Corruption Rarely Begins As Corruption And Other Lessons

I have a friend who just completed his 24 months as a resident of TROSA in Durham, a best practice treatment center for substance abuse.

Now he is a post grad for a month or two before he walks the stage in their next quarterly graduation ceremony.  As is true for many graduates, the program has had a profound impact on the life of this individual.

I’ve known about TROSA and been friends with its founder from its inception, but I’ve observed even more about why the program has been so successful as I have participated in some events over the past two years.

It takes two years, not just to kick bad habits, but to drill down to the triggers behind them, and most of all, to inculcate values and coping mechanisms including not just work ethic but how to work with others.

These include techniques for conflict resolution and emotional control.  One that is particularly important in the program is zero tolerance for failing to disclose something that is awry, even if you weren’t involved, even if was for a good reason.

TROSA understands that corruption rarely begins as corruption.

It may even be a means to a good end as United Airlines executives recently learned the hard way.

As Dr. Dan Ariely who also calls Durham home, along with his colleagues including Harvard’s Dr. Francesca Gino have shown, “simply seeing another person cheat can lead us to cheat, even if we care about being honest.”

TROSA understands that even omission of acknowledgment is contagious and leads to a slippery slope.

The organization is famous for its entrepreneurial approach.  It’s is too bad one of them isn’t offering workforce and leadership training to businesses and agencies on accountability and the importance of speaking up.

But as Dr. Gino notes in a Harvard Business Review post this week, “Behavior can be contagious even when it’s simply described in a story.”

Stories of people, especially low-level employees, who uphold organizational values is a particularly effective means of “onboarding” new hires especially when it comes to orientations regarding ethics.

In my former life, I saw otherwise good people in each of the communities I represented who always seemed to be dogged by stories of corruption.

What they had in common was the way they made decisions, usually based on “who was asking” for something rather than a strategy of fairness and consistency.

I never felt this shadow on their reputation was deserved but the behaviors that brought it about often made it difficult to work with them as strategic partners because they were always asking me to subtly cross the line.

They never saw themselves that way.

But really, none of us do.

As Dr. Gino wrote in here excellent book entitled, Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, we all have “a rose-colored view of who we are and what we do, and we aim to behave in ways that are consistent with our self-image as capable, competent, helpful, and honest individuals.”

The book deals with forces from within, forces from our relationships and forces from the outside, “factors that characterize the context in which we operate and make decisions.

It’s a good book, as is Ariely’s entitled, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty.

I always found myself considered a pariah by the “who’s asking” types who would in each of the communities I represented, ultimately make it their objective to recruit as many others around me to their way of thinking, hoping that the isolation would make me give in, or at the very least get me fired.

While holding firm to strategic decision-making about what was best for these communities, I always made doubly certain that our organization gave them every service we were capable of giving while remaining authentic.

But I also owe becoming a better and better leader over the years to these people.  Just because they were wrong doesn’t make them stupid or wrong about everything.

I became the CEO of a destination marketing organization at a very young age, twenty-six, so until the day I retired I viewed myself as a work in progress.

Trying to be rigidly authentic or true to yourself can, if you are not careful, also keep you from evolving.

This all made more sense to me looking back as I read an article a few months ago by Dr. Herminia Ibarra, formerly of Harvard, now professor of organizational behavior at Instead, The Business School for the World, entitled The Authenticity Paradox.

The reputation I earned over four decades was all about change.  I may have led three DMOs but they literally evolved weekly - if not daily - so in essence I led about 1,700 different organizations.

My personal “authenticity paradox” was learning that building consensus for ideas and values among stakeholders in a community can feel, well, more than a bit slimy and political but it can still be data-driven and strategic.

During my career I was intrigued when I was frequently credited with grit, resilience and perseverance so when I come across research into those traits, I try to read carefully.

Based on recent research at The Ohio State University, grit and perseverance in the face of repeated obstacles and even failure arise when an individual is able to generalize from successful past success while still learning from failures.

People who can learn to do this stand out from those who have the appearance of grit but are betrayed by perpetually needing to self aggrandize, making them particularly vulnerable to “who’s asking” decision makers.

The latter may have learned grit but their perseverance masks an otherwise negative self-image, thus the self aggrandizement.

Researchers have found that losing is actually good for us.  People who self aggrandize are put off or threatened by participating in “post mortems” after a projects, something which I adapted from EST training or a Ken Blanchard seminar in the early 1980s.

During post mortems, some people literally can’t or won’t shift gears from “what worked” to “what didn’t work,” no matter how safe and blameless you make them.

Often this is because they have issues with accountability or accepting responsibility but it can also be because they have never learned the values of introspection and curiosity which research by the authors of The Innovator’s DNA found are indicative of a rare blend of humility and confidence.

Possibly this is due to the stories they were told as children, which in the words of Seth Godin, “matter far more than we imagine.”

Values imprint by observation or patterning from birth to age 7, then from modeling or identification until age 13, including making our own value decisions, then from socialization with peers until we’re age 20.

People who can’t admit, let alone learn from failure or even admit “what didn’t work” in an otherwise successful transaction were probably told stories along the way that led them to believe that success came from fixed states, making them vulnerable to “who’s asking.”

Learning from failure and even success, on the other hand, are investments in continuing and never ending improvement rather than chalking it up to fixed states.

The difference is between looking good and actually being good, the essence of authenticity.

These are things TROSA understands – teaches and applies – so beautifully.

New values can be learned after the age of 20 but it is very hard and usually occurs with a significant emotional crisis such as facing up to addiction.

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.

Two Hallmarks of a Worthy Consultant

A well-researched and documented concept such as “authenticity” is often misunderstood when executives such as many in my former field of community marketing begin to salt and pepper it into use as a buzz word, rather than understanding its real meaning.

They are easy to spot because they haven’t really read the research behind the term, hoping their community can bluff visitor prospects by liberally adding it throughout its communication resume.

The thing about authenticity, though, is that to consumers it is not a buzz word making it easy for them to detect a fraud.

Linked is an article forwarded by a friend of mine about how Asheville, North Carolina is losing its authenticity.  A three and a half hour drive east, Downtown Durham too may also already be on the backside of that tipping point.

Having destination marketing organizations with a good sense of what makes these communities authentic is not enough if even the best intended developer and public officials carelessly enable destructive mainstream forces instead.

Soon the existence of authenticity in North Carolina may be extinct except for history museums, greatly diminishing its appeal in the eyes of travelers including more than 80% of those who visit fantasy attractions and events.

Few DMOs and even fewer consultants to DMOs have actually read this research about authenticity which was conducted in 2009.

Bill Geist is one of only three consultants to DMOs that I recommend, but it isn’t because he was necessarily a visionary during the nearly nine years he was a DMO exec or because we are friends or because we have always seen eye to eye.

I recommend Bill because in the twenty years since he ran a DMO, he has never stopped learning or repopulating what he had learned to others.  He understands that it isn’t what a community DMO knows or has accomplished but how eager it is to learn that makes all the difference.

Innovation is another attribute that is overused but those who merely salt and pepper it into resumes or initiatives are easy to detect.

Even fewer truly grasp “disruptive innovation.”

According to the Harvard business professor, entrepreneur and consultant who coined the term more than 15 years ago, a “disruptive innovation is not a breakthrough that makes good products a lot better.”  Those are sustaining innovations.

A disruptive innovation transforms a product or service to be more affordable and accessible, giving a much larger population access to them.

When Clay Christensen and I briefly overlapped as classmates at BYU the only computer programming we learned to do was creating punch cards for the university’s huge mainframe computer.

By the time Christensen coined disruptive innovation, the organizations I led had been using desktop computers since the early 1980s.

By the time my career was coming in for a landing, Steve Jobs, who wrote about powerful influence of Clay’s book, had put that computing power in a smartphone.

What distinguishes Bill Geist and Clay Christensen is their humility, a prerequisite to lifelong learning.  Consultants who believe they know it all are a dime a dozen and worth even less.

Christensen famously tells the story of getting a call from a notoriously gruff and impatient Andy Grove at Intel, asking the professor to fly out and explain the theory of disruptive innovation to his execs because he was too busy to read.

When he arrived, crises had arisen and Christensen was told that the execs didn’t have time to even listen to the theory so he would need to just tell them what they needed to do in the ten minutes available.

Pivotal is that Christensen held his ground and insisted they listen to an explanation of the theory because he didn’t know much about Intel but that the theory of Disruptive Innovation would have an opinion.

Grove listened and made the connections.

Christensen eloquently describes the challenge of a consultant.  You can’t be suckered into just telling an organization what to do because there is no way a consultant can ever know enough about an organization or community to do that.

The value of a consultant is to show you how to think differently.  Data can only tell you about the past and help illuminate patterns and connections.  But strategic direction is about connecting data, connections and patterns with a good theory.

A consultant can only teach managers how to think differently and see “through the lens of a theory into the future, you can actually see it very clearly.”

All of this is to say that if you think you don’t have time to read and think about the data behind something like community authenticity or delude yourself into applying buzz words as a short cut, you have no business masquerading as a community marketing exec.

Nor will consultants, even those few who are the best, be able to connect the dots.

Reflections on The Landscape of A Heritage

As I noted recently, I am the only son of an only son, born midway between my dad and his first granddaughter but as hard on him as he was on his father.

If he were still with us or if he is looking down now, he would be even more proud of her than he was at her birth, now a single mother, lawyer and chief privacy officer for a major healthcare concern spread over dozens of cities and towns across our ancestral landscape.

I was the end of the line of more than a hundred years of ranching but in the late 1840s, these ancestors didn’t begin as ranchers.  They came to the Rockies as carriage makers, saw mill operators, molasses manufacturers, cavalry troopers, miners even a dirt farmer or two (smile – rancher humor.)

But collectively they understood that settling and homesteading and building communities from scratch involved commons such as that where his granddaughter ranges in another way.

He’d also be the first to remark at what a perfect blend she is of each of her parents, but equally important would be what she has done to express those equal sets of genes including molding a career blending law, management, technology and innovation.

My dad also would give a smiling nod at the pride my urbanite grandsons and daughter take in our Idaho ranch heritage.

On our final leg to an annual lakeside family rendezvous in the northern Rockies last month at the hospitality of my youngest sister and her family, they took delight when a cowboy hat they picked out for me turned out to be identical to one their great-great grandfather wears in family photographs.

Already with enough cowboy hats and boots to last several lifetimes, I couldn’t help but wear it as we rode up into the Bitterroots that day, smiling at how frustrated my dad—their great-grandfather—appears in that same photograph at having to dismount.

Not yet 30, in an act of defiance, he refused to keep his hat on, revealing a rancher tan and a look of disgust I’ve seen in the mirror from time to time.  I see far more diverse evidence of his nervous system in his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

I wish I could tell him every day how much I love and miss him and how I know I was hard on him.  We both eased up as I turned 30 years old, but we didn’t really clear the air until I was nearly 40 and he was a year younger than I am now.

My emotions were ambushed a few day ago when I first heard a new hit single by Garth Brooks interpreting a brilliant composition co-written by Marc Beeson and Allen Shamblin entitled “Send ‘Em On Down The Road” as I recalled that day when we too “…just threw that baseball back and forth till dark…:”

“he wanted to protect me but somehow my father knew

that you can cry for, live and die for,

you can let them find their wings but you can’t fly for

cause if they are not free to fall

then they are not free at all

and though you just can’t bear the thought of letting go

pick ‘em up, dust ‘em off and send ‘em on down the road”

Some of my favorite Garth Brooks’ songs include references to rodeos such as the iconic “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old),” echoing a variation of a quip my dad would repeat in the 1950s whenever he was greeted with, “How are you?”

It was co-written with a friend and rodeo rider Randy Taylor in Stillwater, Oklahoma where Brooks first performed it in 1986 at a club called Bink’s with his band Santa Fe.

Less than three years later, it was the singer’s debut hit single, just as I relocated to Durham, North Carolina in 1989 and where I still live in retirement.

But historically, true cowboys, aka Bedouins of the American West, were fast fading when Prescott, Arizona staged the first rodeo in 1888, inspired in part by the success of the Wild Bill Cody shows.

Until then, westerners viewed tourism as a way to recruit settlers and investment.  But Cheyenne, inspired by the “potato days” celebration just south in Greeley, created its Frontier Days Celebration in 1897.  By 1901, Denver added one to its local celebration.

By the time Pendleton, Oregon created its famous rodeo in 1910 and Idaho’s first rodeo, the War Bonnet Roundup, was organized in 1911 fifty miles south of our ranch, a circuit was forming.

When Tucson started its rodeo during the Prohibition, it was a tourist event, and when Old Tucson Daze began the year before I was born, it was, ironically, held on an old movie set.

The father of one of my classmates in high school is hall of famer Deb Copenhaver, a contemporary of my father, who won back to back world championships in bronc riding in the mid-1950s when I was 7 and 8 years old just younger than my grandsons now.

Rodeos are emblematic of the time when Westerners began to reflect what visitors from the East expected.  By the time I was born, it had become firmly embedded in Western identity, reinforcing that authenticity is a negotiation.

My parents married young at just ages 22 and 16, eloping over the Bitterroots to Bozeman, as my dad left to join a tank battalion propelling across France.  Initially, his dad had held him out of the war as an only son so the ranch could aid the war effort.

But when his same-age cousin and best friend, a tail gunner in a B-26, was shot down over northern Italy, my grandpa finally relented and allowed the ranch to go fallow as my grandparents put their only son in harms way.

Dad’s unit was part of Patton’s third army sweeping into southern Germany, liberating Dachau, the first concentration camp established leading up to the war, then changing to horses and spotter planes to patrol for Nazis fleeing into the Alps.

Coincidentally, one of the prisoners liberated there handed a young soldier from North Carolina what looked like a rock, and told him never to forget what happened there.

It was actually molten ashes from human beings incinerated in the huge ovens used by the Nazis to cremate prisoners who died or were gassed because they were unfit,

The day before this past Memorial Day, those ashes were laid to rest in a Hebrew Cemetery here in Durham where I live, which dates to the 1800s.

By the time I came along, my parents were still kids too at just 25 and 19, and they had grown incompatible in some ways while apart.

They were still “two hearts on fire,” to borrow a line from a Shenandoah song written by Hugh Prestwood, but researchers now know that what held them together for more than thirty years was a shared style of parenting.

Its something researchers have just found in successful parents that is “distinct from their romantic relationship.”

In the typology of four parenting styles, my parents were “authoritative,” the mix of “authoritarian and responsive” practiced by 32% of parents.

I know now that researchers find that this style correlates to the “concerted cultivation” common to middle class parents or parents who successfully keep or move their children up into the middle class.

More wealthy parents are often negligent or permissive including many so-called “helicopter parents” today who mistake over controlling and frenetic hyperactivity with cultivation.

Researchers have pinpointed that a natural or more free-range style or permissive style of parenting found among many who are poor is one of factors that perpetuates poverty in their children and differentiates them from poor parents intent on breaking that cycle.

One of my siblings seems only to recall my parents as “authoritarian,” perhaps because she didn’t witness the differences two of us saw in the parenting styles of parents who truly were.

Regardless, I am incredibly grateful and credit my parents for any success I enjoy as well as the legacy I see in their grandchildren and great grandchildren.

There is always a tiny nugget to be gleaned. Then go shower.

Before I touch on new research supporting the importance of authentic sense of place, let me touch on one of the ironies from my four decade career as a guardian of sense of place.

It is how much time is required in that profession to defend communities from mainstream tourism interests.

Those drawn to the appeal of sense of place but then from  overbuilding and lack of differentiation brought on by ubiquity, soon begin to cannibalize it instead.

Desperately demanding more and more promotional oxygen to subsidize their responsibility to fill beds and seats, they instead begin sucking away at what is meant to promote the community at large and fuel overall visitation.

During the 1970s and 1980s, it was from convention-related hotels, and meeting or event planners demanding kick-backs or subsidies or facility-driven public officials desperate to obscure deficits when public facilities were no longer warranted.

In the 1990s, it was from mega-event “big-game hunters” intent on subsidies to secure events far too large to fit or held only at times that displaced as much or more demand than they generated.

In the 2000s, my final decade, it was from mainstream events and performing arts facilities which, desperate from overbuilding hundred more than warranted, sought to monopolize attention far disproportional to their percentage of visitor potential, at the risk to less pretentious forms.

If that isn’t enough, there are always one of two elected officials impatient for returns from leveraged visitor spending, who seek to drain away promotional resources.

So why did I love my career so much?

Because communities worth loving as places to live are places people find worthy of visiting.  They are the reason the vast majority of people travel away from their homes at all.

That “authenticity” must be protected and carefully nurtured even during the process of creating awareness and appeal.

Because guarding and leveraging sense of place is also incredibly worthwhile and rewarding.

But I still took time to listen very carefully to those who sought to undermine sense of place, even if intentionally.

Not only was there always a fragment of value to be gleaned but it made me think and reflect more deeply about my own assumptions and the data behind them.

As Dr. Robert Reich recently commented, “there is no better way to learn than to talk to someone who disagrees with you.”

The annual study of leisure travelers who now make up 3-in-4 visitor stays includes indices of areas of importance as well as travel style broken down by generation.

“Nature” scores above 50%, and nearly 65% for “boomers” such as me.

But “authenticity,” the desire for real destinations vs. commercial or mainstream tourism product, is more important across all generations but even more so among Millennials as is “culinary interests,”  engaging in a destination’s arts and cultural assets, and “exploration.”

“Activities,” are among the least important across all generations.

For many communities, this awareness is far too late.  Their sense of place and authenticity has already been hollowed out by preoccupation with mega-facilities and events, mainstream culture and arts, cookie-cutter lodging, formula stores and chain restaurants.

For communities still clinging desperately to their sense of place against the forces of homogenization, the lessons from this report and many others I’ve linked to in essays key-worded as “authenticity,” are clear:

• Focus marketing efforts on unique sense of place assets such as indigenous art and festivals, green infrastructure, historic preservation, organically evolved districts, and locally-owned stores and restaurants.
• Keep mainstream elements in their place while teaching them how to embrace the authentic characteristics of a community.
• Be ever vigilant of the dangers that come with success such as “fear of saying no,” “churn,” “unholy alliances between policy makers and powerful special interests,” and “envy.”
• Forsake those who claim “special knowledge” and relentlessly pursue critical and strategic thinking, differentiation, data and information-driven decision-making.
• Beware of the incestuous deadly sins of complacency and envy of other places.
• Eschew desecration marketing, including billboards, as well as other “yelling” forms of advertising.  Generously invest in the sharing of valuable content, earned attention and respect is the most valuable.
• Religiously foster and protect distinctiveness and carefully guard against decisions that glitter but merely make a community one of many.

And always strive to listen, especially in the face of spittle, condescension, disrespect, anger, drama, exile, character assassinations, bribes, end-runs, betrayals, sycophants, demands and cabals.

There is always a tiny nugget to be gleaned.  Then go shower.

Be fearless.  Communities still worthy of love, still worthy of visitation, and still having a soul will always be worth fighting for.

The “Outcome Bias” Aversion To Strategic Thinking

There are many reasons organizations avoid creating a strategic plan and even fewer that follow one or bother to update it, but a major reason is what economists call “outcome bias.”

At its most dysfunctional, this is reflected when attention-deficit executives and/or governing boards follow instead of lead.

They seemingly prefer to frenetically leap from “parade” to “parade” hoping to claim credit by appearing to be in lead, no matter how short-lived the trend or short-sighted the outcome.

Sounds a bit comical, but it is surprising how common this is and how undiscerning many policy-makers and news outlets are.  Perhaps the Chaplinesque frenzy more closely resonates with their own daily reality.

Enablers include a world view free of historical memory, context or self-appraisal.

A clue to the behavior is found in studies of what makes some school children thrive and succeed while others don’t.  Key is that the latter’s mindset places far too much emphasis on looking good and appearing right vs. striving to be good by accepting and learning from mistakes.

In decision-makers, to paraphrase business researcher Dr. Gad Saad, this is often manifest in an overconfidence, “a proclivity to attribute events to internal vs. external factors” which severely hinders one’s ability to learn from mistakes.

Related is a study published last month by three economists at my alma mater Brigham Young University.  It presents an overview of “outcome bias” and a new model making it easier to examine.

Essentially, “outcome bias” drills down into “how people hold themselves accountable for success or failure unrelated to the quality of their own decisions.”

Of course, those I describe above don’t hold themselves accountable.  They are much too busy looking good and taking credit for reflection or self-appraisal, a key to achievement called metacognition.

This is why so many who are well-intentioned in community development come to unwittingly destroy the very inherent appeal and distinct sense of place crucial for a community’s strategic differentiation and sustainable success.

They also aren’t likely to read, or are just resistant to the reflection evidence which other perspectives might inspire.

The study conducted at BYU notes how “outcome bias” leads us not only to inflate the accuracy of our judgments and decisions (thus the title in the journal Management Science - “Sticking with What Barely Worked”) but it leads to “complacency after narrow wins and excessive switching after narrow losses.”

Researchers first labeled “outcome bias” the year before I was recruited to Durham, NC in 1989 to jumpstart the community’s destination marketing organization.

Then, the year before I retired more than twenty years later, researchers linked it to “ethically-questionable” decisions including choices people make that “benefit one while causing harm to another.”

As a study of Major League umpires by management school researchers found recently, even when not deliberate, we’re all subject to making unconsciously biased decisions.

But an inability or refusal to reflect on one’s decisions is an indication of zero-sum, either/or thinking and an early warning that if someone hasn’t strayed over the line, they probably won’t hesitate to do so, especially if they interpret fortune and misfortunate as deserved.

The BYU economists studied NFL teams and more than 5,000 games as an extremely valid stand-in to analyze “outcome bias” in other management pursuits.

The more consistently successful teams were less likely to jump from strategy to strategy in part, because they factored in the role of luck in both losses and wins.

Policy makers as well as community organizations, especially change agents such as where I spent my career, often overlook or neglect the strategic importance of preserving a community’s distinctiveness and authenticity of sense of place.

This is often because they delude themselves into thinking it will hamper change.

But they miss, to paraphrase Dr. Michael Porter, the world’s foremost strategy expert, that strategy is all about differentiation, it is in essence about choosing what not to do.

Strategy is about continuity and paradoxically “the ability to change constantly and effectively is made easier by a high level of continuity.”

Continual and never-ending improvement and adaptation is essential to communities.  One of my favorite lines by singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, from when I first heard it in his 1965 masterpiece, I’m Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” is:

“…he not busy being born is busy dying.”

But the importance of preserving a community’s inherent sense of place and authenticity is the strategy upon which a community can change and revitalize without losing its soul and sacrificing its distinctiveness.

Clouding the issue is that so many organizations and agencies have merely relabeled tactical plans as strategic plans.

If accredited, as fewer than 17% in North America are, the organizations charged with spearheading visitor-centered economic development (DMOs,) stand out when it comes to strategic thinking, especially compared to other forms of development organizations.

At the essence, the job of a DMO is to strategically safeguard and leverage a community’s distinctiveness, its “there-there,” what’s real and genuine about it, in places where it may still survive.

But standing firm to strategically preserve and promote community sense of place can be a lonely pursuit in the face of so many powerful commercial forces aligned to homogenize it instead.

Even when they fall short or are overrun, those on the front lines of sense of place should take heart from a stanza in that song by Dylan:

“While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he's in”

The litmus test of each decision is to determine if this will  differentiate my community or make it the same.  “Down in that hole” of mediocrity “misery loves company” but blissfully never learns from it.

Fostering – Framing - Fabricating Authenticity

Two weeks ago while I was relaxing lakeside in the Northern Rockies, a message from a friend popped up making sure I had seen a post earlier entitled “Is authenticity authentic?”

Perhaps he wanted to be sure I read it because he noticed that I tried in an essay a month earlier about authenticity as a continuum,  to briefly touch on some recent research revealing where along that continuum public opinion places various tourist activities.

The data showed that “attraction” visitors overwhelmingly prefer authenticity in the communities they visit, including those who participate in activities visitors rate as least authentic, e.g. sports, musical theater, concerts, theme parks, casinos, etc.

The research drew my attention because it was conducted by PGAV Destinations, a company that since 1971 has helped tourist attractions that fall along the least authentic part of the continuum be more appealing including, well, embracing authenticity.

Another way to look at the data is that more than 86% of attraction visitors view natural attractions like Grand Canyon as authentic compared to the beach at 49.9%.

More than 29% of attraction visitors viewed Biltmore Estate here in North Carolina as authentic (the parts that are still historical such as the house itself rate higher,) shows on Broadway at 18.4% and Six Flags theme parks at 8%.

The message was clear.  Regardless of what may prompt a visit, visitors find authenticity the most compelling attribute.

Coincidentally, as that message popped up, I was finishing an incredible book entitled Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity in preparation for a stop I planned on my way home from a cross country trip in Nashville, home of the still vibrant 1892 Ryman Auditorium.

The author, a Vanderbilt sociologist who recently passed on, reminds us that “authenticity is not inherent” in something deemed authentic.  It is “designated authentic” by a “socially-agreed upon construct,” another reason PGAV’s research is so insightful.

He continues by noting that this agreed upon construct is “continuously negotiated in an ongoing interplay” between various interests and perception.

One of the pleasures of retirement is reflection, something researchers call “metacognition,” a higher level cognition that developmental psychologists labeled as such in 1976, just after I took the helm of my first community destination marketing organization in Spokane.

It is essentially the ability or process of evaluating our own thinking, a form of self-appraisal.  When faulty, it results in the overrating of the influence “our wonderful selves” have on outcomes.

When carefully calibrated researchers have pinpointed reflection as key to learning, innovation, achievement and success.

But I find it interesting in retirement (and on long cross country ventures) as a means to sift through the archeology of my influences. 

Never, I have found, is any success with which I was credited ever due to prescience or “thunderbolt” insights, at least not on my part.  Nearly always it is the result of the good fortune to stumble upon connections and then make use of the patterns.

For instance, what made me connect the strategy of authenticity four decades before it reached buzz word status, as a means to differentiate the three communities I represented and leapfrog competitors?

Conventional wisdom, until recently, was to focus instead on building mega-facilities such as stadiums, civic/convention centers and theaters in a way that we know now tragically makes communities less and less differentiated and appealing.

I was certainly involved in my share of mega-facilities during my career in visitor centered economic and cultural development including three convention centers, three performing arts centers, two stadium/arenas, three museums and numerous other historic and natural interpretive sites.

But what was it that gave me an awareness of the importance of trying to gingerly and coherently feather them into each community’s cultural ecology striving with various levels of success to nestle them into indigenous sense of place while doing everything possible to safeguard authenticity?

Genius? Hah!

Was it growing up on an ancestral cattle ranch and exploring forests, an old family cemetery, and discarded artifacts?  Or the presence of the Tetons looming across the Henry’s Fork?

That may have fostered a proclivity but my first formal brush with the concept of authenticity came in my second semester of college, years before I would back into a lifelong career in community branding and marketing.

An ACT score had pushed me ahead a year in history and one of the readings in a 1967 class syllabus was a book penned earlier that decade by Dr. Daniel Boorstin entitled The Image – A Guide To Pseudo-Events In America.

Authenticity has always been important in historical analysis where its relativity first came to light.  More than fifty years ago, Boorstin was already lamenting the threat of mainstream commercialism to what we known now as sense of place.

Dr. Boorstin researched and wrote this book, his first of more than twenty, after watching the famous television debate between Presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John Kennedy.

His summary of “the dark arts” of advertising and public relations fostered a skepticism that may have been why in my eventual career in marketing, I was one of the first in my field to embrace data-driven marketing decisions and recognize the inherent lack of credibility in advertising.

The third chapter of his book, “From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel,” is still one of the best overviews of the historical foundations of visitor-centered economic and cultural development.

He reminds us all that the inherent value of tourism goes much, much deeper than superficial commercial outcomes such as “heads in beds,” or “butts in seats,” or “feet on the street” or even community revitalization.

At its essence, tourism foremost should be a means preserve and leverage what is truly unique, distinct and authentic to destinations.  And in the words of Dr. Scott Russell Sanders, it should be an educational tool to “preserve and celebrate the commonwealth of the place visited as well as the place to which each visitor returns.”

Boorstin who also forsook a career in the law to instead find history useful for varied career paths may have planted the seed that led me within a decade of reading his book to realize that I was more suited and could make a bigger difference in the field of visitor-centered economic and cultural development.

But Boorstin’s influence on me was not in a vacuum.  I literally came of age during the sixteen years of “See the USA in your Chevrolet.”  “Smokey the Bear” and Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson had by then each made patriotic pleas for Americans to travel.

Remember, barely half of Americans had cars when I was born in 1948, less than two decades after mass leisure travel had moved into the mainstream.  By the time I was attending that 1967 history class at Brigham Young University, nearly three-fourths of Americans had cars.

Another reading required in that history course was written by Dr. Earl S. Pomeroy a professor who coincidentally had taught for several years prior to the publication of In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America, at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill near where I now live.

Dr. Pomeroy delved into the complex process by which authenticity is negotiated when the “toured upon” assume roles that reflect the perceptions of the West held by visitors from the East.

In the words of Dr. Jerry Frank in a recent doctoral paper entitled, Marketing the Mountains: An Environmental History of Tourism, these perceptions were based on the “testimony of television.”

I may have been hell-bent while taking those history classes in college on being a lawyer but I can see in reflection now how much tourism and the importance of authenticity has seeped into my consciousness.

By 1973, a job in community marketing was my means of working my way through law school at Gonzaga, when I came across a paper by a newly-minted Ph.D. with expertise in anthropology, sociology, geography and landscape architecture entitled, “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings.”

Within two years, I had exchanged careers and was head of that DMO.  Dr. Dean MacCannell had evolved that paper into a book entitled Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, and I found myself standing on a floating dock one night (shown in image above) with Mike Kobluk watching the sun set over a historic clock tower.

Mike is my one degree of separation from both the singer-songwriter John Denver who was at the peak of his popularity back then and Roger McGuinn, founder of The Byrds, popular for a decade by then (Mr. Tambourine Man, Turn, Turn, Turn.)

Kobluk was co-founder of the popular 1960’s Chad Mitchell Trio (that’s Mike on the Four Winds solo part.)  McGuinn played backup to the trio and Denver performed as a singer for three years, crediting his social and political awareness to that time as well as ideas in songwriting until his tragic death in 1997.

But that night, I was the newly minted exec of Spokane’s community destination marketing organization and after serving as director of performing arts for the Expo ‘74 World’s Fair, Mike was beginning a nearly three decade career as manager for the 2,700 performing arts center and adjoining convention center looming behind us.

The $12 million facilities were a gift from the state after the six month exposition, but stretching before us that dusk was the true legacy of the event, a $117 million restoration of Spokane’s downtown riverfront including two islands splitting its remarkable falls.

I had cut my community marketing teeth with a front row seat to the benefits and drawbacks of mega-events, such as that but we were awestruck by the fabulous park left when all of the exposition facilities were clear away.

As Mike and I looked out over the 100-acre city-center park, he quietly nodded and in that melodic voice uttered something like, “Spokane may have just been the center of the entertainment world for six months, but this park is now the centerpiece of its true visitor appeal.”

Within three years, I had moved on to head my second of three DMOs in Anchorage where his observation that night was still fresh in my mind as I read Dr. Wallace Stegner’s essay on “sense of place,” the first time the term was used.

Mike’s background may have been on the least authentic end of the continuum but he connected the dots again for me that night about the primacy of things authentic.  He definitely had influence on me.

Nearly forty years after his comment, a few years after I retired from that lifelong career in Durham, NC and a decade after Mike had retired from cultural facilities management, two friends of mine in North Carolina happened to conduct research for that DMO I had helped jumpstart in Spokane.

Mike was right.  Visitors not only cited scenic beauty as the destination’s top attribute but overwhelmingly credited the Riverfront Park as the number one attraction not just there but throughout the region.

The Riverfront Park was perceived seven times more powerful than elements found less authentic.

This dovetails with PGAV’s research nationwide.

That research also documents that destinations considered real or authentic tend to enjoy better brand perception, higher satisfaction and greater intent-to-return, but even among attraction/event visitors, fewer than 4-in-10 describe their last trip as authentic (real, natural, original or historic.)

It may be a buzz word now, and my ongoing study and connection more serendipity than destiny, but I still come across a book a year that deepens my understanding including one entitled Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society that came to my attention as I retired and refreshed my memory to some of my earliest influences.

But it is clear that authenticity is still the most powerful strategy for both appeal and differentiations and history is the leading indicator.

Instead, far too many destinations have destroyed their authenticity, irretrievably cannibalizing it in the words of Dr. MacCannell for the undifferentiating “historylessness” and far less appealing commercial and fantastical tourism features scrambling to monopolize attention.

Authenticity and inauthenticity may be relative but the evidence shows  that the fewer than four-in-ten communities with any “real” remaining that are also willing to make its preservation and promotion a priority will be the only ones with appeal to visitors, even those seeking fantasy.

This in a future where all others will have reached equilibrium of “sameness” and settled for simulation.

If not already too late, which will your community be?

Access to Opportunity - The Downside of Proliferation

As Mugs and I drive on cross country road trips each year, some places where we stop for gas will have mini-gambling casinos attached to the convenience store.

Gambling was common in places such as Idaho up until I was born, but limited to slot machines and table-card games in bars or the entrance to restaurants with a bar.  Voters outlawed them there in the 1940s with a constitutional amendment.

Legalized gambling goes back to Colonial times but scarcity created modern casino havens such as Las Vegas as much or more than promotion or investment by gangsters.

But gambling casinos began popping up across the country when Congress passed the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, a few months before I arrived in Durham, NC and midway through my now concluded, forty-year career in community marketing.

The Act has not been a boon to tourism nor to economic development.  Around 8-in-10 of the patrons of this proliferation are local or in-state patrons, making them the antithesis of economic development.

At the end of this week, community marketing execs from across the globe will gather in Las Vegas to celebrate the 100th anniversary of their association.  I’m not sure why they chose Las Vegas since it’s not the site of the first DMO and certainly not because it reflects what DMOs are about at their most elemental level, guarding sense of place.

Following World War II, Las Vegas was an early innovator in the use of publicity rather than advertising as a core community marketing strategy.

The first hotel-casino complex opened in 1932, but Las Vegas as a destination for gambling launched later as other states such as Idaho banned it. 

That’s an image of the Strip at the time I was born.

Long ago, Las Vegas surrendered its sense of place to fantasy but at least it leveraged it into actual economic development, even if it is at the expense of stoking a gambling problem among residents several times the national average.

Atlantic City is the other destination that surrendered to gambling but now that gambling has gone hometown everywhere, or at least home state, its casinos are closing including this fall the vaunted Trump Plaza.  But this doesn’t mean the democratization of gambling.

Vegas and Atlantic City once drew 85% of their patrons from out of state according to an excellent article this month in Pacific Standard by Philadelphia researcher and journalist Jake Blumgart.

One of the hardest things for many government officials to understand is that resident spending does not contribute to economic impact.  It would have been spent locally anyway, just on something else.

Or is it that elected officials don’t care when it comes to gambling because it hauls in taxes. Visitor spending (any non-resident visiting for purposes other than school or work) is the only true economic value added.

Despite the incredible increase in gambling casinos, the proportion of visitors who travel 50 miles or more and participate in gambling has remained at about 6%

Take a performing arts theater, as another example with the same 6%-7% appeal to visitors.  Residents attending events in these facilities don’t count as economic impact.

They would have spent the same amount on leisure anyway, in fact they may redirect what they spend from another leisure activity.

Performers then?  Nope, they take their cut and send it back to where they live.  Employees?  Residents, yes.  Commuter spending work-side is small.  Spending on purveyors?  Only if they are local, meaning based in the same county as the theater.

Additional visitors then?  Under the overarching brand promoting the community as a whole, spending by up to 20% of day-trippers who come just for the performance could be attributed as impact from the facility.

A new study shows that even any development spurred is limited to that same area.

But back to gambling.  Proliferation has meant that it is even less of a draw for visitors.  Through 2012, 17 states now have casinos, 28 have tribal casinos, 14 permit casinos horse races, 5 permit card rooms and 7 permit electronic gambling.

There is a consumer behavior called “access to opportunity” which means that the more opportunity there is do something, the less urgency there is to do it.  Its why attendance at touring Broadway shows peaked in the mid-1990s when the number of cities/theaters exploded.

Gambling may reach that tipping point soon.  Several states are already in decline.  About half of Americans now play the lottery and one third gamble in casinos like the ones Mugs and I see along the roadsides.

Telling is that casino gamblers are much more likely to play the lottery, more than a third more likely among younger adults.

Americans now lose $119 billion annually to gambling, up from $10.9 billion in 1982 and nearly double at the turn of the century.  The portion lost in casinos peaked in 2006, plummeted during the great recession, and has now bounced back.

Only 16% is generated in Las Vegas, about 8% from Atlantic City, half from the top ten locations including four other metro areas.  The industry now relies on new casinos, a sign it is plateauing.

At the same time, the amount of true economic value added is declining as fewer and fewer are drawn from beyond the local area. The impact for tribal casinos comes from a transfer of funds from other parts of the economy, just desserts, I suppose.

Another sign that gamblers are staying closer to home is the sea change underway in Las Vegas.  In 1984, casinos accounted for 59% of the spending on the Strip, now even after the recovery it is down to 36% and gambling revenues are well below what they were in 2007.

Trip spending while in Las Vegas is down 23%.  What’s left is more likely to go to nightclubs ad shows, shopping and dining.  The proportion now whose primary purpose is to gamble is not much more than the proportion there primarily to visit friends and relatives.

The proportion there to attend a convention or meeting has fallen to 7%, half the proportion seven years ago and less than a fifth of the proportion there for pleasure.

While the percentage there primarily to gamble is consistent among repeat visitors, it drops by 75% among first time visitors.  The 24%reporting that they would be “more likely” to visit Las Vegas even with more places to gamble elsewhere has plummeted to 24%.

Attendance at events in the convention center there are now down to what it was when it was half its current size, a reflection of the continuing decline in conventions and meetings nationwide as well as attendance at events.

During their stay in Las Vegas, those in my former profession may be witness to the fact that destinations are shifting away from gambling and conventions and because interest in pure fantasy is also waning, possibly shifting back to the authenticity of its sense of place.

My guess is eventually, gambling may fall back as a backdrop and instead of creating fantasies of other places, the Strip may return to its far more genuine and broadly appealing roots.

The Meaning of Ideal Community

While discussing what makes Durham, North Carolina so textured and real recently with a Raleigh friend and native of East Jerusalem, I touched on the fact I had a friend in “DERM” who is Jewish and married to a Palestinian Christian.

During my now-concluded career, my job was to differentiate Durham in every way possible, not only because that is a “best practice” in community marketing, but because that is what surveys showed Durham residents wanted, especially the cohort showing as most attached.

This, of course, meant carefully moving Durham out from under Raleigh’s shadow while ensuring bonds were left in place.

Differentiating is a much more effective way to help visitors, including newcomers, make decisions that are best for them rather than blurring distinctions as a means to try and appear to be all things to all people as so many in my former field try to do.

I can still tick off two dozen ways Durham and Raleigh are inherently different, e.g. sense of place, architecture, authenticity, business climate, geology, diversity, tree cover, climatic zone, activism, attachment, distance and visitor/newcomer origins, lack of overlap, etc., etc.

Another I spotted recently is by its largest non-Christian tradition. Durham’s is Judaism, Raleigh’s is Islam. In this way Durham even differs from other counties actually in its metro sphere, e.g. one Baha'i, another Hindu.

One of Durham’s biggest challenges to differentiating was convincing businesses predicated on appearing the same no matter the location (formula businesses) and those whose fortunes were built on on erasing distinctions that:

• The advantages of congregating just to give the illusion of size has far fewer advantages than distinguishing community brands.
• Communities can constructively compete at the same time they are cooperating.  Businesses often fail to grasp that things in the “commons” don’t have to be cutthroat.
• More than 8-in-10 residents prefer to characterize where they live by a distinct city, town or county.  Next comes neighborhood and a sliver who don’t care.
• Differentiating creates much more tourism appeal and more “bites of the apple,” especially in polycentric areas.

For many years now Gallup has drilled down to isolate the ingredients that make some places more ideal than others, now one of five indices that feed into its overall well-being index.

Community has a lot to do with resident pride and liking where one lives as well as clear air and water and being able to walk alone in neighborhoods.

Almost two-thirds of Americans are not satisfied with where they live, although 4-in-10 who live in the South and West are, as are half of people my age, 65 or older.  At the extremes, the satisfaction ratio nationwide is about 2.5 to 1.

Durham residents hover at 80 to 1. Making that even more striking is that the ratings North Carolinians give our state rank it 38th out of 50 as a place to live, 12th from last - the bottom quartile, in a state where 7-in-10 residents are natives.

Instead of lobbing pejoratives, some in high state office would do well to examine what it is that makes Durham worthy of this affection.  Gallup provides some clues.

While honing the index, Gallup uncovered what makes a community ideal to Americans.  First comes aesthetics, trees, parks, trails and playgrounds.

Another key differentiator for the “ideal” community is having “ places where people can meet, spend time with family and friends, and enjoy nightlife.”

The third quality that “distinguishes near-perfect communities from the rest is a general openness to all types of people, regardless of race, heritage, age, or sexual orientation.”

“Durham isn’t for everyone” as a popular saying goes, but Gallup’s findings confirm why annual surveys here show such a high percentage of residents here consider it ideal for them.

Of course, these ingredients are always at risk.  Local governments, both officials and administrators, are a critical line of defense if it isn’t too late, as is a community’s destination marketing organization, if its takes seriously its role as guardian of sense of place.

Far too many, though, fall into the categories that sense of place experts label as “boomers” (Berry,) “raiders” (Stegner,) or simply “scary people” (Kunstler.)  Others listen carefully to “stickers,” only to surrender sense of place for fear of losing when threatened by developers.

Many developers are “stickers,” which is far more than just tenure, a reference to a state-of-mind.”  Far too often those with attachments to communities fail to make that distinction and paint them with the same brush as “boomers” and “raiders.”

In his wonderful 1996 cover essay in The Atlantic entitled “Home From Nowhere,” John Howard Kunstler argues that the year America won World War II is the year that marks when we began the wholesale surrender of sense of place in our communities.

Three years earlier, I had devoured his book The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, which earned a place on my sense-of-place bookshelf with Stegner, Berry and Sanders.

In 1927, Durham was the second community in North Carolina to develop a comprehensive plan for development, but it would be some time before communities began to rely on municipal ordinances to preserve sense of place.

Kunstler reminds us that for the previous 300-odd years, Americans had relied instead on “cultural agreement,” an inclusive consensus so firm that it didn’t have to be reinvested every few years because gatekeepers had forgotten what was agreed upon or had given way to special interests.

He sums up that - “Community is not something you have, like pizza. Nor is it something you can buy.  It’s a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy.”

Kunstler continues that community “expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.”

Studies abound confirming the economic importance of being “real and authentic” to a community’s ability to engender resident affection, draw talented newcomers and attract visitors and related cultural and economic development.

Kunstler reminds us that “a land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.”

“Authenticity” of community is an ever-evolving “cultural agreement.”

To adapt a process identified by the late Vanderbuilt sociology researcher Dr. Richard A. “Pete” Petersen, community authenticity emerges from the interplay in a historical context between affectionate residents, visitors, government officials, environmental science and the development industry.

Kunstler is no fan of zoning ordinances, making the case that like the so-called Highway Beautification Act did by enabling billboards, these regulations often become a pretense to undermine sense of place while giving a false sense of security.

He also argues persuasively that the idea of Americans being able to do whatever they want with their land and that “impediments are somehow un-American,” is a fallacy, “the result of a propaganda campaign from the promoters of suburban sprawl and the real estate industry.”

According to Kunstler, “we actually have a long history and a fat body of law for land use and the regulation of things we can do on it and with it.”

“Community,” he concludes, “is foremost a “public service.”

A Vision Quest – Reflection and Renewal

Five years into retirement, people I run into often ask what I do now, “ride my Harley all day?”

Forgetting that for most people this is like saying “how are you?” as a form of greeting, I usually respond that I write these essays.

Follow up if any, is “about what?” but the answer is too eclectic to express in passing.

Frankly, I’m puzzled at the numbers across the globe who read these essays.  For me they are about self-discovery and revelation.

One person who really did want to know probed yesterday into how I decide on the topic each day.

He was puzzled and maybe even surprised at a habit I formed at age 19.  Each morning after waking, now after an early morning walk, I try to spend just a few minutes randomly reading a few passages from some inspirational volumes.

Some date to when the habit formed, such as these two tiny, tattered books I bought in the late 1960s filled with things such as, As A Man Thinketh, and other essays written by James Allen, as well as speeches such as Winston Churchill’s “Never Give Up” speech -

“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never--in nothing, great or small, large or petty--never give in, except to convictions of honour…”

These books have been joined over the years by a collection of speeches and writings by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the King James version of the Bible, teachings of Confucius, the Book of Mormon, the diary and reflections of Marcus Aurelius or the Quran.

Some are historical by nature, such as the family heirloom, an 11-volume set entitled, The Story of Civilization, written by the Durant's between 1935 and 1975.

Never in sequence, I just open any one of them to a random spot and read, if only for ten minutes as I did this morning from a one I’ve read and re-read over the last fifty years, Letters from a Stoic by Lucius Annaeus Seneca.

Of course, the practice certainly isn’t unique.  I think I learned it from a friend, Bob Jensen, but these books feed me spiritually.

I can trace many of my poorest decisions to times when I was in too much of a hurry to feed this habit.

I read a few minutes from the books I mentioned not to judge them or their authors or as a zealot would, but because they center me.

Ultimately, the underlying thread tying them together, at least for me, is ethics.

I mentioned the Quran last on purpose, because I’m not Muslim.

It is just so different than most people think.  Many of the narratives evoke those similar in Jewish and Christian scriptures.  After all, it’s the same God.

Only when severely twisted and deformed by zealots, as many do with the Bible today, any of these scriptures can be remotely rationalized to condone what extremists do and have done for centuries in the name of their “faith.”

Americans get frustrated as we’re led running from one demon to the next. But any reaction to Muslims in general, instead of terrorism specifically, is because so many of us haven’t read what they believe.

Today, 37% of Americans have never left their hometown.  Nearly 6-in-10 have never lived anywhere other than their current state.

Nearly 12% have never even set foot outside their home state.

I have lived 60% of my life in two states, but like only 15% of Americans, I have lived in four or more states (seven in all, four in the first six years after forming that habit.)

More than 70% of North Carolinians, a state that adopted me 25 years ago, have never lived anywhere else, making it what researchers call the second most “sticky” state but also a “magnet.”

My bio-native state of Idaho, where my roots go back to before it even became a territory and given that name, is half and half, making it one of the top “magnet” states but not as “sticky.”

In the middle of the 1840s, all eight sets of my sixth-generation Mormon ancestors headed out over the Rockies thousands of miles away from their birthplaces to forge a new homeland along the slopes of 111th Meridian.

In the decades before, half of Americans moved.  In fact, 30% lived west of the Appalachians by 1824, and 40% or 7 million did by 1840.  But the area truly west of the Rockies would not reach that population until 1920.

Of course, this does not count members of 250 Native American tribes in the Far West who were divided up into nearly two dozen distinct language groups.

By 1850, my ancestors were joined by 3,000 others who had begun spreading out over 1,100 miles of the Rockies, and there were another 8,000 people living in Salt Lake City.

The population of the Far West was just reaching 179,000 people, 3/4th of whom were in California or New Mexico.  That was only .7% of the nation’s population spread over nearly 900,000 square miles, twice the area of the original 13 colonies. 

But Henry Ford’s great-grandson, reminds us in a TED speech, that in the decades before the Ford Model T, Americans rarely ventured more than 25 miles from home during their lifetime.

Back when I was just put in charge of my first community destination marketing organization in 1975, half of all Americans had never flown on a commercial airliner.  Even today, 30% of Americans have never flown.

Of those who do fly, nearly half don’t in any given year, primarily due to the hassle it has become.

That’s what makes the prophet Muhammad particularly impressive.

In his early 20s, he was living at a time roughly midway between the looting of Rome by Visigoth terrorists and militants and the birth of my 38th great-grandfather Charlemagne, who would turn the corner on the Dark Ages of Western Europe.

Back then, Muhammad was a business manager for trade caravans working 3,000-mile trade routes running high along the eastern slopes of the Sarawat Mountains that rise abruptly to 12,000’ from the Red Sea.

North, the routes ran during the summer, south during the winter and to and from what are now Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Gaza, Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

During the time of his first visions, Muhammad had long been gleaning narratives, beliefs and ethical codes from a diversity of faiths along the full length of these journeys and during the merchant fairs at each stop.

Of course, one doesn’t have to travel today to broaden his perspective and get spiritually renewed, especially when so many places have exchanged integrity and authenticity for the turnoff of lines/crowds, consumption, fantasy and sameness.

Even the reflection and renewal I find each dawn as I loop through heavily wooded Rockwood Park resting at the base of two converging ridgelines where I live not far from downtown Durham is validated by science.

Research conducted both before the Great Recession and six years later shows that it greatly accelerated the paradigm shift in the kinds of destinations Americans prefer, now trending more toward “places that are restful and relaxing” being a priority with activities “off the beaten path.”

Even those intent on activities are looking for things “out of the ordinary,” with more than 3-out-of-4 seeking to “relax and unwind,” and 6-out-of 10 seeking to “learn something new.”

Even the vast majority of those planning to splurge seek less stress, enrichment, engage with loved ones and avoiding crowds.

Couple this with findings that 73% of visitors participating in activities, attractions and events prefer real or authentic experiences compared to the 21% who prefer fantasy, and the road to destination appeal is clear.

Travel, no matter how far, at its best can be what Dr. Scott Russell Sanders calls a “vision quest” in his essay, “The Geography of Somewhere,” where I was in the audience when the speech was first delivered.

In part, my early morning habit is a vision quest.  So are the essays I post on this blog.

Nurturing Authenticity of Place

On a warm Sunday morning twenty-five years ago I was sitting on the ledge of what was then a Duke Power appliance store near my temporary office in the restored Kress Building looking down Main Street in Durham, North Carolina.

This was my first week of spearheading what was my third and final community-destination marketing start up.

I felt an incredible sense of urgency but I also knew by that half-way point in my career, that to leapfrog much more established competition we had to do things differently.

To me that meant not only differentiating Durham as place to visit but differentiating the very way we marketed it to potential visitors,  It would need to be very different or highly evolved from anything I had done in my previous two communities.

Peers then, and far too many now, thought that this was weird. The prevalent mantra was an approach best described as hyperactive, cookie-cutter follow the leader.

But two resources I had read a few years earlier kept ringing in my ears - an essay on “sense of place” by Dr. Wallace Stegner, who coined that term, and the definitive primer on strategy by Dr. Michael Palmer.

Later I would conduct studies to drill down more completely into Durham’s personality, but to begin with, start ups have to skim characteristics on the fly.

Running through my mind that day as I looked down Main Street were Durham values and personality characteristics I had already sensed.  In marketing parlance this is called honing in on a community’s brand, the nexus of internal and external perceptions.

The first apt descriptor to come to mind regarding Durham was genuine, real.  Quickly following that came diverse and eclectic which morphed to textured and finally, authentic, the core trait.

Few communities back then valued, let along exhibited those traits, preferring instead, a rush to replicate others in the geography of anywhere.  If they did any branding at all, they confused it with aspirations.

But I didn’t have to be in Durham but a few hours and days to know these were among Durham’s core, almost temporal values.

Later research confirmed and deepened snap judgments made when that’s all time would allow.

Being able to discern those traits probably came from pre-school explorations around our ancestral ranch, or perhaps gleaned while earning a degree in history.  Maybe it was just plain luck or a combination of all three.

While I quickly tested these descriptors on two community elders, individuals with roots going back before Durham’s founding, I already had some idea of what they meant in other contexts such as when a decade earlier the late Dr. Christopher Lasch had written about authenticity in a social context.

But I became a student of “authenticity,” particularly Durham’s, where it was so deeply rooted compared to other communities.  There had to be a reason they did things so differently from its founding, such as those neo-Romanesque chimneys on historic warehouses here.

In 1992, a paper I wrote at BYU for a folklore class in 1971 was footnoted in more serious studies, and while alerting me, my professor faxed me a copy of an article written that year by Dr. Regina Bendix entitled, “The Scientific Search For Authenticity.”

Five years later, I snapped up her new book, In Search of Authenticity, to learn more about the “longing” for it spurred by cultural influences such as modernization.

This led me to believe that is what motivated Durham’s founders to embed it so deeply here.

It was a counterbalance to the tobacco, textile and other factories we are repurposing today for the creative class.

It also explains why, after creating some of the world’s largest trusts and revolutionizing North Carolina’s economy after the Civil War, Durham turned to the preservation of historic sites only a few decades after the founding.

I knew that if we couldn’t trace authenticity, we wouldn’t be able to explain it, nor would we be be able fulfill our organization’s charge to be the guardian of that essence of Durham’s sense of place.

The term “authentic” wasn’t applied much to other places until a decade after my insight when at the end of that century, historical novelist Dr. Michael Crichton inserted a prescient line in his 1999 book Timeline, about a team of historians and archeologists who time travel back to 1357.

The billionaire Robert Doniger, a character in the novel who facilitates the expedition as a means to infuse authenticity into a tourist attraction utters the line:

“Authenticity will be the buzzword of the twenty-first century.”

Two years later, as if on cue, authenticity surfaced in research published by Dr. Richard Florida describing places most appealing to the creative class, a bellwether to community economic vitality.

I still remember the blank stares I got from two economic developer friends when I read them the passage about the creative class being drawn most to “authentic…experiences” in “authentic, indigenous and organic venues.”

Back then, while fronting for business interests, supply-side economic developers (tourism is demand-side) were in the midst of a more than two-decade frenzy to push for public cultural facilities such as convention centers and particularly performing arts centers as a a means to, in turn, more easily leverage capital from lenders.

In the pretense of spurring development, nationwide they pushed through $16 billion in arts facilities alone during this period, more than half on performing arts centers, with the greatest increase occurring  in the four years between 1998 and 2001.

Analysis shows that it paid off handsomely for adjacent developments but had negligible impact beyond.  Later I will explain why this binge had the unintended consequence of hollowing out so much community authenticity across the country.

In the 2000s, “oh-that-too” marketers ubiquitously tried to obliterate the meaning of authenticity with phony applications.

To the rescue came a 2006 speech/essay entitled The Geography of Somewhere by Dr. Scott Russell Sanders, followed a year later by the definitive book entitled, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, by James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II.

They summarize why it is so hard to communicate authenticity, because it is often perceived by what it isn’t.  It isn’t commercial. It isn’t fake.  It isn’t monetary, etc.

But derived from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Gilmore and Pine distill what they call the two principles of authenticity, applied here to communities:  An authentic place is true to itself and strives to be always true to what it says it is.

Authenticity isn’t created, its nurtured.  Working with researcher John Henry of H2R Market Research, PGAV Destinations, a company that has created or revitalized attractions visited by 75 million people each year, has conducted the definitive analysis of perceptions of authenticity.

This included in-depth, nationwide research into the two-thirds of visitors who participate in attractions, which tourism textbooks define as:

historic sites/museums, parks/preserves/botanical gardens, performing arts, zoos/aquariums, art galleries/museums, amusement/theme parks, sports (spectator and participatory,) festivals/events, gaming and of course shopping and dining.

By nearly 4-to-1, travelers prefer destinations that are real and authentic over those that are fantasy, but fewer than 1 in 3 destinations visited in the previous year met those qualifications.

However, people view authenticity on a continuum with historical and natural attractions most authentic and, for example, performing arts (especially musical theater-sorry Broadway) as least authentic, with things like science centers and botanical gardens in the middle.

Each type of attraction also fits on an authenticity continuum with independent-locally owned stores most authentic while malls and formula stores least authentic.

Local-chef owned restaurants serving locally grown foods including heirloom veggies are most authentic whiled national restaurant chains are least authentic.

Those least authentic must strive to let a community’s authenticity rub off, such as The Streets at Southpoint, a super regional mall in Durham did with faux architectural details.

Of course, communities need a mix but to retain appeal as authentic, they must vigilantly manage the mix so that things most real and authentic are never taking a back seat to things fantasy.

That is, if like Durham, they are fortunate to have any left.

Trying to straddle is a sure way to becoming Anywhere, USA.