I remember when I first got married and changed my name from Pam Reach to Pam Baker... the name didn’t feel like “me.” I said on more than one occasion that Pam Baker is someone who has a long blonde ponytail, bakes a lot of brownies, and is very “crafty.” At the time of our wedding [...]
We were ‘talking shop’ over breakfast recently, as business people are wont to do. After several mentions of ‘collaborative this’ or ‘collaborative that,” one of the group remarked that he wasn’t interested in collaborating with his professional advisers – what he wanted (and was paying for) was a consulting expert. It was a casual comment [...]
Last week I was honored to attend the Ronald McDonald House Charities International Conference in Chicago. The night before sessions started, I was channel surfing in my hotel room, finding nothing satisfactory on TV, until I ran across a PBS Series, American Masters, highlighting Carol Burnett. Memory Lane I know — I’m showing [...]
Pulitzer shmulitzer I recently read two Pulitzer Prize winning novels, in an attempt to shore up my credibility as a semi-literate individual. The first one, Tinkers, is a little book that seemed to be right up my alley, but I couldn't even get through half of it. (Which is extremely rare — I tend to [...]
Philosophers have long loved grappling with paradoxes — paradox-grappling is like no other exercise for the intellect. Perhaps the most famous paradox of all — Zeno’s Paradox — actually has a lesson in it, even for those of us who don't usually grapple with such things. Zeno's Paradox Here is how Zeno’s paradox goes: the [...]
This cyclical marketing debate frustrates me: Is marketing a science, or an art, or some trendy mix of both? The cycles can suddenly make clients feel pressured to produce data-driven rationales in the midst of a successful multi-year campaign, or conversely, suddenly want to ignore the numbers entirely and focus only on the ‘artistic expression’ [...]
Noodling is what I call it. Everyone has his or her own way to describe where good ideas come from, but for me, noodling just sounds like how it feels. The Temptation That first flicker of an idea asks to be shared and explored, gently — wherever it originates. You may not recognize it yet [...]
