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Collaborators wanted! Inquire within.

I’m always on the lookout for great people to work with! Wondering what’s a fit? Naturally, I have a visualization for that:

efrye_vennThe green zone is my ideal – a strategic role in a team-based, consulting environment, working for mission-driven clients. If you can help me make this happen, you’ll be my hero!

Mission-driven is my shorthand for a range of possibilities including both for- and not-for-profit organizations that have a strong sense of purpose beyond making money and contribute positively to their communities. I consider many entrepreneurs and small businesses to be part of this group even without an overt social mission.

Only a tiny handful of people work completely at the intersection of brand, mission, and team, so while I cultivate that space there are two other intersecting zones I look for.

The yellow zone comprises the heart of my work as a brand and communication consultant. The engagements I enjoy most are developing organizational identity, positioning, and narratives from the ground up. In plain terms, that means I help them get clear about what they are and can go, gain new insights into their audiences and markets, and bring it all together in messages that are simple and powerful.  I always appreciate referrals to leaders in mission-driven organizations who are ready to raise their visibility and impact.

While this offers rewarding work for clients I love, direct consulting is often solo. To balance that I also look for opportunities on the other side, in the blue zone. It’s doing the same kind of work, but as a freelancer with existing brand agency teams for more mainstream clients. Working with teams is collaborative and accelerates learning, and these experiences give me renewed inspiration and tools to bring back to my mission-driven clients. If you know of agencies or consulting firms that need freelance help on their projects, introductions would be most welcome.

Those are three ways you can help me grow. Please let me know what I can do to help you!

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Be the best maple tree you can be

bonsai_680

My inner control freak loves bonsai! It’s nature, in a tiny, perfectly-designed form.

Over a long weekend in Oregon, I lucked into an exhibit of American bonsai by Ryan Neil at the Portland Japanese Garden. It was charming and beautifully staged in origami-like frames.

What I learned is that American bonsai differs from the Japanese tradition. Japanese bonsai treasures the ideal, training each maple tree to be the ideal maple tree, whereas American-style bonsai brings out the unique characteristics of each individual maple. In the words of Michelangelo: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” That’s what Neil is doing. Incredibly, he does this with wood that’s as much as 600 years old, teasing out fresh life from what seems mostly dead. (Remind me of this if you hear me say I’m too old for anything.)

Why am I talking about bonsai? Because it is a great analogy to how we’ve evolved our thinking on brand and organizational development. The old school way was the “best practices” model — there is a right, replicable way to do things, and we succeed by emulating the ideal.  And, certainly, it is enormously useful to study the success of others.

What this overlooks is that organizations — and people — are not machines made up of levers that can be reliably manipulated just so. They are complex organisms filled with complex organisms, and despite common patterns no two are alike. Human systems simply can’t be templatized the way business books promise.

When we insist an organization must look or act a certain way, we lose sight of the individual characteristics that give it strength and power. And we miss seeing what might be actually better, outside of tradition and beyond our imagination. To be sustainable, brand and culture must be built on what is authentically different, not what is the same.

That’s not to say we can grow wild and still succeed. Bonsai has much to teach us about careful cultivation. But with careful training and pruning, we can become something amazingly unique from the inside out.

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Purpose drivers

It seems everyone is talking about purpose these days. Imperative has a new take on what purpose means in your career — it’s not the cause you work for, but how you work.

Curious to see what surprises it might reveal, I took Imperative’s purpose driver quiz. My results:

My purpose drivers from Imperative

 

This is spot on! In fact, if you reverse the order it’s an overview of my job as a brand strategist: I generate new insights that create opportunities for organizations.

Taking the test revealed an important facet of what makes work meaningful to me — a time horizon of a year or less. While I certainly look years ahead when developing strategies, it’s important for me to see visible progress in the near-term and to know my work won’t vanish into the corporate void. This accounts for my preference for scrappy, responsive organizations over bureaucratic ones.

Closely related is my preference for organizations, as opposed to individuals or societies. The one-on-one aspects of my work are deeply satisfying — little compares to the a-ha moment when a leader suddenly sees his situation in a whole new way — but the real value is turning individual transformation into a bigger organizational shift. And while I love the idea of shifting society, that feels a little too big. Not to mention systemic changes take years, decades even, to pay off. If they ever do.

Why does knowing your drivers matter? Here’s an example: Let’s say I’m passionate about conscious capitalism. These results tell me I’ll be happier working with a B Corporation, where I can directly impact and enable their success, rather than getting involved in community organizing or policy for this cause. Since I often wonder if supporting cause-driven organizations is enough and think I should be contributing on a higher level, it’s important to understand that what seems more meaningful may not be. I’m right where I should be.

I met Imperative’s CEO Aaron Hurst a decade ago when I became an early volunteer with the Taproot Foundation, which he also founded. He did a great job building Taproot into what it is today, and I look forward to seeing what he does at Imperative.

Building a meaningful career has been incredibly important to me, and hope Imperative can help more people find their purpose.

Updated to add: Want to dive deeper? Check out the Purpose Economy site and book!

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Brand of Me

During a conversation at a conference, I mentioned I had created a brand strategy for myself as a job candidate. When asked, “Did you do stakeholder interviews?” I nodded, thrilled by his intuition, before realizing he was kidding. Almost before his words were out he grasped his misperception and we agreed that while it sounds odd on the surface, of course I would gather feedback from colleagues. Why wouldn’t I? That’s an important part of the brand audit process, no matter who it’s for.

Developing a brand is the more or less the same whether you are a Fortune 500 company, small business, entrepreneur, or job seeker. To be successful you have to know your core identity, competitors, audience, and value proposition, among other things, and then have a plan for how to communicate that consistently and compellingly. Each situation will have different angles and challenges, but the basic framework always applies.

My project was part of the Brand Strategy course taken in my final semester. The assignment was to perform a brand audit, starting with assessing the market, getting feedback about existing brand image, and then articulating a differentiated brand identity, personality, and position. We were encouraged to use a real-world project or even ourselves as the brand to make it immediately relevant and useful.

I chose the “Brand of Me” option which, admittedly, felt like a bit of a lark at first. But soon I realized how valuable it would be to apply a rigorous audit and strategy process to my career planning as I prepared to be among the first DMBA graduates. With a hybrid set of skills and a unique MBA, being able to clearly define my target markets, strengths, messages, and experiences would be critical. And, as many of us expect to have to create our own positions, having a long-term career strategy would be equally important.

In two years I had collected a mountain of frameworks, and I enthusiastically applied every tool I had to this exploration. For me, the key is not knowing what a tool might add to the process but doing it anyway to find out if it will reveal something new. Taking the time to explore seemingly redundant tools for mapping the transition from “here to there” helped me identify common threads, triangulate missing information, and find the most effective visualization. I relied heavily on visualizations in an effort to align the tools with the subject, since a key part of my value proposition is the ability to synthesize and visualize information.

The most valuable learning came in the process itself. Not every tool was useful and some had to be altered or even invented, but continuing to iterate and sketch led me to insights in unexpected places. Some tools took me down blind alleys — all versions of mind maps and ecosystems, normally some of my favorites, did not produce new information. The greatest insights came from a timeline, which I originally intended simply as a graphic about my career rather than as a strategy tool. However, the process of mapping my past positions, activities, and learning revealed the future as well. The timeline gave me a structure to plot out interim and end goals, plus the adjustments needed in activities and learning to reach them. The effect was similar to a ERRC (Eliminate, Raise, Reduce, Create) grid, but with a chronological dimension added.

Observing the varying audits presented by my classmates illustrated that while all brand strategies share a framework, there are not “5 easy tools” that will provide optimal insights for every brand. It takes diligence and a curious mind to adapt the process to each unique situation, but brand strategy can be applied to any professional endeavor, even career planning.

 

Article originally published in the DMBA 2010 student annual