The Business of Branding

The Brand Intelligencer

Start-Upped: A Short Story by Jeff Swystun

“Startups don’t need HR departments. They need cages and the occasional hosing out.” So says a character in Start-Upped, a short story that explores the absurdity and dark side of startups. It covers the quick rise and even quicker fall of 4Bearers.com, a “Facebook for Families’.

Start-Upped hit big in the ‘Satire’ category, landing #9 on Amazon’s Hot New Releases list, #63 in the Amazon Kindle Store, and #91 in Books.

The tidy tale is replete with the sillier aspects of technology and pop culture. The impact of social media, ‘boomeranging’, the SXSW conference, parenting, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, and binge-drinking all factor into events.

The story takes place from March, 2012 to March 2013 and is styled like a diary confession in the form of staccato bursts found in Tweets and texts.

It is topical, fast-paced, and sadly humorous. Most amazing is it is based on real stories of the “brogrammer” culture that threatens the credibility of startups that hope to bring us the next big thing.

Visit Amazon to purchase Start-Upped.

In Defense of Reading

A few years back when The Wall Street Journal redesigned using color and added the Weekend Journal and Personal Journal, a colleague of mine thought it was going the way of USA Today. Personally, I thought the design was attractive and layout inviting. My concern was with the content and the length of the written work. That concern has only grown since.

In the past fifteen years, news and information has been beaten, shrunk, diced, and sliced into bite-sized easily digestible trifle. The masses accept headlines and “top ten lists” like they are gospel without a proper assessment of facts, logic, and argument. Nor do they examine the source. Once author credibility was sacrosanct but sadly is no longer.

Most have forgotten that learning and discovery are meant to be arduous. The journey is the destination. If you are handed the answers what have you possibly learned? William Henry in his brilliant rant, In Defense of Elitism, wrote, “Today, even critical books about ideas are expected to be prescriptive, to conclude with simple, step-by-step solutions to whatever crisis they discuss. Reading itself is becoming a way out of thinking.”

I know that for some people reading is a chore best avoided. To these folks, I can only encourage the effort because I believe it is worth it. Reading is meant to be challenge. Anything that presents difficulty often returns incredible rewards. And besides, skimming short works online and in print impact one’s intellectual growth or so experts say. These social scientists advocate slowing one’s reading down and reading longer works more often.

Thankfully, I love a beautiful turn of phrase. I admire a narrative that places one in that moment. I crave an argument compellingly delivered. I respect the complex being made simple but not so simple as to rob it of intricacy. I appreciate learning new words, turning them over in my head and sounding them out on my tongue.

So I have been pleased to discover people and organizations that have recognized that reading needs its protectors and proponents. A few have cleverly re-committed to sharing longer reads thus fighting back against the troubling trend of ‘dumbing down’ the very practice of reading.

Narratively is such an organization and was named one of TIME’s “50 Best Websites of 2013″. It “is a platform devoted to original, in-depth and untold stories about New York and, increasingly, other cities.” The site intends “to slow down the news cycle. We don’t care about the breaking news or the next big headline; we’re devoted exclusively to sharing a city’s untold stories—the rich, intricate narratives that get at the heart of what a place is all about.”

Then there is Longreads, it “posts links to new stories every day — they include long-form journalism, magazine stories from your favorite publications (The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic), short stories, interview transcripts, and even historical documents.”

Longreads is an amazing repository and aggregation of wide-ranging topics. They share the length of each feature in both words and reading time. Rebecca Harrison’s piece from New York Magazine titled, I Tried Gwyneth Paltrow’s Diet, clocks in at 9 minutes or 2339 words. Or there is The Luckiest Village in the World by Michael Paterniti published in GQ that is 26 minutes or 6701 words. Surely everyone can find 9 or 26 minutes in their day to read something of length.

I continue to be a passionate fan of The Atlantic and The Economist. Both remain committed to long form journalism. They eschew simplification and credit their readers with content that truly explores and respects a topic.

So please read. Read slow and read long. Read on various subjects. Take yourself outside your comfort zone because I believe what we choose not to read tells more about ourselves than most of us would like shared. Finally, take heed of what John Locke said centuries ago, “Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”

By the way, this is 684 words or 2 minutes long for those of you wondering.

Managing Millennials Shouldn’t Be A Problem

A recent article on Inc. Magazine’s website was titled, “5 Tricks for Working With Millennials.” It went on to say, “Your youngest employees are creative, bright and a complete disaster to manage. Here’s how to turn the mess around.” The tone and content of this piece shocked me. I was prompted to do a Google search on “managing Millennials” to see how others viewed the topic.

I discovered five things. First, there are a great deal of views and opinions out there. More than 400,000 results popped up. In my unscientific, quick scan of the suggested reading, it appears the vast majority of these articles are written by baby boomers or Gen Xers.

My second observation is that basically every piece written communicates frustration and vexation on the part of the (older) writer towards his or her younger subjects. After a few reads, this actually becomes humorous. Much of the writing and advice comes across as flabbergasted and distraught parents reacting to their own out-of-control teens.

The third area concerns the broad generalities that have been assigned to this youthful workforce. They are labeled as entitled, opportunistic to the point of being “hustlers,” self-centered, nonconformist and disloyal. The only credit they seem to receive is that they are good with technology and social media.

Fourth, I was struck by how superficial and hokey the advice is for managing these “disastrous youth.” There are “11 tips,” “seven strategies” and of course, “five tricks.” This content is either comprised of generic common sense or insultingly positioned command-and-control techniques that would obviously backfire with anyone who has talent and a modicum of self-esteem.

My fifth observation is how incredibly adversarial all of this comes across. It is definitely “us against them,” with the older, supposedly learned and experienced set sounding supremely “right” yet appearing almost entirely defensive.

I am now 48 years old and remember fondly when I was the young upstart. All I wanted was to learn, be given a chance and make a valuable contribution. My experience in working with Millennials has proven they largely want the same things. I owe much to the leaders and managers who mentored me and allowed me huge opportunities to fall flat on my face just so I could pick myself up and do it right the next time around.

I cannot offer up sage advice that will instantly solve the “managing Millennials” problem because I do not believe it exists. The issue may actually reside with the management old guard who are defending the status quo long after the quo has lost its status. I relish the opportunity to work with Millennials so together we can learn and make valuable contributions. If this strange and unnecessary divisiveness exists at your company, the only ones benefiting from it are your competitors.

I’m an advertising man…

“Now you listen here, I’m an advertising man, not a red herring. I’ve got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders depending upon me, and I don’t intend to disappoint them all by getting myself ‘slightly’ killed.”

Roger O. Thornhill/Cary Grant in North by Northwest