A Signature Report and the Coming Primacy of Analytics

Each spring, an incredibly useful interagency report covering a comprehensive range of metrics and involving efforts all levels of government, including volunteer and non-profit efforts, is compiled and published regarding efforts to keep streams and roadways in North Carolina clean.

The heavy lifting is done each year by the the Beautification Office of the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT,) which also keeps the reports from past years on its web page.

This office falls under the department’s acclaimed Roadside Environmental Unit, headed when I arrived in Durham twenty five years ago by a close friend, the legendary Bill Johnson who spearheaded the wildflower and the scenic byway programs to name a few.

To paraphrase something once written about Durham songwriter Don Schlitz, “there are millions of people who know Bill Johnson but have never heard of him.”

There is currently a lot of talk about North Carolina’s brand, but no one has done more than Bill to shape it, although some actually given that task have enabled desecration instead.

It was as Bill retired to the tiny crossroads of Sims, NC in 2001 after thirty years as an NCDOT engineer that lawmakers mandated the Interagency Report coordinated by an office in his former Unit.

Bill still champions the preservation of North Carolina’s scenic attributes.  He passionately believes in the words of a mutual friend that our state is a truly “unique collection of qualities and characteristics” including environmental.

He understands more about branding than most of those charged with doing it for North Carolina.  There are powerful forces wanting to take it back to an era of desecration a hundred years ago when forests were seas of stumps replaced by seas of billboards.

You see, no matter what we say North Carolina’s brand is, its brand is indelibly stamped first and last by the condition of its roadsides and green infrastructure as visitors, including site selection executives for expanding or relocating businesses, arrive and depart.

The interagency report dealing with aspects of scenic preservation and protection is produced now under the leadership of George Kapetanakis.  It is invaluable to residents and policy makers.

But most of all, it is invaluable to the hundreds of groups and agencies as well as thousands of volunteers who collectively work to clean up the incredible mess that research shows is deliberately caused by just 4-every-100 people, 17% if you include those who are just careless.

In my experience, many of these groups and volunteers, sensing how overwhelming it can seem to keep roadsides and streams and communities appealing, are vulnerable to activity traps instead of carefully measuring performance against annual metrics that can be found in this report.

I do my best in the groups with which I am involved to encourage a more sustainable, strategic and scalable approach, but I get far more blank stares than nods.

I’m used to it.  Being passionate but analytically-driven during my four decade career made me highly effective but a bit of an odd duck.  I would often overhear someone say, “I like him but I don’t get him.”

Even when I arrived in Durham for the last half of my career, a community whose largest employers are in the business of being research and data-driven, I would often get complaints from detractors delivered second hand bemoaning about why I did so much research.

Showing the power of information though, few realized that only a few percentage points of our budget was devoted to research.  For all but the last decade of my career, I had to do nearly all of the analysis to convert research into action.

It seemed like more because we widely distributed analysis in hopes it would be of use to others in community as well as reinforce that we weren’t just driving community marketing by the seat of our pants.

By far, it was the most difficult position to fill.  Even people good with numbers often struggled with how to make analysis relevant and to pin point it to strategic initiatives.

Most of my peers just filed the studies away as something to check off the list.  Many DMO execs today still do.

Data, and especially now with the advent of “big data,” is prevalent everywhere but still only 1-in-8 in a recent survey conducted for SAS Institute based in nearby Cary have become “analytic innovators,” which somehow came naturally to me and also to my successor.

According to the study conducted in conjunction with the MIT Management Review, six-in-ten professionals report now feeling pressure today to become more data-driven and analytical.

While two-thirds still sense that decisions are being made the old fashioned way, based on management opinion and experience, another survey of senior marketing leaders finds that “seat of the pants” approach is fading fast.

This study commissioned by executive search and succession giant Spencer Stuart shows that while 70% of chief marketing executives consider analytics and creativity to be equally important, three times as many now rank data analysis and orientation as a top-three expertise needed for future marketers compared to those feeling that way about creativity.

It’s no surprise to me that a “strategic mindset” transcends both.  To paraphrase a Spencer Stuart blog post, tomorrow’s CMO is more likely to be “chief logic officer” than “chief magic officer.”

If they haven’t already as Appalachian State University has, business schools training tomorrow’s community destination marketing execs should take very careful note.  This is also important information for anyone just pursuing this career because they “like to travel.”

Looking over the syllabus for the annual Brandworks University, an MBA-level event held each May in Madison, Wisconsin, there is no “flash and bang,” or “shock and awe” during this premiere of all marketing events which draws the top marketers in every field.

Instead, it is all about data, analytics and science.

That’s why you could find Durham’s chief marketing executive eating it up.  The organization embedded data and analytics in its DNA from the start.

This genetic sequence helped Durham’s destination marketing leapfrog more established competition where they are still fading in the “rear view mirror.”  I predict that in the future anyone hoping to move up in a DMO will need to learn how to understand, analyze and apply data as a pre-requisite.

Unfortunately, the Spencer Stuart study found that few are doing that, forcing organizations to look far more frequently to recruit people from places such as strategic consulting firms and startups.  Fewer than 1-in-10 find the necessary affinity for analytics necessary for executive succession on existing teams.

One respondent quipped that its like “finding a few needles in a haystack.”

When I started in community destination marketing in the early to mid 1970s, many executives came up through sales.  Eventually far more came from the marketing side of which sales is an element.

Judging by my succession, analytics will be the background for leading edge DMO execs.  And note this isn’t so much about math, although statistics is useful.

Keep in mind that the dominant organizations of the future according to one of the studies above will be “analytics innovators,” a culture that is driven by sophisticated data analysis and strategic application.

Being a data-geek isn’t required as much as the ability to see patterns in the data and then translate them quickly and consistently into strategy and action.

It came natural to me.  I was never successful at training it into someone.  But I could sure see it in someone when manifested.

Spencer Mittan Should Be Vice President

One major element of customer service seems to have vanished. Ever try recently to get a front line employee to pass along a suggestion?

No matter how polite or low-key, clear or humorous a request is made, it typically gets one of three responses:

• Oh yeah, like that’s going to happen.
• Or a vacant, helpless stare.
• Or reverse delegation “You can call this number.”

Customer service isn’t easy and I know it can be overwhelming and people can be difficult. But corporations, no matter the size, need to do a better job of making sure front line people have the means and feel empowered to quickly and easily pass along suggestions to higher ups from customers.

When I went into an AT&T store while traveling, on two different occasions, I had two polar opposite experiences. The first time, the guy was polite enough but didn’t even listen to the problem or see if he could fix it, he just dialed a number before I had finished and handed me the receiver.

When I suggested he file a suggestion, he preferred to argue with me.

The second time I went into the same store, a couple of days later, I encountered Spencer Mittan, who should be immediately promoted to a Vice President. He listened carefully, gave me an alternative solution, quickly took my phone and tested it several ways including one way the other gentleman had swore was impossible.

In the end, he gave me his card, wrote a number and an email on the back and told me to call him whenever I needed anything from AT&T. He also volunteered to report my problem up line.

I took full responsibility for what happened to the phone. I wasn’t trying to do anything but get information and assistance. But that my friends is how customer services is supposed to work.

The Unpretentious Role of Historic Sites

Well, for three reasons it was a big week for history last week in Durham, North Carolina.

Even among those involved in tourism, most people don’t realize that a greater percentage of travelers visit historic sites than attend concerts, theater and dance performances combined.

Travelers who take in historic sites also outnumber those who golf or attend/participate in pro and amateur sports combined.  They also outnumber those going to theme/amusement parks, zoos/aquariums and water parks combined.

Soon those visiting historic sites will rival the number attending conventions and meetings or going to the beach or other waterfronts.

And because historic sites are also on the most authentic end of the spectrum of activities, they add destination appeal even for those participating in those more mainstream activities.

First, on Sunday a week ago the Bull City (Durham’s nick name) celebrated the re-enactment by Bennett Place of the surrender here ending the Civil War 150 years ago.

It would be another 58 years before the state took stewardship as a historic site.  More on the history of that endeavor later.

The next day, in Atlanta, three of those involved in the startup of the Durham History Hub including executive director Katie Spencer were asked by The Museum Group to be one of its five prestigious “conversations at AAM.”

TMG is a consortium of 31 of the top museum consultants in the world.  AAM is the American Alliance of Museums which was holding it annual meeting in Atlanta.

They wanted to hear more about the Durham’s History Hub, which they characterized as “a sustainable new model for community-based museums” affectionately termed by a friend and historian as an avatar for the day there is a Museum of Durham History.

But Katie Spencer is no avatar.  She is rapidly rising star and the startup has already mounted an incredible 18 exhibitions at the “Hub” in less than 24 months.  Hopefully Durham can keep her.

Her work in Durham caught the attention of those at AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums because the pop-up exhibitions at the Hub are an ingenious way to help officials and community leaders here understand why a Museum of Durham History has been ranked for decades by residents as the #1 cultural need.

The pop-ups also serve to identify residents who have artifacts that could be loaned and safeguarded when a full-fledged history museum becomes a reality.

Durham’s third history event last week took place on Wednesday when the state’s three historic sites here were celebrated by nearly 400 people attending the Annual Tribute Luncheon which is facilitated for the community by the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau.

A video reenactment wove the pre and post role that Historic Stagville, Bennett Place and Duke Homestead played in the history of not only Durham but especially the transformation of North Carolina.

After some editing, the video will be posted at this link along with a handful of the more than 20 Durham Annual Tribute Luncheons DCVB has produced over the past two decades.

North Carolina’s 27 state historic sites have been systematically starved through repeated budget cuts going back to shortly after I was recruited here 26 years ago, notwithstanding their importance to the state’s appeal for economic development.

Lawmakers today seem to have become unmoored from the public value of these sites as it was so well understood by their peers in 1923 when Bennett Place was donated as a state historic site, nearly 50 years before gaining national recognition.

The state apparently took possession of Bennett Place more than a decade before it began keeping track of theses assets in 1937.

It had been preserved and donated to the state by the Durham founder’s second generation in honor of its first.  Within six years, this generation went on to salvage Duke Homestead.

But it became a National Historic Landmark seven years before it became a North Carolina State Historic Site in 1973 at a time when Margaret Haywood was working to ensure the oldest of Durham’s now three state historic sites would be preserved.

For more than 25 years, Bennett Place fell under the precursor to the State Department of Economic Development showing that lawmakers and businesses back then and through the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s better understood the link of historic sites to economic development.

In 1955, Bennett Place was transferred along with by then 11 other state historic sites to to the newly created Department of Archives and History.

Less than two decades later, the nation including North Carolina were swept up in preparations for celebration of the America’s Bicentennial and Duke Homestead and Historic Stagville became state historic sites.

A decade earlier, Duke Homestead became a National Historic Landmark in 1966 and then part of the state’s historic sites, which in 1975 became its own unit in the Department of Cultural Resources.

Of course, the unique historic sites owned and operated by the state represent only 27 of the 2,780 Tar Heel listings on the National Register of Historic Places including 500 historic districts.

Only 15% are publically owned but 25% are of significance at the state level and another 5% at the national level.

Today, North Carolina Historic Sites are funded at roughly the same amount they were two decades ago or 54% less accounting for inflation even though the number of sites has increased.

This slow starvation has been bipartisan in nature, even though in the early 1970s voters overwhelmingly embedded an amendment to the state constitution to “conserve and protect”…”for the benefit of all its citizenry”…to preserve as a part of the common heritage its”…”historic sites”…

Although economic analysis of cultural assets shows a 7-to-1 return to governments on dollars spent on museums and cultural organizations, North Carolina invests only 52 cents per person on state historic sites, less than 2 cents per site.

Because they can also be leveraged into visitor centric economic development, the state has rightfully come to think of the 78 assets it began to accumulate beginning in 1879, such as historic sites, museums, zoos/aquariums and parkland/recreation areas, as “attractions.”

Unfortunately, state government doesn’t or isn’t able to conduct the analysis that would credit these “attractions” with the overall tax revenues they help harvest.

If that day comes, maybe lawmakers will resource them accordingly.

Culture, Mindset, Analytics and Nonprofits

A recent article heralded the halo effect of advertising, but the almost impossible task of measuring the effectiveness of traditional advertising means any probable halo effect is more attributable to marketing.

This is because marketing is a blend of various communication activities, only one of which is advertising, and less and less of that is traditional advertising which experts now find has an overall negative return on investment.

It is this blend, when customized to each organization, that creates a synergy transcendent of any of its elements.

Unfortunately, a survey released this month shows that less than a third of marketers (32%) put data and metrics “at the heart of their strategic decision-making.

What is disturbing about that finding is that data-driven marketing is nothing new.  By the early 1980s, it had found its way to the core of a small nonprofit community marketing organization I led.

Granted, I was an “early adopter,” as I still was in 1989 with similar startup with which I was involved.

But seeing how quickly this approach enabled early adopters to leapfrog more established competitors, one would expect it to be more mainstream by now.

Studies pinpoint that the reason so many marketers remain mired so far in the past is because of they lack a strategic mindset even though recruiters for top marketing positions now find that attribute, along with analytic skills, more important for marketing leadership than creativity.

A study conducted in 2012, long after I retired from four decades in the field of community marketing, showed that the nonprofit sector in the U.S. had grown 3.5 times the rate of the for-profit sector.

Fast Company magazine surveyed their ten most innovative companies in not-for-profit recently to ascertain what talents and skills will be in most demand in this sector over the next five years.

Top are data-savvy skills.  Next come design skills.

Those, along with technology were at the core of my last non-profit startup 26 years ago.  I don’t say that to gloat but out of puzzlement. We couldn’t have been three decades ahead.  Really!

If I stumbled into those competitive advantages so long ago, how is it that so many of my former peers across the country apparently still don’t get it or is it?  Or maybe its that their governing boards don’t get it?

Survey results show that 96% of marketers today know that data is important or very important including 9-out-of-10 in senior management but as the authors point out, that is very different than knowing how to collect, manage, analyze and utilize it.

Telling is that fewer than half of marketing organizations give more than half of their own employees access to their data.

This is why so many go to the trouble of contracting analysis to show how effective their marketing strategies are, known as the “turn-on” ratio.

However, they nearly always fail to measure the equally significant “turn-off” ratio such as when their ads are merely a form of yelling or placed in the wrong context such as on billboards where they are associated with desecration.

Even Super Bowl ads have a 5-to-1 turn-off to turn-on ratio, further illustrating that less than a third of marketers have data and analytics at the heart of strategic decisions.

Marketers will be in high demand if they have a strategic mindset, understand analytics and design and recognize that marketing is not only about “turning-on” consumers but minimizing “turn-off.”

The president of the Rockefeller Foundation is quoted as saying that nonprofits in general are projected to continue to hire more talent than the for-profit sector over at least the next five years.

Silverpop, an IBM company, has just published an ebook entitled, The New CMO Guide – A Handbook for Marketing Leaders.  This is also an example of content marketing, a form of advertising that has replaced traditional advertising.

The authors note research showing that 82% of marketers feel unprepared to deal with the data explosion.  In part, this is why the average tenure for chief marketing officers is now only 48 months.

Even more so, this may also explain why, according to Spencer Stuart, this tenure was less than 24 months just a decade ago when the importance of data belatedly began to dawn on marketers.

But especially in the field of community marketing, hiring a chief executive with a strategic mindset who understands analytics isn’t enough.

It is an organization’s culture that makes all the difference and sets the tone for “innovation, growth, market leadership, ethical behavior and customer satisfaction,” according to a new white paper published by Spencer Stuart, also a form of content marketing.

It was management guru Peter Drucker who originally discussed that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” later modified by others as “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”

But Drucker wasn’t referring to a document as much as the strategic mindset.

Culture in the organizational sense is what Dr. Kelly Page of NativeHQ refers to as “an iterative process over time that we enact, guided by vision and values forged through conversation and collaboration…our individual and collective voice over time.”

Shawn Parr, head of Bulldog Drummond, encourages us to view an organization’s culture as a “nurturing habitat for success.”

He continues that “Cultural cannot be manufactured;  It has to be genuinely nurtured by everyone from the CEO down.  Ignoring the health of your culture is like letting aquarium water get dirty.

A shared culture creates critical alignment.  And that alignment must also include each and every member of an organization’s governing board.

Excellent Radio Documentary On The Impact Of Teachers

This afternoon I just listened to NPR’s broadcast of the American RadioWorks documentary on the impact of good and poor teachers on student performance. If you missed it, I highly recommend you read or listen to it.

To read the transcript, click here. But this is one I recommend you download and listen by clicking here. It is an incredible overview by Emily Hanford.

If you think you’ve heard it all before, you’re wrong, even if you’re concerned about this stuff and involved.. And don’t make the mistake of tuning out the minute you hear something with which you agree or disagree. You’ll be surprised if you read or listen to the end.

Here is a link to policy reports and resources mentioned in the documentary.

HR consultant David Camner told me something I learned to be true. Approximately 20% of people in any line of work are ineffective and should be doing something else. That applies to any line of work including the professions including doctors and lawyers.

I believe that this documentary’s evidence on the effect of firing and/or putting greater resources into improving teachers shows that that this percentage also holds true for the teaching profession.

What do you do with the 20% of people who are ineffective in their line of work or profession? It isn’t easy. They are often pulling down good workers or just as bad, bleeding away management and training that should go to make the other 80% of good or excellent workers even better. Many companies, including school systems just move them around, usually through transfers to schools in low income areas.

One thing struck me while listening was the fact that, in a successful program covered in the documentary, mindset is critical. It is crucial that teachers take a no-excuses approach to full accountability for student performance.

There is also mention in the documentary, without attribution of Dr. Carol Dweck’s work. In reading her books, she isolated one critical factor in parents and teachers that is the difference between students who, all things being equal including IQ, either thrive when they hit obstacles and or give up.

Those who gave up, had parents and teachers who believed intelligence is finite. You either have it or you don’t. Those who thrived and grew regardless of obstacles had parents and teachers who believed intelligence is infinite.

Many thanks to the Spencer Foundation for underwriting the documentary.

Never Underestimate The Power of Artifacts

Some really cool people are making the Museum of Durham History a reality.  But from the outset, a few have been petrified of being in the “artifact” business.

Granted I am an artifact junkie.  In my former career, I kidded unmercifully the now retired head of our local science museum for giving away a very cool 1942 DC-3 to another museum.

It had been purchased from the military by Western Airlines the year before I was born and then sold to Piedmont Airlines in North Carolina and flown as the Potomac Pacemaker from 1956, when I was the age of my grandsons now, until 1965 when I was a senior in high school.

During that span, the plane most certainly flew in and out of RDU International Airport which is co-owned by Durham, but through Raleigh subterfuge (see page 6), the other co-owner had the name  switched out of alphabetical order.

In fact, in the image below, that very well could be the Potomac Pacemaker sitting in front of the RDU terminal in the late 1950s.  Piedmont few in and out of RDU from the airline’s inception in 1948 when it was founded in Winston-Salem, NC.

When I was growing up, we either took livestock for auction to Bozeman or Idaho Falls which are very roughly equidistant from our ancestral ranch in the Yellowstone—Teton nook of Idaho.

When the choice was Idaho Falls, my paternal grandfather, who was born in 1888, loved to go out to the old airport that had been built there in the 1930s by the WPA and watch Western Air Express prop planes such as the DC-3 take off and land on routes from Montana to California.

A decade after it was retired, the Potomac Pacemaker was salvaged and then donated to the Durham-based NC Museum of Life & Science in 1978 by Durham-native Dillard Teer and his family.

The Teer family has been prominent in Durham now for 125 years, having built the Blue Ridge Parkway and many of the major roads in North Carolina.

They also owned and operated the Durham & Southern railway, built airfields around the world including RDU’s in 1939, developed Research Triangle Park here, and through several generations have served on the RDU Airport Authority.

The family carefully trucked the historic aircraft to the Durham museum where it was lovingly restored and mounted for display by former employees of Piedmont.

When I moved to Durham in June of 1989, I was intrigued by Piedmont Airlines which had been founded in North Carolina the year I was born, only to be gobbled up by US Airways three months after I arrived here.

To me, that made the Potomac Pacemaker mounted at the Museum of Life and Science a valuable visitor feature as well as a significant symbol of Durham’s history.

Of course, had it been retained instead of given away in 2004, it would be too large to be displayed inside what will eventually be a full-fledged Museum of Durham History, unless hung from a vaulted ceiling.

But the old DC-3 could have been mounted at the front entrance of the eventual local history museum as an icon, much as this Mercury Redstone Rocket does today for the Museum of Life and Science.

One only has to look at the front-page news about the recent reclamation of one of Durham’s 1949 fire trucks which will join two others, one from 1902 and another from 1935, in yet another mini-museum, to see how artifacts capture the public’s enthusiasm.

Maybe my friend, the former director, who parted ways with the Potomac Pacemaker is serving penance by being a driving force in retirement for a Museum of Durham History (smile.)

Instead, the Potomac Pacemaker is now in loving hands of volunteers again who are fully restoring it for display one day at the state Transportation Museum in Spencer, NC.

It was given away ten years ago as museums fell under the spell of interactive exhibits, especially for children.  But soon it became clear even to museums created during this span, that it is the genuine artifacts that garner the most attention and create a sense of awe.

It is both/and, never either/or.

By not wanting to be in the “artifact business,” I assume some who are laying the groundwork for the Museum of Durham History (now represented by a hub-avatar) probably fear that people like me will show up with their grandfather’s collection of old National Geographic magazines (smile.)

But museums don’t need to tie themselves down by vetting potential donations.  They could use trained volunteers or contract with entities that do that sort of thing.  We’ve all seen this vetting at work on TV shows such as Antique Roadshow, American Pickers or even Pawn Stars.

The primary importance of history museums, especially local history museums, is the telling of stories.  A recent essay posted by the Smithsonian explains why artifacts are so powerful, far more powerful than just photographs or videos:

• Artifacts tell their own stories.
• Artifacts connect people.
• Artifacts mean many things.
• Artifacts capture moments.
• Artifacts reflect changes.

The authors note that (paragraphing inserted for ease of reading):

“Artifacts are the touchstones that bring memories and meanings to life. They make history real. Moreover, it is a reality that can and should be viewed from different perspectives.

When museums choose not to enshrine and isolate an artifact but instead open it up to new interpretations and different points of view, they provide opportunities to challenge and enhance our understanding of the past.”

Anything but static, “consider each artifact with its many stories as holding diverse meanings for different people, past and present. Think of them as bits of contested history.”

The authors of the essay, National Museum of American History curator Kathleen Kendrick and Dr. Steven Lubar at Brown University, have written several books both together and separately about the legacies of artifacts and what is worth saving.

Because Durham officials have delayed what has for eight decades (half of Durham’s existence) been a top cultural priority among Durham residents as measured most recently during a cultural master planning process, thousands of invaluable artifacts have been dispersed around the world.

Many are in landfills, but many were hopefully plucked by collectors from garage and estate sales when distant decedents of Durham owners, ignorant of their significance, put them on sale or discarded them after cleaning out attics.

This means the Museum of Durham History, when finally fully enabled, will need to put out calls to collectors and pickers for invaluable but forgotten Durham heirlooms and hope they can at least be loaned to the museum.

One only has to watch and observe visitors to the three state historic sites in Durham (mini-museums) to see how significant artifacts are.  Each site has hidden away details on how to relocate hundreds more than they have room to put on display.

With each passing day, Durham loses more and more of its history.  For those still puzzled about why we should care, here are just a few reasons a Museum of Durham History, stocked with both artifacts and the latest technology, is crucial:

• Story Telling. It will give children, students, newcomers and relocating executives a place to get in touch with Durham’s story. People who grasp that stories are more inclined to be engaged as activists, volunteers and philanthropy.
• Synergy. It will augment Durham’s historic sites by providing exhibition space to stir interest in those locations, making them more sustainable. It will complement rather than undermine other cultural facilities and programming.
• Preservation. It will be a vigilant testimony to what makes the community distinct and unique and insulate its character and personality from the pressures of development and “generica.”
• Future Generations. As a repository of innovations and artifacts, it will inspire future generations to build on the temporal qualities that make Durham, well, Durham…creative, entrepreneurial, caring, innovative, accepting, etc.

My dad was notoriously unsentimental about artifacts but through the last few decades of his life he learned to ask me first before disposing of old equipment and memorabilia.

Unfortunately, this was too late to salvage tack from the ranch or my great-grandfather’s branding irons.

Never underestimate the power of artifacts.

Resistors to Information-Driven Decision-Making

People, not all of whom are friends, tell me that I was an innovative community destination marketing (DMO) executive during my four-decade career in .

That’s sad, because two characteristics with which I am credited are still so rarely found: what we now call integrated marketing and the use of analytics for decision and strategy making.

Any credit due is because I worked under innovation-friendly governing boards in each of the three innovation-friendly communities I served.

Even today, still only 12% or 1-in-8 organizations globally qualify as “analytical innovators” according to a new survey by the MIT Sloan Management Review and North Carolina-based SAS Institute.

This means they thrive in an analytics-driven culture, mandated by senior management, which means endorsed by board policy. These organizations have groomed higher levels of analytic skills and here’s the kicker, they are deploying analytics for strategic advantage.

Strategic mindset and analytic skills are now more important for marketing executives than creativity according to executive search giant Spencer Stuart.

This is because, in the words of Tony Parker who heads up marketing for a company whose brands now touch 1-in-4 people globally every day, analytics enables and enhances creativity.

A strategic mindset from the board through its chief executive to every corner of an organization is a huge competitive advantage because deciding what to do as well as forecasting the best direction is all about evaluating tradeoffs.

Being driven by data-analytics-metrics is simply the best way to choose among tradeoffs.

So where do the vast majority of other organizations fall?  According to the study, nearly 6-in-10 are analytics wannabes.  They have an attitude of “oh yeah, that too” but they fail to deploy analytics as a “core asset.”

Fully a third of all organizations are “analytically challenged.” This means they rely more on just anecdotal experience and personal opinion and suffer from poor data and analytic management skills.

Half of the 78% that believe they need to be more innovative are held back by “analytically challenged” executives and governing boards.

Ironically, many data skeptics and resisters are also usually top performers personally, according to an analysis last month in Harvard Business Review dissecting the psychological resistance of those afraid of data-driven management.

This is why a friend of mine who consults with community destination marketing organizations like those I led got so much grief from sources he didn’t expect when he chastised DMO execs for being data-resistors.

Data enemies have high perceived but low actual performance.  Data friendlies are perceived low but are actually high performers.  Data skeptics fall in the quadrant of high perceived and high actual performance.

The authors found that those who resist data are what I would call “control freaks.”  They hold their organizations hostage because they fear data will show a better way than their experience alone and they will look bad or their organization and community will look backward.

Because of rotations and term limits, I probably worked with around 120 different board members during my career.  I say “with” because an executive only works “for” the board as a unit.

While the boards as a whole were data and innovation-friendly, there were at least ten members appointed who weren’t and many of those were high performers in their day job.

They were easy to spot.  While they endorsed board policies such as being data-driven, they usually worked in meetings to undermine, restrict or pooh-pooh data.

A couple were data cynics who made cheap shots by purporting that anything can be proved by data, perhaps saying more about how they use it than me as the target of their dispersion.

A few others were data-skeptics, some because neither their personal experience nor that of their employer valued analytics as a core asset.  Some just never grasped the difference between data, analytics, and metrics and how to weave them into a guiding organizational narrative.

A few even tried to pull the organization backward from best practices to outmoded regressive practices only because those were familiar and often because they had been siloed from best practices.

It worked a time or two until other board members realized the ramifications and we got back on track.

I’m less forgiving of executives who remain stuck in their heuristic ruts.  Studies find them even more common in marketing and media organizations where until four decades ago standard metrics were difficult to come by.

But many want to be data-driven, they just work for boards that don’t, ironically populated by the 3-out-4 of non-marketing execs who still struggle with believing that marketing can drive demand and revenue.

According to the study by MIT and SAS, there is a high correlation between an organization being an “analytic innovator” and being growth-oriented.

Maybe being growth oriented and “analytic friendly” should also become pre-qualifications for serving on boards.

Obviously they should already be for any executive.

Spurring Memories

Mention of “Spanish Spurs” was made in an essay yesterday that linked to one of the letters where Mark Twain refers to my great-great grandfather, a friend, fellow-Missourian and partner in a short-lived mining venture in the mountains between Nevada and California.

It also brought to mind a story about my father, a third generation Idaho rancher in my native Yellowstone-Teton corner of that state.  My early elementary school teachers were following the custom then of trying to get me to print and write “right-handed.”

I was really a mixed-lefty which make up 7-8% of the population, but I was lefty when it came to handwriting.  As was the custom back then I was “encouraged” to use my right hand.  Even through high school and college, I would rarely find a left-handed desk.

The teacher’s desk, either Mrs. Bratt or Mrs. Spencer, was in the back of the classroom.  One day when we were quietly working on an assignment, I heard the unmistakable sound of my dad’s spurs as they echoed up the hallway.

I didn’t turn around but my friend Arlen did and then whispered to me, “Hey your dad is back there saying something to the teacher, are you in trouble? Did he find out about our Mexican Jumping Beans?”

Soon I heard the door close and next to me was my teacher leaning down to tell me that it was okay for me to use my left hand.

As if sharing a name with a high school legend in four sports wasn’t enough, that day he gave me cachet on the play ground and prompted an invitation to join a fourth-grader’s football game…until I picked up a fumble and ran the wrong direction, that is.

Known first as “Damascus Spurs,” the Spanish brought this style of spur-making with them to North America.  “Damascus” referred to a style of laminated, “one-piece” steel-making that Islamic armies adapted from India to make swords and spurs.

For spurs it meant “one-piece.”  If Twain had been referring to a two-piece version made at the time he would have probably used the term “California” spurs.

It would be another decade before America’s spur industry would emerge.

My great-grandfather probably didn’t give it a thought as he tossed those spurs Twain had sent him after they were worn out.  Nor do I have any my dad wore.

If his predated the Great Depression, they may have been one-piece, but I doubt it.

Today, Spanish or “Damascus” spurs are recreated by artisans for collectors such as those shown in the image in this blog handcrafted by Larry Fuegen using the process shown in this slide show.

The process was used by Persians, and after his death, the commanders of the Prophet Mohammed expanded their Islamic reach by defeating the Byzantines and Persians using cavalry of recently unified Bedouin tribesmen atop Arabian horses incorporating this technology.

We forget that Islam had already reached pinnacles of astronomy, physics, mathematics, literature, technology, governance, architecture and urban development by the time Europe began to emerge from the “Dark Ages.”

Brought back by Crusaders, these advances fueled the “Renaissance.”

We also forget that this golden age in Islam came to an end because of infighting and religious militants, still blinding us today to the fact that Islam’s spread was founded on teachings and practices of Mohammed, now ignored by extremists who dominate the headlines.

The Crusaders from Spain didn’t bring back spurs which had originated with Romans who may have learned their use from “Celts.”

Probably borrowing from the forces of Saladin, they brought back fast Arabian horses and the “Damascus” form of forging them, which on this continent became known as “Spanish Spurs” when imported by Cortés.

Remember, even the famed boots of “Spanish leather” often graced by Damascus spurs are a credit to Muslim Moors.

Hotels Were the Center of Early American Settlements

I've been blessed with great hoteliers. While only 3% of Durham's visitor-related stakeholders, they can often be the bane of a Bureau's existence. It is aptly said that hotels worry about today, CVBs about tomorrow.

According to historians like Daniel Boorstin, hotels are a uniquely American innovation. At one time, hotels were the center of our early settlements, and owners and managers were the most involved in the community; their lobbies were the original "civic meeting places," many the epitome of civic pride, the place where events took place, the center of the community.

Today, hoteliers are more often tethered so tightly by chains or franchise flags, if not owners, that they come and go every two years, three if a community is lucky. Often they don't even live in the destination where the hotel is physically located, which can make them even more detached. Their companies rarely give them time to be outside the hotel and often schedule visits or meetings without regard to a hotelier's commitments locally. With a few exceptions, regional and national overseers drop in at a minute's notice and demand hoteliers drop everything.

Fortunately a good friend, Richard Green, a VP at Marriott, is working with other chain counterparts to try and shift that paradigm.

But Durham and DCVB have been blessed. People like Martino, Hunter, Philbrick, Pokrass, Dempsey, Lile, McGhee, Teber, Wagner, Adams, Vickery, Defeo, Book, Simpson, Koll, Spencer and many, many others have come through Durham and taken a strong role in teaming with DCVB to build the Durham brand.

People like Ron Hunter started at entry level and worked up to general manager, while raising a family in Durham and giving back to the community in a way that has brought his hotel untold millions in business.

Mike Martino (pictured here) at the Sheraton Imperial Hotel and Convention Center is extraordinary. His hotel was built in the late '80s by a developer two towns away in nearby Raleigh. Early on, it probably wasn't clear the hotel knew it was located in Durham. But Mike's been here as long as I have. (We both had gray streaks in our hair until it all began to turn gray.)

Mike is upbeat, always can do, courageous, willing to stand up for what's right and never, never self-serving. He's bonded the hotel with Durham. He's supervised the property's contribution to Durham charitable causes, most recently running a can drive to support Durham Rescue Mission following a disastrous fire that wiped out its food supply.

Hotels are only 3% of the visitor-related businesses in Durham. They are virtually dependent on the destination (the very first decision any traveler makes is "where to go," not "where to stay").

But hotels can work with other visitor-related businesses, restaurants, shopping, entertainment, performing and visual arts, historic sites, sports clubs to forge a destination… or they can hijack a destination for special interests or they can hold a destination back.

Durham has been blessed with great hoteliers, and it has accelerated the community's evolution as a destination.

Remembering The Sand Creek Elk

A herd of elk and moose that wintered along the back of our ranch as I was the age of my grandsons now suddenly emerged from my memories as my daughter and I traveled a southbound-return stretch of my cross-country trip last month.

After ascending the narrow, green, tree-lined Beaverhead River Valley that morning as it contours around sage covered mountains, we had stopped for breakfast in one of those ma and pa diners for which we’ve always shared an affection, at a ranch town called Lima, Montana, population 220, one of several across the country to pronounce it “Leema.”

My elk reverie occurred to me as we continued up through a pass between two mountain ranges that form the Continental Divide along the border with my native state of Idaho because just after the crest, if one turns east through the mountains instead of dropping down into Spencer and follows the route along the southern edge of the Centennial Mountains for a total of 50 miles or so you reach a cutoff to the backside of the ranch homesteaded and assembled by my great-grandparents and grandparents.

The route follows a stretch of Old Highway 22 past the Camas Meadows formed by a creek where less than thirty years before they homesteaded, Nez Perce Indians had defeated three companies of pursuing US Cavalry.

Here, a few miles before the path to the ranch cuts southeast toward Bishop Mountain is where my grandfather and I would occasionally search for arrowheads and other artifacts.

There the route arches around Big Bend Ridge, a thousand feet below where it cradles the lava of the Aspen-covered Yellowstone caldera, past where creeks named “Sand”, “Cold Spring” and “Snow” spill briefly out through the grassland and sagebrush steppes before the waters find their way down into the Henry’s Fork and then the Snake River Plain another thousand feet below.

Legend also marks this stretch as the site of a climatic battle between the encroaching bands of the Blackfoot confederation from across the mountains to the north and east and linguistically-related Shoshone and Bannock bands of Native Americans.

The far eastern part of our ranch embraced a bend in Snow Creek, a mile west of the Henry’s Fork and stretched west almost to where Sand Creek passes through Lemon Lake along a 17 mile stretch of public lands cobbled together for wildlife management after a small herd of elk was discovered to winter there the year between when my father returned from WWII and I was born.

There are now 3,000 elk, 1,500 mule deer and 400 high desert moose wintering there before migrating back nearly 30 miles east across ranchland - such as that of my youth, where we ranched as many as 500-head of cattle - circumventing tiny settlements such as Ashton, Marysville and Warm River, to summer in areas such as the Bechler Meadows in the southwest corner of Yellowstone Park and where a pack of grey wolves have since been reintroduced.

According to recent reports, the elk leave behind, in their winter home, animals such as beaver, mink, marten and muskrat along along with grouse and shorebirds such as loons, western grebes, trumpeter swans, snowy egrets, sandhill cranes, willets and long-billed curlews as well as the occasional osprey or bald eagle.

The wetlands where the elk summer form below the steep forested cliffs of a 70,000-year-old lava flow, Yellowstone’s most recent, known as the Pitchstone Plateau which stretches southeast from Old Faithful Geyser and Shoshone Lake.  The elk’s lush summer habitat is fed by spectacular 250-foot waterfalls that plunge, cascade or horsetail down into this relatively remote Idaho corner of Yellowstone.

My great grandparents, Hyrum and Margaret Bowman purchased 360 acres more than 105 years ago between Snow and Spring Creeks in that Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho so their six sons, including my grandfather, and three daughters could have an opportunity to surrounding homestead ranches.

One April their family caravan left their mid-Cache Valley spread along the Uinta Mountains near the Utah border with Idaho, taking horses, including three teams of four each to pull three iron-wheeled wagons and a buggy, along with saddle horses to guide the starter herd of 100 head of cattle.

It took them 15 days to make the 200 mile trip.  The first image shown in this blog shows the family, including my grandfather in the hay wagon, taken around my great-grandparents’ home.

Though three miles from the ranch house in which I spent my early years along Snow Creek, the house in the image, then deserted, was the site for days of solitary exploration that not only fueled my imagination but forever embedded a respect for my roots.

On a return visit while I was in law school, I snapped the second image shown in this blog from one of the window frames as a reminder of what that old house meant to me and what it still means to me nearly 60 years later, even though satellite images confirm it is long since gone.

After collectively “proving up” on or assembling approximately 2,000 acres of ranchland including spaces to grow crops of hay and grain to feed the livestock, everyone except my grandparents and great-grandparents eventually departed for other pursuits including jobs on the railroad or in the city or on farms further south.

My grandfather reassembled nearly all of the ranch after it was dissembled in the wake of my great-grandfather’s death without a will, complicated by his re-marriage after my great-grandmother died in the 1918 pandemic flu that killed tens of millions worldwide.

My Bowman great-grandparents are both buried in a very small county cemetery carved from the ranch on a hill above the Snow Creek house.

The homes on the various homestead parcels were recycled.  One was moved to Saint Anthony when my grandparents retired there after the war giving my father and mother the opportunity to run the ranch.

Several decades before my grandparents had moved into the sawed-log house on Snow Creek that my great-uncle George had built.  That is the house where my father was born and in which I lived my boyhood.  As singer-songwriter Neil Young writes, “all my changes were there,” or at least many of them.

For most of my adult life I’ve been a moderate Independent but possibly not that far from my the rock-ribbed, ultra-conservative Republican upbringing, evidence of how extremely far to the right that party has shifted.

As partisan as my parents and grandparents always seemed, they never dismissed the indispensible role that government played in my family’s emergence into the middle-class.

Things such as the elk preserve along the back of the ranch and the homestead act that enabled it and the incentivized dams and electrical cooperatives that brought it power, are all emblematic of many things made possible by a country that understood the “common good.”

Hub Is Historic First Step To Filling A Cultural Gap

On July 20th, activists in Durham, NC, where I live, are taking another significant step in filling a gap in the community’s otherwise rich non-profit arts and cultural sector that has long been identified by public opinion polls and master plans.

From 6 pm to 10 pm an open house will celebrate the up-fitting of a former bus transfer station in the center of downtown Durham to a History Hub, a work-in-progress  demonstration of what the real Museum of Durham History will hopefully become.

Below are 12 imperatives gleaned from a recent study forecasting the long-term relevance of museums such as the Museum of Durham History plans to become:

• Far into the future, “museums will be places of cultural exchange in their communities…They will be one of the most powerful agents in helping all children understand the future and ensuring they are prepared to take leadership roles.”

• “With educational attainment becoming a more visible tool of social mobility than ever, museums provide more opportunities than ever for [those] from less-educated families to gain exposure to topics that drive academic interest…As important players in the formal and informal education system, museums will…meet the rising expectations highly educated moms have for their children.”

• In a world undergoing incredible change, “museums will educate the public on how past societies coped and adapted to tectonic shifts in their resources.  They will help society learn from history as we cope with a new era of expensive energy, lower consumptions, carbon constraint and climate change.”

• “Museums are stable oases in the mist of turmoil…museums play an even greater role in sustaining the well-being of their communities during a prolonged downturn. Whether for the retiree managing lower post-retirement income than anticipated, or for schools with fewer enrichment opportunities for students, museums are there for their communities.”

• “Museums play an important role in helping communities…reinvent themselves in the new knowledge-based economy. Responding to society's need for greater global awareness…promote dialog and understanding about other cultures and our place…”

• “Museums are among the few institutions that bring together people of all economic classes…valued for their ability to redistribute wealth in the form of access to scientific, cultural and artistic resources, mitigating the cultural gap that arises from income disparities.”

• “the fundamental human condition responds to a variant of Newton’s Third Law of Motion: The prevalence of the digital, virtual world raises public awareness of the increasingly rare world of non-digital assets that help tell the story of how humans got where we are.  Museums play  a more critical role than ever as purveyors of the authentic, addressing a human desire for the real as the wonders of technology march us towards the opposite path.”

• “…Museums provide common experiences for diverse audiences, serving as safe public spaces for civic dialogue. As one of the most trusted sources of information, museums help people navigate the vast new world of information by filtering and validating credible content.”

• “Museums…play a vital role in nurturing, documenting, organizing, interpreting and making accessible…creative output…They are repositories of knowledge about traditional craft, sources of inspiration for new designs and processes, and through their collections and exhibitions” they are “validators of new.”

• “museums provide unique opportunities for today’s youth to exercise their gaming skills and satisfy their expectations for immersive narrative.  This increases their engagement with museums but also the community and the world, providing levels of social and global awareness they might not otherwise absorb while sitting in front of a screen.”

• “Museums will be oases of the real in an increasingly virtual world.  Along with the outdoors and places of worship, museums represent the best opportunity for getting away from it all.”

It was clear to me from a now concluded four-decade career focused on marketing communities to visitors, including newcomers and relocating or start-up executives, that local history museums uniquely provide a place where existing residents, visitors and newcomers can explore the soul of a community and appreciate and perpetuate the temporal values and traits that make a community unique and distinct.

They are essential to place-making.  They engage all five modes of cultural involvement including inventive participation, interpretive participation, curatorial participation, observational participation and ambient participation.

Congratulations to my friends on the Museum of Durham History Board and to its first full-time director, Katie Spencer on this historic step.

Weaving Place Authenticity With Restoration – 2 of 2

This is part two of an essay I posted yesterday attempting to trace sense of place authenticity in my life.  I’m using restored airplanes and their contribution to sense of place as an example.

Conducting a place-based inventory in Spokane, my first community marketing start-up in the mid 1970s, took me a few miles down to the valley below the steep bluff along South Hill and a grass air strip named Ox Meadows.

In his early 50s then, it was my first of many visits with Ed “Skeeter” Carlson, who as contemporary of my dad’s, had also first been intrigued by places when he saw vintage aircraft flying low across ranch and farm land to deliver mail.

Skeeter, who today is over 90 years of age, had already by then been restoring historic airplanes for twenty years. 

That day he took me up in his first restoration, a 1927 Stearman biplane, still today the oldest flying.

He also had several other aircraft in various stages of restoration lined up in an open shed along the path between his farmhouse and Ox Meadows.

In the early stages was a 1917 Curtiss JN-4, the famous “Jenny” that he was bringing back to flying condition, the oldest in America.

Maybe it inspired the huge scale model of the Navy seaplane version of the “Jenny” hanging above the landing between floors of my house.

Skeeter flew that old Stearman for forty years out of Ox Meadows before finally selling it back when he turned 85.

Today I think his old “Jenny” has been passed to a private living historic aircraft museum in north central Pennsylvania about thirty miles northeast of Williamsport.

When I arrived in Durham, North Carolina 25 years ago to begin my third community marketing startup, the initial feature inventory took me to old Farris Field, a grass airfield here similar to Ox Meadows, renamed many year ago as Lake Ridge Aero Park.

Operating since the mid 1940s, it sits on what was made into a peninsula in the early 1980s when Falls Lake was impounded, shown in this spectacular sunset landing there.

Until recently, Mike Ratty, a retired American Airlines pilot, took visitors flightseeing from there each summer and fall over Durham in his restored 1941 Waco UPS 7 biplane (pronounced wah-co,) a 1920s and 1930s contemporary of Stearman.

Speaking of American Airlines, when I arrived in Alaska in 1978 to begin my second community marketing start up, I soon learned of the restoration of a 1936 Stinson A Trimotor the airline had first owned.

It had ultimately been sold in 1942 to the Anchorage-based Ray Peterson Flying Service, a precursor to Wein Air Alaska before it made a forced crash landing and was abandoned in 1947 in the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley a few months before I was born.

When I arrived, Ray was just retiring as the CEO of the state’s largest airline.

The company had pioneered jet landings on remote gravel runways and innovated a moveable bulkhead in Boeing 737s to easily calibrate between cargo space and passenger seating.

Wein folded in the mid 1980s while I was there, a victim of a leveraged buyout and corporate raiding.

In the late 1960s, that Stinson trimotor abandoned in 1947 was saved from an inferno by BLM firefighters.  Then using a Cat, a man from Fairbanks spent eight years pulling the old plane to where it could be reached by road.

He then sold it to a United Airlines Boeing 727 pilot in Illinois who fully restored it.

Aviation in Alaska goes back to 1913 when a Gage-Martin biplane landed in Fairbanks, just two years after the first airplane landed in Durham and three years after the first one landed in Spokane, the latter two both Curtis Pushers.

For Alaska, though, it soon became more than a novelty.

This was only a decade after the first flight took place in Kitty Hawk, NC, but Alaska has always been an extremely aggressive “early adopter” as a means of leapfrogging less remote places, as it did with its own satellite for communications in the 1970s.

In the 1920s, aviation in Alaska took root in Anchorage where biplane pilots used a strip first used as a golf course and park to take off and land.

Today that strip is purely recreational open space running alongside Downtown Anchorage, but aviation, both historic and modern, was a huge part of Anchorage’s sense of place.

The state had become strewn over time with the remains of historic civilian and military aircraft over the five or six decades before I arrived there.

One of the first people to visit my office in Anchorage was Ted Spencer, a fish and game biologist and third generation Alaskan.  In the late 1960s or early 1970s, he had begun cataloguing abandoned but restorable vintage aircraft across the state as a passion.

Ted founded the Alaska Historical Aircraft Society a few months before I arrived and shared with me his a vision for an historic aircraft museum in Anchorage.

He dropped in regularly to give me updates and to get help and ideas and because his stories of surveyed wreck sites resonated with me as an important part of Alaska’s sense of place.

Many of these vintage aircraft were being looted.

This fueled an incredible sense of urgency and intensity in Ted that many people couldn’t understand but because I was involved with community marketing start ups, I could.

Not everyone grasps the fragility of sense of place, and many instead seek to undermine it, some on purpose.

A year after my near decade in Alaska concluded, Ted and others made the museum a reality, cobbling together grants and donations including an old hanger on Lake Hood, a float plane base between downtown and Anchorage International Airport.

A few months later, the museum reclaimed that now restored Stinson Trimotor.

Military units supported the museum by using the rescue and recovery of vintage aircraft around the state as training exercises including a PBY, P-40, a Stearman like Skeeter’s and many others.

Volunteers labored for decades to restore them for display, a few to flying condition.

In 1998, the museum had to part with the old Stinson A, selling it to a collector with a a private museum in Minnesota who freshened it up as shown in this blog.  I understand he uses it in movies and American Airline promotions.

Shortly after its founding as I arrived in Durham, the Alaska Aviation Museum also sold the same collector a 1928 Ford Trimotor 4-AT-B that had taken the first overland commercial flight to Alaska in 1934.

Ironically, the plane had begun its days in Spokane flying out of old Felts Field, today the home of a fleet of flying antique Stearman biplanes inspired in part by Skeeter.

Instead the Alaska Aviation Museum acquired a 1931 Fairchild Pilgrim 100B previously flown by the precursor to today’s Alaska Airlines.  Originally ordered by American Airways too, the 9-passenger aircraft was the first with steam heat, luggage racks and a toilet.

It is flown around the state each summer to promote the museum and the state’s aviation history.

Cultivating Concentration

A business professor lamented on a recent blog that it is hard to get in the “flow” at work when you’re constantly interrupted, and then prescribed superficial antidotes such as fewer meetings and less email.

I don’t mean to be flip or insensitive, but complaints about tactics such as these are more likely a sign of employees who are among the 70% overall in the US who are simply disengaged or worse “actively disengaged (even higher worldwide.)

Distractions are part of every line of work or endeavor, but recent research reveals that 75% are unrelated “self-interruptions.”

From my experience, even if emails and meetings could be banned altogether and every effort were made to fill the workplace with motivation, enthusiasm and purpose, it wouldn’t really make a dent.

The proportion of workers who either spin frequently into what neurobiologists call “frazzle” or simply sleepwalk at work are apparently struggling with focus.

I was blessed to spend more time engaged and in the “flow” during my career than most people spent being awake, something that can mostly be credited to my wiring.  But this didn’t make me immune to rare but inscrutable instances of distraction, usually brought on by personal turmoil.

Nor was I a stranger to interruptions and distractions.  Part of being the CEO of a community organization is having to “putting out fires,” many set intentionally by one or two other executives or officials hoping, I assume, to benefit from the resulting chaos of “who’s on first.”

My job was also to firewall my coworkers from these “fires” so they wouldn’t be distracted and to restore my focus to tasks at hand as as quickly as possible.

Realizing that what seemed to be in my wiring or mysteriously acquired was obviously illusive to others, I was always trying to learn, adapt and cultivate in others new information about concentration and attention.

It always disturbed me when some people not only perpetually fixated about their worries, but then seemed to hitch rides on the personal drama in the lives of others, even strangers, as though they were their own.

These are the folks who, for example, when someone in the office has encountered a death in their family, even if it is an aunt twice removed, will react as though it is happening to them.

They become not only distracted for days with vicarious lamentations, but use them to repeatedly distract and dramatize others around them.

Wiring or not, researchers are finding that difficulty with focus is really at the root of distractions or the inability to tune them out rather than after-work access to emails or meetings.

In fact, complaints about not being able to unplug are just an extension of why some people were so disturbed to find emails waiting for them on Monday morning or before that, voice mails and snail mail to be answered upon returning from wherever.

Managing and processing information is a part of life.  Being so distracted by it that one cannot refocus or focus at all runs deeper than a few tweaks in office productivity can remedy.

Anyone temped to think focus and attention can be populated in others by some superficial office tweaks is well advised to read a new book published a few months ago entitled Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Dr. Daniel Goleman a scientific researcher who also writes about science.

I suspect the few negative reviews I read about the book came from those who thought, without understanding why they have trouble with focus, that the book would just give a set of list-checking techniques and “voila,” instant success.

What they were looking for is better found in a series of CDs Goleman has produced based on the science that focus and attention can be cultivated like a muscle.

But in my experience with people who struggle with these inabilities, the book is a way to understand and come to grips with how emotional centers in our brain work.

More importantly, it explains why without what is called cognitive control, these emotions can literally take over the centers of our brain used for learning, critical thinking, focus and attention.

Developed when we are young, studies show that cognitive control—or focus—is a better predictor of health and financial success in our 30s than either IQ or family background.  This was the type of focus that came easy to me.

“Outer focus” also seemed to come easy or was fueled by early distributed learning.  This is the ability to perceive how larger systems shape our lives, organizations and communities.

This is what people mean when they credit me as strategic, an inclination to see how various ecologies work and interrelated.  In fact, it is something that can be cultivated too.

The third type of focus is one I always felt that I had to work hard all of my life to cultivate, “empathy for others.” 

But in my 30s an RHR management consultant once told me that from his observations my sense of empathy and “other focus” was so strong that at a very early age I had earned to over-rule it, moving to the safety of cognitive control.

This ability to quickly shift back up to cognitive focus always is why some people perceived me as cold.  It is also why some people become extraordinarily calm and focused in the face of tragedy, chaos or adversity.

Goleman puts it this way – “Since focus demands we tune out our emotional distractions, our neural wiring for selective attention includes that for inhibiting emotion.  That means those who focus best are relatively immune to emotional turbulence”

That consultant in the 1980s helped me understand that my challenge wasn’t gaining more “empathy for others.”

Instead, to paraphrase Signe Spencer who researches competency at Hay Group, that consultant told me I needed to learn to manage my impact (referring to my passion and intensity) on others in my presence.

I’ve worked hard at this but it remains a challenge.  Maybe not as challenging as it is for so many people who find it much more of a challenge to reach up from the eddies of emotional turmoil to grasp cognitive focus.

See, I can be empathetic (smile.)

One of the best explanations of empathy is a short TED talk by Jeremy Rifkin put to illustration.

In his book on focus and attention Dr. Goleman breaks empathy down into a triad:

• Cognitive Empathy which is fed by inquisitive nature and comes from our top-down brain circuitry.
• Emotional Empathy which shared with other mammals comes from our more instinctive brain and helps us join the other person in feeling along with other people
• Empathetic Concern or compassion, a mix of top-down and bottom-up circuitry, the opposite of self absorption which involves discomfort at others pain and caring instinct.

The key takeaway from the science of focus and attention is that we need to cultivate all three levels along along with the ability to shift levels, especially to cognitive focus, in the workplace.

This includes learning when to soften that focus. But this is difficult in a fast moving workplace where it may make more sense to hire people with these abilities.

It would be far more efficient for society, especially parents and teachers, to cultivate this in children at very early ages and as they are prepared for the workplace.

Looking Back To A Pivotal Secret Meeting

The violence that met the first Freedom Riders 50 years ago had been brewing by then for more than 50 years coming to a full boil as Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office as President 110 years ago and then promptly met in secret, late one night, with Booker T. Washington, a former slave and nationally recognized educator and thought-leader on race relations.

By then nearly 50 years of Republican power brokering, with heavy-handed partisan and racially driven patronage with Federal jobs, had given that party control of all but two elected presidencies following the Civil War era contributing to the hardening and re-dividing of the south nearly back to where it was at the end of that war.

It is possible that both Roosevelt and Washington agreed with the assessment of rival William Jennings Bryan that “the extremes of society are being driven further and further apart” – a statement that had been reiterated repeatedly the year before on the campaign trail.

That late night both Roosevelt and Washington were chilled by the recent news of another lynching of a black man in the south – news that had grown all too frequent over the past decade, but this time the man had been burned alive at the stake with pieces of his liver cut up and sold as souvenirs.

As Republicans are doing today in legislatures across the country, southern white Democrats had renewed restrictions on voting so that less than 1 in 1000 black men could vote.

Born just two years apart, Roosevelt and Washington were bonded even before that night by an explicit faith in the meritocracy favored and epitomized by some founders like Alexander Hamilton. Roosevelt proposed and Washington agreed to support:

• Quality vs. quantity in future distribution of patronage


• Appointment of racially moderate whites, Democrats where possible


• Extension of these practices for the first time north of the Mason-Dixon line.

To make good, Roosevelt’s first official act a few weeks later was to appoint, on Washington’s recommendation, Thomas G. Jones as a Federal Judge. Jones was a former Confederate Army Major (who had been wounded four times and carried Lee’s sword at the surrender of his army to then-General Grant) and a two-term former Governor of Alabama who was racially moderate for the time having promoted fair election laws and opposed lynching.

And then all hell broke loose.

The subsequent vitriolic condescension from the southern press back then rivaled today’s flood of the same by conservative pundits following the election of the first African-American as President. The vitriolic condescension today is thinly disguised by questioning his birthplace, his grades to get into Harvard and by reverse projecting, as psychologists would term it, using the ludicrous claim that President Barack Obama hates white people.

Politicians in Raleigh at the time of Roosevelt’s and Washington’s agreement were already looking down their noses at Durham for “doing things differently,” a long-held community personality trait, as they did again only recently over the issue banning digital outdoor billboards. A Raleigh newspaper editorial back then had already opined as paraphrased, “have you seen what they are doing in Durham? Whites and blacks are working side by side on the same street, like a wild west town.”

Five years before Roosevelt and Washington made that agreement, Duke University, then known as Trinity College had become the first white southern university to have a black man speak, let alone speak on racial issues, as Washington did on campus after receiving an invitation from the college’s students.

Then nine years after the meeting with Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington returned to Durham for the founding of what is now North Carolina Central University and lauded the approach the black business community was taking by making racial harmony a beacon for other communities, north and south.

Things certainly weren’t perfect in Durham then, nor today, but we’ve always done things differently and we were definitely going a different direction than much of the south.

Roosevelt and Washington, if they lived today, would each be just as controversial.

As he did just a little more than 100 years ago, Roosevelt today would be railing at members of his party who are attempting to dismantle environmental protections, strip consumer protections, disrespect labor, fuel anti-immigrant sentiments, enable greedy mega-corporations, limit early voting and in general make it harder for students and others to vote.

Washington’s philosophy would be far closer today to Dr. Shelby Steele’s as expressed in the controversial book The Content of Our Character, a title taken from Dr. King’s I Have A Dream speech, than to those who seem intent only on counting how many seats or positions they control only to discover, it doesn’t secure change.

Roosevelt and Washington firmly believed in government’s pivotal role in providing the foundation for social mobility.

Born in privilege, Theodore Roosevelt learned the importance of social mobility to making a nation great from his famously humanitarian father who believed, even in an era when the idle rich were truly idle, that everyone, regardless of a heavy work schedule, should devote one or two days a week to helping those less fortunate.

He was the first of the nation’s then 26 Presidents to be born and raised in a big city and he welcomed the cacophony of different cultures and ethnicities.

He was also the first President in the words of trilogic-biographer Edmund Morris “to mingle both Union and Confederate blood” and wanted the south, in his own words, back in “full communion.”

It is likely that during his 1896 ground-breaking speech in Durham, the first at a southern white university, that Booker T. Washington reiterated a metaphor he coined the year before and one still famously adapted today by four-time-national champion Duke Basketball Coach Mike Krzyzewski to describe the importance of teamwork: “we can be separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

Two years after the Roosevelt and Washington meetings set off such an uproar throughout the south, a white professor at the same southern white school here in Durham set off another by writing in a southern quarterly that “Booker T. Washington is the greatest man, save General [Robert E.] Lee, born in the south in a hundred years…”

Two years later, during a visit to Durham, Roosevelt praised Professor John Spencer Bassett’s courage and the university for supporting him in a speech noting the importance of academic freedom. The great man visited Durham one last time, accepting a rare honorary degree less than a year before his death in 1919.

Hopefully, we can emerge from the extremes in today’s society that seem to also be driving us further and further apart by adapting to today’s bitter partisanship and extremism the dream Washington articulated for blacks during a speech in Durham:

“We are to live in the South together, black and white, and it is sometimes helpful for us to speak directly and frankly to each other. When two races are to live in the same country, the sensible policy to pursue is to do everything that will promote good will and friendship rather than enmity and discord. In every part of North Carolina I want to see the Negro get to the point where he will not be merely tolerated in any community, but he will render such fine and valuable services that he will actually be wanted in every community.”

May God bless America with more leaders like Teddy Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington.