The Short Version:
I build worlds.
That's the work of a brand strategist, creative director, business leader, writer, mentor, and troublemaker in the service of innovators — from Fortune 100 global giants to scrappy small-town entrepreneurs; from non-profits out to change the world to creative talent across the globe.
Results over the years: double-digit leaps in sales, photo-ops with American presidents and Hollywood actors, new paths for growth not previously in view, scores of ad industry awards, brand platforms that still deliver 15+ years later, and some really cool swag.
Folks I've served: tech giants (Intel, HP, Oracle, Cisco, IBM); pioneers of sustainability (DuPont, BMW Group, Poet, Avangrid Renewables, Prairie Gold Energy, Genencor, Carbon Harmony, the American Coalition for Ethanol); leaders in ag (Cargill, Raven Industries, Sullivan Supply); consumer brands (Gap, Philips, Bissell, Char-Broil, American Bank & Trust).
The Long-Winded Version:
Career Advice from Anarchists (An Essay)
The Long-Winded Version:
Career Advice from Anarchists (An Essay)
A riot is a wave of madness.
It carries you where it wants as you try to convince yourself you can swim it. If you’re a reporter in a riot, the reflex is to apply higher orders of brain function to not just survive, but to surf.
Of course, you’re no match.
Riots reject external logic but draw power from their own algorithm: chaos. The city looks right. All the geometries, color blocks, and spatial points of reference seem fixed. But the wave violates all the visual rules you learned in a distant condition known as sanity.
Strangers yell, skip, strut, and sprint, flowing in and out of bunches over sidewalks and traffic-filled streets, as if pulled together and apart by an unwritten but understood purpose. The sound is a hellish drone, like seabirds at a landfill, punctuated by the clatter of metal things meeting other metal things, or glass things, or hollow enclosures like the hoods of cars.
Pieces of the set without any relationship collide in disjointed violence. Anything not bolted down — and even then, some that can be yanked free — becomes ordnance. Trashcans, newspaper machines, benches, pieces of concrete. Punks who seem to know what they’re doing or understand some inscrutable agenda chant as they pass, as if calling a disheveled infantry to battle.
You try to stick close to your photographer as the current pulls you; this is a first for you both. A single question glues you to each other as you ride it out: what the hell is going on?
The wave doesn’t answer questions. All you can do is document.
It seems to have taken over the downtown and the absence of law enforcement to confront it feels like an abdication. It accentuates the confusion – how can this surge of terror go unanswered?
And then a police spokesman known to every reporter in town calmly walks a straight line down the street, speaking into a radio.
His eyes fixate on a distant, invisible point. He ignores bids for his attention — from both civilians and reporters. He’s working. And suddenly you recognize an armature of sanity reappearing: a professional on the job.
His eyes fixate on a distant, invisible point. He ignores bids for his attention — from both civilians and reporters. He’s working. And suddenly you recognize an armature of sanity reappearing: a professional on the job.
Then, around the corner, a few blocks down, a reef: cops in riot gear form a wall from one side of the street to the next, led by a cavalry of mounted police and backed by a phalanx of city busses and firetrucks. The wave will break here.
Your reporter’s notebook and your photographer’s camera embolden the two of you to sidle up to their formation. After moments holding its position, the reef advances. Cops pound riot shields with billy-clubs like war drums and chant in unison: move, move, move, move.
As disorder meets its antagonist, the riot falls apart. It only takes the arrest of a dozen or so hooligans to disperse the wave and defuse the madness. And that’s when the reporting begins.
You learn that a gathering of anarchists known as an “unconvention” in uptown Portland had spent an entire weekend under the close watch of police — an arrangement not unlike storing gasoline near a furnace. A confrontation that should have been as easy to predict as the inhabitant of Grant’s Tomb touched off the wave, one of dozens that the social geography of this city would continue to propagate over the years.
_____
And that was as close as I ever came to reporting in a war zone. It was also as close to emulating my idol at the time, Ernest Hemingway.
Because at that stage of my career, well, the plan was to be Hemingway.
That meant living a life of danger and romance — and writing for a newspaper, which is how I got myself into this circus in the first place.
I reported for a Pultizer-prize-winning news weekly in Portland, Oregon, led the editorial department at an alt rock paper, and wrote for publications across the country — experiences that permanently shaped how I think and also taught me an important lesson: I had other bulls to fight.
After several years, I’d published enough to grab the attention of an up-and-coming Portland agency. And away I went, carried by a much different wave of madness known as advertising.
In my journeys as a copywriter and creative director and eventual agency owner, I’ve always applied lessons learned as a young investigative journalist. Research. Analysis. Translation. Ask intelligent questions. Listen. Talk to multiple sources. Cut through bullshit. Make an audience feel something. Open with a good hook. Close with a thud.
Whether it's advertising, journalism, or advocacy, the stories are everywhere. Sometimes you have to work to find them. Sometimes they find you. Like this wave you and I are in right now.
Surf's up.
Thank you. I'm really grateful for the chance to connect.