of discipline and thoughtfulness with a long-term goal in mind, and you have the next generation of corporate executive. This person not only leads others by example but infects them with her attitude. The result can be a collective feeling that becomes a signature element of your corporate culture, and as such can be nurtured and developed within your entire organization.

So, the next time a key position in your company opens up, look for the values and qualities in those applicants that define the professional amateur. You may foster a collection of talented people who understand what it takes to be continually striving for success as a fact of nature.

“Information is not the same as intelligence.”

This was the first sentence from a speech by Charles Eames at the International Design Conference in Aspen in the late seventies. He was a man of strong feelings and stronger ideas. His life was spent in partnership with his wife Ray, working on and succeeding in bridging the gaps between concepts and communication, between art and application, between work and life.

They understood an important tenet about the act of communication: the common denominator is always people. Technology may be the tool, and in some cases it is also the messenger, but it is never the message.

Eames’s quote has several layers of meaning, most of which apply directly to key components of the decision-making process in contemporary business. The function of technology is to manage information, to gather, sort, link, group, position, prioritize, alphabetize, scrutinize, sometimes memorize. It is a tool – a useful tool, but just a tool. It may be the best tool ever invented, but it is still just the means to an end.

There are tools that manage other tools. Programs and directions are part of its memory, giving it authority to dictate to other machines, other tools. We have all seen examples of computer-driven robots that mimic many human movements and activities. In many cases, the robots can do a better, safer job. Robots, in any form, provide service in areas that are dangerous to humans. They perform functions and complete tasks that require a highly critical state of exactness with mind-numbing repetition. They perform these services with consistency and continuity. This is the current history of the physical side of technology, where tools work for us. The next generation of tools will attempt to think for us.

Since many of us, for the most part, could be considered non-combatants in the computer wars, on the sidelines so to speak, we have had the opportunity to evaluate the battle tactics and strategies of the combatants. Interestingly, the wars have been about language, one computer’s vernacular versus another’s.

After some time and several failed encounters on the battlefields of marketing, technology and the courts, the protagonists have reluctantly agreed to disagree. The result is a continuation of the conflict which has now moved underground and behind the scenes. For those of us who have a rooting interest for one side or the other because we have committed to a particular hardware, the current atmosphere is like the yellow-green sky before the storm. We know something is coming but not what, when or from where. At the moment and maybe for the next several months, the status quo, while not acceptable, is tolerable.

There’s the rub. The next generation of intellectual technology will probably have almost nothing to do with the past or the two language-driven combatants. A third player is preparing a “device.” A device like a glorified television set that will function more on the level of a video game. The special computer communication language will no longer be necessary. Translators will be built into the device. It will be as though you had a combination translator, guide, docent, teacher, concierge, and loving aunt inside the box. This will change the definition of technology for most of the world from something requiring extensive training and experience to something, with the user difficulty of a microwave oven.

However, nothing is as simple as electronic oracles project or as devastating as those that are chained to the past predict. The actual outcome will probably lie someplace in the middle. To get back to Mr. Eames, this revolution/evolution is not the story. It’s an important element but still only a player with only part of the answer.

What Charles Eames said refers more to us as human beings than to the newest, most innovative technology. The misnomer of artificial intelligence implies that machines will do the thinking for us. That has never been the goal or the assumption. Smart machines, yes, very smart machines, but still only tools.

Does it matter how fast computations can be made or how readily available enormous amounts of complex and in depth information are? It has always been what we do with that information and those numbers that makes a difference. Intelligence is not a commodity. It does not have volume or the malleability of matter. It is a concept. A concept of accumulation, articulation, evaluation and application.

“Information is not the same as intelligence” is the revolutionary’s chant that goes back to the first Frenchman who threw his wooden shoes in the machines, creating sabotage. It is the credo that inspired generations of writers who spoke to the value and worth of human ideals and compassion for one another. It is the murmur that is heard from every chief executive officer who is trying to take back his company from those who would guide its future using a quarter to quarter mentality without regard for the long-term goals.

Charles Eames was saying that people’s ideas and energies are more important than the accumulation of data. He was saying that the will of individuals is more tangible than hardware and more valuable than the latest software. He was saying that we have an obligation to ourselves not to forget that we make the choices for the machines, not the other way around

Lobsters have standards, too, and they started a long time ago. Before the Europeans came or the Italians working for the Spanish or even the Norsemen sailed our northeast coast, lobsters had standards.

That is, the Algonquin Indians had standards for lobsters. They captured lobsters using bent-wood traps – some about the size of a Volkswagen – which were designed to allow smaller, younger lobsters to escape through the slats. They had unofficial standards for how big a lobster had to be before he was tossed into the cooking pot or back into the ocean.

To this day, the citizens of Maine, through their local regulatory agencies, continue to set standards for lobster fishing. The fishermen use a small metal device tied by a short rope to their wrists. This blade-like caliper measures the length of the large plate on the back of the lobster. If the blade fits over the plate on the lobster’s back, it goes back in the water. This is the best kind of standard. It’s hard, fixed and constant. To paraphrase Popeye, it is what it is and it ain’t no more.

Another type of standard is the small, almost flat, round disk about the size of a half-dollar with a half circle cut out of its side. The negative shape created by the “bite” is exactly the acceptable shape for the end of a cue stick, which is what it’s used to dictate.

The town Gaithersburg, Maryland, is the location and safehouse for the United States Department of Standards, Weights and Measures. In that building is a device, token or rule that is the precise weight, length or volume for every element of official measurement used in our country except time, which is handled someplace in Connecticut.

There are other places where standards are measured. Some are electronically matched to the precise weight of particular ingredients to create specific therapeutic drugs. Some combinations of components or ingredients are so detailed as to warrant a patent. Others, no less precise and no less strict, guide the production of a soft drink or the seven herbs and spices for a particular brand of fried chicken.

To a degree, standards like these contain a certain amount of interpretation. To promote consistency, the human factor has been slowly removed from the judging process. It is important to note that in these previous examples, quality is not an element of evaluation. Only specific components of performance are evaluated. It has been assumed that if the standards are met, then the quality is in the product. This is not necessarily so.

There are also situations in which standards are evaluated on a sliding scale. In these cases, there are written rules of acceptable and unacceptable levels of performance. For example, what is artistic and what is athletic has always challenged the figure skater. The platform diver is constantly adjusting to the changing tastes of judges from competition to competition, and baseball’s strike zone has as much expansion and contraction as the scale at a Weight Watchers meeting.

The next position on our sliding scale of standards from rock hard to noodle wet is our own judicial system. In most cases, laws are written to control what not to do rather than what should be done. In that case, unacceptable behavior is punished and acceptable behavior is irrelevant. The most mercurial aspect of the law is that the determination of the eventual punishment is always negotiable. And seemingly, the more visible the defendant, the more generous and conciliatory the system.

Establishing and adhering to prescribed standards touches us in every aspect of our lives because these standards help to define a course of conduct in a world that we share with others. The solid yellow line dividing a two lane road is as much a ten foot wall of agreement as so much paint. The courtesies shown children and seniors are more an acknowledgment of future or past contributions to our society than an acceptance of their physical limitations. Whether you adhere to the golden rule or the survival of the fittest, your everyday conduct and behavior is driven by your own code, your own set of standards. Adherence to these standards may vary from situation to situation over the years, but they are how you choose to live.

Just like people, corporations and businesses, even individual products, have a code of performance that defines what they value, what they find unacceptable and the character traits that best articulate their qualities.

The best and most successful corporations in the world spend a lot of time and money defining their standards and communicating them to their employees, suppliers and customers. By doing this, they hope to establish an attitude that reflects the values that guide their organizations.

When their people need to make a critical decision about quality, performance, or just what the right thing to do is, they have a history of shared experiences to demonstrate how they should act for the long-term benefit of the company. In some cases, their actions may be to concede a short-term loss for a long-term gain. An organization begins to develop character when employees accept responsibility for corporate standards as their own.

This kind of shared responsibility for the success of your organization is both cumulative and perpetual, as long as there is an initial commitment to define your company’s standards, communicate them and acknowledge their implementation.

This is not the latest management trend. These activities are not touted in the next wave of business seminars. It is a simple act of courtesy toward your employees. Don’t assume they know what you want. Think of them as a group of individuals willing to work with you and each other for their own interests as well as those of the company.

Like the Algonquin Indians of Maine, the reason to establish standards for not taking lobsters that are too young and small is so that there will be bigger and more plentiful lobsters in the future for everyone to eat.

We must give them time to grow and multiply. A corporation that defines and rewards the successful implementation of its collective standards of performance will benefit from the ideas generated by motivated and focused employees.

“You will never, yes never, earn real money making superior products.” Wallace was the last of his generation, one of the last to serve as chief executive officer, president and chairman of the board. He was five feet nine inches tall, on the plus side of 300 hundred pounds, clean shaven with a close-cropped “Friar Tuck” ring of silver hair. His navy blue chalk-stripe, three-piece wool suit was more of a uniform than a preference. Black socks and wingtips finished off a look that had not changed since his first days as a middle manager in a company that would eventually grow to an annual five billion dollar multi-national corporation.

He was an imposing man, visually, intellectually and passionately. He was tenacious and focused, he was competitive and generous. If you worked for him, you worked milkman hours at one end of the day and the cleaning crew’s hours at the other. If you shared his commitment to that kind of work ethic, you earned his attention and his loyalty.

His ideas on how to run his corporation were simple – for some, too simple. When asked by a Wall Street Journal reporter how his company was able to increase its profits almost 15% for thirteen years in a row with over 400 different earning centers in almost 300 different markets in over 42 countries, he said, “Don’t be stupid. The company doesn’t grow 15% each year. Each profit center does. We acquire good businesses, managed by smart people – most of whom started those businesses – and we help them do whatever it takes to succeed. Sometimes it’s just providing growth or expansion capital, piggy-backing existing distribution systems or just lending them a few talented bean counters.”

His ideas about quality and superior products were just as simple and just as controversial. When he said, “you will never make any real money making superior products,” he was not being crass or cavalier. He was just being practical. Wallace asked, “Can one taste the difference between a five dollar bottle of wine and a fifty dollar bottle? Probably. Can one taste the difference between a five hundred dollar bottle and a five thousand dollar bottle? Probably not. Even those that can appreciate the difference may not be able to afford it.

“What good is it to make the best stereo speakers in the world, using superior design, workmanship and materials, if only one person in a million can both appreciate the sound it reproduces and can afford the expense?”

On the surface, Wallace’s practical, straight-ahead philosophy may seem harsh, even cynical. If that’s your interpretation, Wallace would say you’ve gone too far. You’ve simplified too much.

Along with his belief in the futility of pursuing the goal of making superior products is the equally “stupid” task of accepting substandard performance from inferior products.

Cutting manufacturing corners to reduce costs that result in making shoddy products with the hopes of selling them in large quantities for mass audiences of sheep who can be manipulated by clever advertising is also “stupid.”

If you can only sell a product once, it’s not worth making. If it has a poor flavor or a part falls off or the performance is inadequate, the chance for a second or third sale doesn’t exist. This is where the man’s ideas really shine.

If money were not a factor, most manufacturers would make a superior product. It’s just human nature and good business to do your best. And, if money were not a factor, most customers would select what they perceived to be a superior product. Again, it’s human nature to want the best for yourself and your family. But since money is always a factor in both the manufacturing and purchasing process, what we are left with is a sliding scale called value. Finding the highest performance for the lowest cost is not only successful for the customer but for the manufacturer as well.

Of course this idea doesn’t belong just to Wallace and it’s probably not a new one to you, but like most very simple ideas, it gets overlooked from time to time, and sometimes misunderstood or forgotten.

No reasonable consumer above the age of nine expects something for nothing. We know that real diamond rings are not accidentally hidden in boxes of Cheerios. We also should have learned by the time our skin started to clear up that most of our purchases are driven by our own personal definition of value. We make choices on how much we are willing to pay for what we really want.

How your customers perceive the value of your product or service is determined by two assumptions: that the cost is reasonable for the level of performance promised, and that the choice of product will reflect the intelligence and good judgment of the purchaser.

An intelligent and active communication program can prepare, package and present your products in ways that acknowledge and support your customer’s judgment and participation with your company. It reinforces product and brand loyalty by defining and articulating your customer’s values and those of your organization.

This is not manipulation or misrepresentation. It is the ability and the willingness to put your product in the best possible light without distortion or deception.

Communication that represents who you really are and what you stand for will position your company and its products for all of your customer audiences as an organization of value and values.communicate them and acknowledge their implementation.

This is not the latest management trend. These activities are not touted in the next wave of business seminars. It is a simple act of courtesy toward your employees. Don’t assume they know what you want. Think of them as a group of individuals willing to work with you and each other for their own interests as well as those of the company.

Like the Algonquin Indians of Maine, the reason to establish standards for not taking lobsters that are too young and small is so that there will be bigger and more plentiful lobsters in the future for everyone to eat.

We must give them time to grow and multiply. A corporation that defines and rewards the successful implementation of its collective standards of performance will benefit from the ideas generated by motivated and focused employees.

For Barbara, the day after her graduation ceremony felt like the first time she ate sushi. She knew it was coming, she knew what it looked like, she had even watched others go through the experience, but it wasn’t until she held a piece of yellow tail with sea urchin to her lips that her stomach turned and the ceiling tiles became floor tiles. She was prepared, but she was not ready.

To make matters worse, her degree was in painting and drawing with a minor in art history. What was she thinking? She would never be able to support herself with this very expensive, debt-covered education. Why was she so stupid, so naïve not to realize this day would come? What was she thinking? Why didn’t she listen to her father and go to law school or look for a good man, husband material, while she was in college as her older sister had counseled? And all this took place on her way back to her seat after being handed her diploma.

While the next day was better, it was so only because it was familiar. Her emotions, her thoughts, her anxieties now hung about her neck like a small asafetida bag, quite pungent and ever present.

She was looking back and forward at the same time. Her life had always been about “the work.” As a little girl, when money was tight, she would draw on the cardboard sheets used to separate stacks of canned foods in their shipping containers. They also became the arms and legs of her paper sculpture, the wings and panel for a mobile, even the bridges and walls of a futuristic city. While she had friends and family that loved her, her love was the work. It made her feel special, not by comparison with others, neither more or less talented, but just special.

When she lost her mother to a drunk driver and her father two years later to cancer, her work gave her a context for her grief, a safe place to explore her feelings, resolve her conflicts and develop her own sense of self-worth. Her work was both a sanctuary and a fortress. It was not something she stepped into like pants or shoes, but a part of her like a tattoo that could be added on to and could grow. She knew instinctively, a sense of natural knowing, that while she was unsure and a little afraid, her connection with her work would nurture and guide her future.

Stop this, she told herself, making a fist in both protest and resolve. I have talent, imagination, energy and a degree. I have a great deal to offer the world of art. So she went to work painting her vision of the world, looking to depict on her canvas images and ideas that would communicate to and touch others. Her ambition was strong and so was her need to create. She would do whatever it took, for as long as it took, to find her visual voice, to speak through her work to others.

If pride and fear could co-exist on two sides of a spinning coin, she would succeed.

This was six years ago.

While not totally disillusioned by the cynical world of dealers, galleries and brokers, she was tired of a 60-hour week, being the gofer in line to be a slave for an advertising executive. By the time she had time to paint, she was too tired or too strung out or just too scared of the big white empty canvas hiding under her bed. She kept telling herself that doing the work she loved, her art, could wait. All she needed was to save enough money so that she could quit her menial job and paint full time. This sacrifice would be over soon. Soon got further and further away. Even though her job was not much, she ate well, had a door with a key and on occasion even leftover perks were dropped her way.

In July of the fourth year of her “six-month” agency job, her boss asked her, “Don’t you have some kind of artsy background?” He put her to work at a drawing board filling in for a junior art director on vacation.

After her first day she said to herself, I can do this. And she could. In fact, she was very good. So good that she was promoted to assistant art director. The only problem with the position was that it was not salaried. It was freelance work, paid by the hour. If she was good, fast and the agency “bag men” could and would bring her enough to do, she would make a great deal of money. She moved to a better apartment, bought new clothes for the first time since college, and even bought a used car.

Things started to move well for her. She was several steps up the ladder, no longer at the bottom being stepped on by others on the way up.

After only a few more months she was earning $100 an hour for her time. If she came in early and left late she could earn $1,000 a day, $5,000 a week. If she forgot vacations, worked when she was sick and worked through holidays, she could earn $260,000 a year. She did the math in her head, on note paper, even in the condensation on her office window. Her life would now be set. But...

If she took 30 minutes for lunch, it would cost her $50, that’s $250 a week just to eat. I don’t think so. Breakfast and dinner would be plenty. Damn those holidays. They were costing her dearly. The dentist, the doctor. Who has the time. I’m sure I’ll be okay.

When another group in the agency had weekend work, Barbara was there. A rush job, have to pull an all-nighter, Barbara was your girl. New Year’s Day? Any day.

She was working very hard on everything. She helped introduce a new toothpaste, promoted ridership of a suburban bus service, created a cartoon character spokesman for a lawn service company. Barbara even helped decide how many chips of butterscotch should be in each “new” Aunt May’s Old Fashioned Country Cookies. She was successful, but not a success.

On Saturday, the first Saturday in months she was not at the office, Barbara was loading up a rented moving van with her things. Finally she was stepping up to a new place. She picked up her night stand which she’d had next to her bed from house to house to dorm to walk-up.

As she turned the stand upside down to carry it more easily down the stairs, her legs became weak, her eyes would not function, focus was lost and what was up was now down. She could no longer stand, but she could fall, and she did.

Alone at the bottom of the stairs she slowly awoke staring at the bottom of the stand. It was a painting of a mythical kingdom she had drawn as a girl of ten.

The fall was not just down three stair sets but back eighteen years. Back to a feeling, to her work, her art. She was remembering what she had forgotten.

For most of us, the act of living requires concentration like that of a running back moving through a field of potential tacklers. Attention is focused on the next and closest obstacle to be overcome. Then the next and the next. If the lines were not painted on the ground, many a runner might lose his way. It’s a matter of perspective.

Many businesses, like people, go through the same process. The quarter to quarter evaluation by the bosses and the bosses’ bosses do not permit the kind of visionary planning and introspective thinking that guides a business’s future. Long-term success requires the establishment of goals that require more than one generation of management to attain and the willingness to share that vision and that challenge with everyone in the organization.

Like Barbara, we need to remember our passion, refocus our experiences and share the vision with others if we are to accomplish our goals and fulfill our potential.

Saturday. A hot summer Saturday morning. It was only 7:30 but the temperature was already in the upper eighties. This is normal for the area just outside of Garden City, Kansas. That’s where highway U.S. 70 stretches across the map like a line drawn with a ruler.

There is a unique aspect to this particular highway. If you were to stand on the dotted white line in the middle of this two lane tarmac and look west, the road would seem to disappear at a point near the horizon. Likewise, looking east would create almost the same picture.

On this particular morning, a three-and-one-half pound Rhode Island Red chicken was walking alongside a 35-pound China White pig, not hand in hand or hoof in wing, but side by side. While their conversation was continuous, it was not substantive.

They had been walking since sunrise and were getting hungry. In the distance they saw a small roadside diner, classically clad in once polished aluminum. The parking lot was empty; not a good sign. It was either too early for customers, which it wasn’t; closed, which it wasn’t; or lacking in the good food category.

As they came closer to the diner, the hen was all for stopping in and ordering breakfast. She had already started up the cinder block steps when the porker squealed and retreated to where a curb ought to have been. He did not appear to be afraid. He looked angry with the hen.

The clucker asked, “Why the tantrum?”

The now fuming China White pointed to a sign in the window of the diner and asked if she had read what was written there. It read No shirt, no shoes, no service.

“No, no, the sign next to it!” squealed the pig. Breakfast special: Ham, two eggs, toast and coffee $2.50 all day. The hen remarked that it was a great price and that she was getting hungrier by the minute.

The pig, now quite put out by the hen’s obvious lack of sensitivity, squealed again. “All they want from you is a contribution. From me they want a total commitment!”

If you are a senior manager in a large organization, your view of your company may be substantially different from those in middle management, and maybe profoundly different from your employees as a group.

That difference can be found in the quality and quantity of information available to you exclusively. A total commitment to both internal and external communications prepares your employees as well as your customers for who you are and what you stand for as a company.

If your people don’t understand why you are doing what you’re doing, they will create their own interpretations. Human nature being what it is, this is not good. The same is applicable to small manufacturing operations with 200 semi-skilled workers or international groups with 150,000 employees working in disciplines as diverse as consulting and fishing, automotive after-markets and healthcare. Your people will react as people first and professionals second. It does not have to be that way for them or your suppliers, and certainly not for your customers or shareholders.

Take the time, spend the money and communicate. If your people understand why this or that is happening, they can help. With understanding, they can act with knowledge. They can appreciate that they are part of the solution and can make a contribution to your mutual success. They need not see themselves as the only ones asked to make the total commitment, the total sacrifice, without reason or logic.

For those of you who think this level of commitment to communication will diminish your ability to manage sensitive issues or inhibit delicate negotiations, you’ve gone too far. It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition.

Take the time to share your vision of the company with the company. You may be pleasantly surprised how many others have a similar view. Even if they don’t, you can help them understand where you want your organization to go and how you plan to get there. Even if it’s just to get them on your side.

Don’t assume that they know what you know, and that they have your level of enthusiasm. Given the opportunity, even the most difficult of union shop stewards wants your company to succeed, because then they will succeed. They will work hard if only for their own self-interest.

Communication and the ability to do it effectively can be just as much a management tool as Harvard’s Management by Objectives, just-in-time delivery, team building and quality assurance incentives. The mutual trust and respect gained through aggressive communication will be returned in cooperation and productivity.